Florence*, a choreographer and dance professor in her late fifties, has tracked herself with a Fitbit Charge HR watch at all times for one week. Throughout this period, she took notes on her experience and the thoughts that emerged from it in a journal. After the week of tracking, she created and performed a choreography inspired by this lived experience. The data collected by the self-tracking device were then used in the creation of a soundtrack, and the production of visual effects. These two “re-workings” of the Fitbit data were integrated in an edited video, and used to create this web-based interactive platform.
This research and creation project aimed to explore how the data and the lived self-tracking experience could be used to generate subversive forms of data materialization through choreography, sound, and visuals. We aimed to critique injunctions related to aging bodies and “successful aging” normativities.
The creative process also became the hub for technical and theoretical explorations on the bodies produced through the Fitbit device and related activities (mediatized bodies, regulated bodies, standardized bodies, lived bodies, etc.) as well as on what constitutes “data.” We conceive the data as being culturally mediated. The mediation processes that participate in data production inform the ways in which it is produced, treated, and rendered effective. Our critical approach aimed to “re-work” the “bio” metric bodies produced by Fitbit, to deconstruct the narratives and temporalities that are embedded and generated in their production.
labs.fluxo.art.br/dancing-with-fitbit/
2019