Soft Shapes and False Forms

On collecting data about the body, and then giving that data its own peculiar body as a collaborative experiment

Together with multidisciplinary artist Marisa Satsia, I will soon be teaching a course (rather mysteriously named “data pseudomorphs”) about collective data about the body… as well as giving body to a data through art objects. Teaching is an essential aspect of our art research, because it is one vehicle for bringing something that can be isolating (quantifying oneself) into a shared space, and enriching it with different perspectives.

This course is the culmination of a year-long a feminist research partnership working on anti-systematic art/data practices. Collective practice and experimental pedagogy is a critical part of our research; in fact, we met through the same organization where we will be teaching the upcoming course, Berlin’s School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe. For this post, Marisa and I interviewed each other on the origins of our collaboration.

We refer to the objects produced during subversive, critical data projects as “data pseudomorphs,” inspired by the inky false form ejected by cephalopods as camouflage — and lately we’ve been taking body/data practice beyond graphs into the realm of textiles, thread, and reconstituted found materials.

Kit: I took Marisa’s Medical Bodies course last year, and it was very inspiring and informative. She taught about the history of anatomic illustration, and how the tools for seeing the body from the Renaissance to today influence not just contemporary art, but the popular imagination of our own bodies. Meanwhile, I was developing and teaching courses about self-tracking and the quantified self, and grappling with a lot of similar issues in terms of the power dynamics of who gets to “see” the interior of the human body and how, so it felt like a wonderful fusion of interests. We ended up having a lot of discussions and forming a research partnership. One of the things we’ve talked about is how informative and generative the School of Machines has been for each of our research agendas.

Marisa, how has your own research or art practice been influenced by either teaching or taking courses here?

Marisa: My research and my art practice has been tremendously influenced by both teaching the Medical Bodies course but also being taught by amazing humans such as Regine Debatty in her Art and Animals class, WhiteFeather Hunter in BioArtCoven, and Rodolfo Acosta Castro in his Mushroom cloning workshop as part of the Natural Machines program, to name a few. I have been taught a variety of skills, ways of making art and thinking and my aim is to also transfer this knowledge to more people along the line!

The courses are always in tune with my interests and I always get to meet other artists whose artistic practice and research deeply inspires me and can also collaborate with and learn from. Speaking of collaboration, meeting Kit during the 2nd Medical Bodies class has led into many wonderful things so far including writing a paper about Knowing thy flesh and building body knowledge to exploring alternative bodily data practices and creating our new collaborative class in November called Data Pseudomorphs!

This one of Marisa’s soft robots: “When thinking about simulating the natural world and inner workings of human body such as muscles for example research led me to the design and fabrication of inflatable soft sculptures. These sculptures are as otherwise known as ‘’soft robots’’ and are made from flexible silicone. Following the Soft robotics toolkit by the Harvard Biodesign Lab and the Fabricacademy’s open tutorials, I have managed to design and fabricate my own soft robots. Inspired by biodesign, nature, and the properties of living tissues and systems, this project was part of a two month artistic residency and is an introductory exploration of the potential and integration of soft robots in a visual and multidisciplinary art setting.”

Kit, do you think our collaboration and partnership has influenced your artistic practice and thinking? And if yes then in what way/ways?

Kit: Oh, definitely! I felt very intrigued by your class when I first signed up. I had no exposure to medical art or the anatomist approach to viewing the body; rather, I was very much seeing the human body as a data analyst, through numbers; and as a yoga practitioner, through movements and sensations. The anatomist perspective, and the ways in which contemporary art has expanded that, was totally inspiring. I ended up practicing figure drawing anatomy for a few months after that, too. From a history of science perspective, the way that the human body is understood is influenced so much by the technology we use! Talking with you about it inspired me to develop a much more visceral, hands-on experience of the “technology of seeing” through drawing, not just in a theoretical sense.

Section from print book & layout from a project I started in Marisa’s Medical Bodies class in 2020. These images explore the human skin as an organ, and use altered photographs of reconstituted unusable food products.

What are you most excited about in our upcoming course?

Marisa: I am really excited for building our own systems of observation and knowledge production of the data body, about asking unusual questions about our daily bodily existence, making and exploring a collective data set and coming up with new ways to make art about things we care about. What I did not mention earlier is that I love learning from the participants as well and this is another aspect I love about the classes and School of Machines in general.

What about yourself?

Kit: I’m really looking forward to the discussions, too! Every time I do any workshop on this subject, I am blown away by the creativity and curiosity of participants. Over the past year, I taught two other courses on personal data practice (Radical Imperfection in Self-Tracking and Radical Imperfection in Time-Tracking) and we had some fantastic discussions. Some ideas about data practice and community care came up then, already. So I’m really delighted that creating and exploring a collective dataset is a major topic in this course. Marisa and I have dedicated time in the plan for looking at how personal data practice relates to citizen science projects; and how the artistic approaches and principles of data feminism introduced in the rest of the course can inform working with larger, co-created datasets.

We’ve been doing art research on the data body together for over a year, and a lot of what we’ve thought about is actually about sleep. Sleep tracking is a now-commonplace encounter with the invisible and uncontrollable body through wearable sensors. This makes working with sleep data a fascinating art practice, but often a bit isolating, even though the bodily experience is so deeply shared. In this class, especially the last 2 weeks, we ask: what does it mean for such a “self-tracking” practice to be collective? During the beginning of the class, we will encourage setting this “collective research agenda” together — so maybe it won’t be about sleep at all! But as an introduction and initial prompt, we will share some of what we’ve already explored with sleep data.

Making this course has been wonderfully fun: we’ve pulled together a lot of different artworks; critical technical theory; and practical data experimentation. This course is part of a larger research agenda on the data/body, which has also included recent publications and presentations at xCoAx 2021 and Politics of Machines Berlin 2021.

A slide from our talk at xCoAx 2021 about bringing art practice into self-tracking. You can watch the whole talk here, or check out the full article PDF.