Everyday surveillance work is increasingly performed by non-human algorithms. These entities can be conceptualised as machinic flâneurs that engage in distanciated flânerie: subjecting urban flows to a dispassionate, calculative and expansive gaze. This paper provides some theoretical reflections on the nascent forms of algorithmic practice materialising in two Australian cities, and some of their implications for urban relations and social justice. It looks at the idealisation – and operational black boxing – of automated watching programs, before considering their impacts on (...) notions such as ‘the right to the city’ and ‘the right to the face’. It will argue that the turn to facial recognition software for the purposes of automating urban governance reconstitutes the meanings and phenomenology of the face. In particular, the fleshly and communicative physicality of the face is reduced to a measurable object that can be identified by a virtualised referent and then consequently tracked. Moreover, the asymmetrical and faceless nature of these machinic programs of recognition unsettles conventional notions of civil inattention and bodily sovereignty, and the prioritisation given to pattern recognition renders them amenable to ideas/ideals from phrenology and physiognomy. In this way, algorithmic governance may generate not only forms of facial vulnerability and estrangement, but also facial artifice, where individuals come to develop tacit and artful ways of de-facing and re-facing in order to subvert the processes of recognition which leverage these modes of biopower. Thus, the datafication of urban governance gives rise to a dynamic biopolitics of the face. (shrink)

This paper explores the embedding of data producing technologies in people's everyday lives and practices. It traces how repeated encounters with digital data operate to naturalise these entities, while often blindsiding their agentive properties and the ways they get implicated in processes of exploitation and governance. I propose and develop the notion of ‘data doxa’ to conceptualise the way in which digital data – and the devices and platforms that stage data – have come to be perceived in Western societies (...) as normal, necessary and enabling. The ‘data doxa’ concept also accentuates the enculturation of many individuals into a data sharing habitus which frames digital technologies in simplistic terms as panaceas for the problems associated with contemporary life, figures of progress and convenience, and mediums of knowledge, pleasure and identity. I suggest that three types of data-based relations contribute to the formation of this doxic sensibility: fetishisation, habit and enchantment. Each of these relations come to mediate public understandings of digital devices and the data they generate, obscuring the multifaceted nature and hidden depths of data and their propensity to double up as technologies of exposure and discipline. As a result of this situation, imaginative educational programs and revamped regulatory frameworks are urgently needed to inform individuals about the contribution of data to the leveraging of value and power in today's digital economies, but also to protect them from experiencing data-based harms. (shrink)

Digital cameras and motion capture technologies that document and share creative practices have transformed the way we think about dance as an embodied knowledge as well as the way we experience it bodily. Computational media, which not only records and archives but also calculates, analyses and models dance, further complicates its ontological status. This move to document and inscribe dance in a tangible medium marks a shift from understanding dance as an ungraspable event towards conceiving of dance as a tangible (...) process that can be collected, transmitted, repeated and packaged or archived as an object. I look at two dance works – Matthias Sperling’s Loop Atlas and Siobhan Davies and Anri Sala’s Solo in the Doldrums – that trouble conventional notions of embodiment and its relationship to both presence and absence, at the same time they challenge how computational media fixates on figures and gestures that can be traced, mapped and calibrated. (shrink)

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ (...) computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change. (shrink)

This article discusses the datafied embodiment of the Internet of Bodies (IoB) technology by applying the methodology of postphenomenology. Firstly, the author claims that the boundaries of dual distinction between real and virtual, online and offline, and embodiment and disembodiment have become increasingly blurred. Secondly, the author argues that postphenomenology can help us to study today’s emerging technologies’ mediating role in human–world relations. Thirdly, the author analyses the implication of embodiment from phenomenological and postphenomenological perspectives and then demonstrates in what (...) sense the data collected from the IoB devices can constitute our embodiment and selfhood. Fourthly, the author elucidates how the IoB devices are datafying our bodies and the whole lifeworld and how these devices mediate and transform our religious practices and experiences. Fifthly, the author points out that the Quantified Religion as the possible new religious model would smooth out the differences and diversities between religions and then create homogeneous religious data selves, which will mediate, reshape, constitute and even replace our physical selves. Ultimately, the author argues that responsible designing of the IoB devices and establishing the ownership of personal religious data can be seen as significant measures in the face of the risk of our quantified religious future. Contribution: This article contributes to understanding the potential religious transformations caused by the IoB technology. This article analyses the mediating role the IoB technology plays in the relationship between humans and the world through a postphenomenological perspective, thereby explaining how body data harvested from the IoB devices can datafy and constitute our embodiment and selfhood. The article argues that the Quantified Religion as a new religious model will emerge in the future IoB era, and it will mediate, constitute and shape our religious practices and experiences through personal data harvesting and analysis. (shrink)

In this article, we explore smart deterrents and their historical precedents marketed to women and girls for the purpose of preventing harassment, sexual abuse and violence. Rape deterrents, as we define them, encompass customs, architectures, fashions, surveillant infrastructures, apps and devices conceived to manage and protect the body. Online searches reveal an array of technologies, and we engage with their prevention narratives and cultural construction discourses of the gendered body. Our critical analysis places recent rape deterrents in conversation with earlier (...) technologies to untangle the persistent logics. These are articulated with reference to the ways that proto-digital technologies have been imported into the realm of ubiquitous computing and networks. Our conceptual framework offers novel pathways for discussing feminine bodies and their messy navigation of everyday life that include both threats to corporeal safety and collective imaginings of empowerment. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to examine how metadata taxonomies in embodied computing databases indicate context and describe ways to track the evolution of the embodied computing industry over time through digital media archiving. Design/methodology/approach The authors compare the metadata taxonomies of two embodied computing databases by providing a narrative of their top-level categories. After identifying these categories, they describe how they structure the databases around specific themes. Findings The growing wearables market often hides complex sociotechnical tradeoffs. Marketing products like Vandrico (...) Inc.’s Wearables Database frame wearables as business solutions without conveying information about the various concessions users make. Potential solutions to this problem include enhancing embodied computing literacy through the construction of databases that track media about embodied computing technologies using customized metadata categories. Databases such as FABRIC contain multimedia related to the emerging embodied computing market – including patents, interviews, promotional videos and news articles – and can be archived through user-curated collections and tagged according to specific themes. One of the benefits of this approach is that users can use the rich metadata fields to search for terms and create curated collections that focus on tradeoffs related to embodied computing technologies. Originality/value This paper describes the importance of metadata for framing the orientation of embodied computing databases and describes one of the first attempts to comprehensively track the evolution of embodied computing technologies, their developers and their diverse applications in various social contexts through media archiving. (shrink)