Environments by Design
Abstract
This performative paper ‘Running in Rome: A Bio/Digi-Rhythmic Soundscape’ will present an empirical case study and sound ‘data-stream’ which has been developed as part of a 4-year doctoral research project titled, ‘Bio-rhythms/ Digi-rhythms: Synthesizing the Digitally Mediated Body Through Performative Methodologies’ (Hughes 2020). The rise in contemporary digital, wearable biometric ‘data-tracking’ devices to facilitate our subjective health and fitness-related pursuits in recent years, has indisputably proliferated a ‘culture of measurement’ in regards to how we consider our physically moving bodies, in interrelation context to the unfolding spatio-temporalities of our urban environments. In a ‘post-digital’ globalized culture, as we increasingly integrate contemporary digital wearable devices into the functionality of our everyday lives as ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1982), the quantifiable biometric data-language that ‘self-tracking’ devices translate our physiological bodies into arguably reduces the multiplicity of our sensorial embodied experiences into abstracted numeric data-products, with ‘big-data’ implications. In ‘Running in Rome: A Bio/Digi-Rhythmic Soundscape’ the researcher’s digitally-mediated running body is re-materialized as a data-process in flux, through the empirical and sensorial materiality of a sound ‘data-stream’. As her running body moves in affective inter-relation to the rhythmic spatio-temporalities unfolding in and around the Villa Borghese Gardens public park, in the urban city centre of Rome. Applying philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004) as a methodology for re-imagining a rhythmic synthesis of embodied experience as it is mediated in real-time through the digital device, the soundscape proposes a phenomenological ‘acoustic ecology’ of the bio/digi-mediated running body; converging the body’s ‘bio-rhythms’ and ‘digi-rhythms’ with the affective entanglements of the urban, environmental, socio-cultural and biopolitical rhythms of contemporary city life.
Kathryn Lawson Hughes is an independent researcher, academic and lecturer who has recently concluded a 4-year doctoral research project titled ‘Bio-rhythms/ Digi-rhythms: Synthesizing the Digitally Mediated Body Through Performative Methodologies’ at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Swansea College of Art), where she lectures on the interdisciplinary MA & MRes Contemporary Dialogues programmes in Art & Design. Her doctoral research project was sponsored by a Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarship (KESS 2), fully funded by the European Social Fund through a Welsh Government research initiative, towards contributing a cultural/theoretical discourse around contemporary subjective digital health practices. Kathryn’s research, which converges her interdisciplinary background across the fields of cultural theory, fine art, sound, performance praxis, and health & wellbeing intervention, to situate embodied subjectivity and lived empirical experience as central to a cultural/theoretical discourse of the ‘healthy body’, has been disseminated internationally at conferences and symposia; including Metric Culture: The Quantified Self and Beyond (Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark, 2017), Found Performance: An Un-disciplinary Symposium Exploring Aesthetic Methodologies in Health Care & Medicine (The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, 2018) and What Has Love Got To Do With It? Performance, Intimacy, Affectivity (Culturgest, Lisbon, 2019). Kathryn lives and works from Wales, UK.
10:00 am - 11:30 am
Friday 18th June, 2021