What is this self-tracking research project about?
The objective of this project is to produce new knowledge about how people’s perceptions of the body shift when their bodies and monitoring technologies (ie. technologies that measure and report on everything from how fast you run to devices that measure sleep patterns) become entangled in the practices of everyday life and how ideas of their future life are constituted through this entanglement.
The project interrogates the question of how the body has developed as a monitorable object through people’s everyday life leisure activities, and it goes on to examine the role that the digitalization of body monitoring devices has had upon perceptions of the body.
To achieve this we focus on three questions:
- How have historical embodied practices laid the cultural foundations for new body monitoring technologies and practices?;
- How are body monitoring technologies and software given form by designers in relation to their experience and imagination of past, present and future bodies and selves?
- How does the embodied experience of body monitoring devices, and the physical environments they are used in, influence how both advanced and novice users know (about) and perceive and imagine their bodies?
To investigate these questions in the present we will focus on contemporary body monitoring practices with a specific focus on the roles of both software development and members of the Quantified Self movement in defining how bodies and technologies are experienced and imagined.
