The Body Politics of Data

The PhD project The Body Politics of Data is an artistic, practice-based study exploring how feminist methodologies can create new ways to conceptualise digital embodiment within the field of art and technology. As a field of practice highly influenced by scientific and technical methodologies, the discursive and artistic tools for examining data as a social concern are limited. The research draws on performance art from the 60s, cyberfeminist practice, Object Oriented Feminism and intersectional perspectives on data to conceive of new models of practice that can account for the body political operations of extractive big data technologies and Artificial Intelligence. The research is created through a body of individual and collective experimental artistic projects featured in the solo exhibition The Body Politics of Data at London Gallery West (2020). It includes work on maternity data and predictive products in relation to reproductive health in the UK, created in collaboration with Loes Bogers (2016-2017), workshops on “bodily bureaucracies” with Autonomous Tech Fetish (2013-2016) and Accumulative Care, a feminist model of care for labouring in the age of extractive digital technologies. This research offers an embodied feminist methodology for artistic practice to become investigative of how processes of digitalisation have adverse individual and collective effects in order to identify and resist the forms of personal and collective risk emerging with data driven technologies.