Hacking the Body 2.0: Ethics in Wearable Tech, Etextiles Design and Data Collection in Performance

Abstract

The technology fervour over the last 2–3 years around wearable technology that collects user’s personal body data, under the pretense of medical or fitness monitoring, highlights that it is time to raise critical questions. The ethics of corporate data collection has only begun to be discussed outside media arts forums and the fine print for wearable sports and health devices and corresponding mobile apps. More public awareness and education about body data mining is critical, everyone should have the right to access, own, explore, and use their own body data. Wearable companies should be required to provide users open access and ownership of their own body data, as well as to grant rights it, to enable them new ways to express their personal identity, as well as to interpret or reinterpret this data however they choose – which is presently not easy since the companies hold it as proprietary and only sell it to insurance or medical companies (Forrester 2014). Hacking the Body 2.0 (HTB2.0) is an on-going practical investigation, by media artist/choreographer/researcher Kate Sicchio and Camille Baker, which explores the issues of personal data collection and data as identity. The focus of HTB 2.0 has been in interpreting inner processes in order to try define them as part of one’s personal identity, which may (or may not influence) one’s movement and interaction with others. The issues of data collection other ethical issues of using wearable tech, etextiles and electronics in general will be discussed, specifically how HTB 2.0 has been addressing these issues in our garment creations, choreography, interaction design and in our final performances.

1 Bodies, Technology and Performance

Over 15 years of digital media and performance practices incorporating mobile media, wearable sensors and devices embedded in garments for interactive and participatory performances, have witnessed substantial numerous changes unfold in technological development, bringing wearable devices into the mainstream corporate, sports, fitness and medical technological development. Yet, as Ryan noted in her book Garments of Paradise (Ryan 2014), few have explored the full potential of wearable technology in performance. She writes:

‘Wearables in the context of performance present opportunities for exploring our relationships with our bodies and how we move them… [Or how] communications interfaces, and other soft and sensory technologies allow us to experience or transcend our bodies, and how the concept of theatrical performance can be expanded in virtual space’. (2014:8)

Conceptually, Hacking the Body and HTB 2.0 started by examining rhetoric within the online computing community on code, hacking, networks, the quantified self, and data as a new approach to examining inner and outer states of the human body, measured by sensing devices within performance. By using modern DIY wearable electronics and smart materials alongside hacked corporate fitness tech, we explore issues of data identity and data ethics that are adding a new dimension to the evolution of technology in performance. As researchers and artists, we question corporate and government agendas, and explore ways to access body data locally (not ‘in the cloud’), to uniquely demonstrate who we are, our physiological changes, movement, and interaction-like language. While examining these issues, can we create new forms of non-verbal interaction and communication, and empower ourselves through access to our own body data, to enable us to express and perform our identity, outside the cloud?

The participatory performance activities and choreography developed for HTB 2.0 are informed by physiological code and data collection as a means for performers to interact with their own body data, through experiential, sensual, haptic engagement with the custom-made garments on their bodies and those of other performers as such, they become co-creators in the work. But HTB 2.0 is not only focused on the making of physiological sensing and actuating garments, but also on how to enable performers to understand, express and perform their ‘data-as-identity’, as a means to reclaim control over it and as another technique to devise movement and interaction to co-create performance. And as with other forms of data, body-as-information can be hacked and re-purposed, and re-physicalised, but we argue this should only done by the owner of that body. The project aims to highlight ethical issues by putting the concept of data ownership back literally back into the hands of the body from which it originates and is collected from.

2 Research to Performance

In practical terms, HTB 2.0 is as much a performance investigation as a conceptual research endeavour, and its instantiations have developed our hands-on making skills in DIY electronics, soft-circuits and smart textiles, while unearthing the greater unethical data collection issues. In response, we have created non-data-collecting technology garments that trigger expression and portray personal identity through movement responses and haptic interaction. In the process, performers invited to express their own body code during several performance ‘hacks’ or experiments based on the concept of physiological code ownership.

In our more recent iterations the focus has been on garment aesthetics, ethical used of fabrics, housing for the electronics, as well as the interaction design of the sensing and actuation of the electronics, as well as a focus on the movement vocabulary and gestural responses of the dancers triggered by the actuation and how this could be made into dance performance phrasing. This was intended to allow dancers to interact and respond to touch, the sensors and their response to actuation or output through vibration, to develop new movement ‘dialogue’ between performers, exploring their identities.

HTB 2.0 took to the public stage in 2016. We hacked into off-the-shelf devices to enable the dancers to interact directly with the embedded electronics in the garments on their bodies, to trigger the dancers to move in conversation with each other, with an added feature that allows the choreographer, or indeed the audience, to intervene directly with the dancers’ bodies and their movement responses. Two pieces were developed for the performances: (1) stutter/flutter – costumes with haptic garments and motor actuation ‘tickles’; (2) feel me – costumes with custom etextiles breath sensors and vibe actuation. feel me, the piece with the hacked corporate devices, is a very structured piece of choreography that had a strict form of repetition, so that when one dancer exhales, the other dancer stops moving for the duration of that breath. The movement is forced to become stagnant rather than follow the expected patterns (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Images from performance of the piece in February 2016 in London, UK - the dancers interacting with the textile touch sensors embedded in the pink pleated fabric.

The ultimate goal is that performers engage with their own and other’s body code to create new forms of ‘live data performance’, with the performer initiating the interaction, using these skin interfaces to aid their performance interaction. The performers interact or respond to the smart garments and each other through movement, enabling code-based movement phrases or ‘dialogue’ to emerge, reacting to each other’s unique gestures representing their data identities. This may then allow them to interact or respond to biosensing to create new movement ‘dialogue’ or interaction with other performers and explore identities. In this way, the performers have one way to directly reclaim their data sensing, expression and collection and the technology, as another tool or collaborator to devise movement and co-create performance works. This circumvents, and puts ownership back into the hands of users, and in turn becomes another critical act of making and a small confrontation of surveillance and data control. This is intended to challenge the power and control of patented/copyrighted body data collecting tools, versus personal body rights, and expands concepts of the body as part of greater social, political and the (open-source) technological network (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.

Image from Feel Me performance still from February 18, 2016 in Sheffield

3 Reflections and Directions

Part of our aim in Hacking the Body 2.0: to explore the body, movement, nonverbal communication with the collaboration of the technology as a resistance to the modes of working with wearable technologies and etextiles through making, performing and public debate. We are more concerned in what a body can do, but first we must sublimate the technology, rather than conform to its inherent limitations. We recognise that we cannot actually reclaim the ownership of our private physiological data automatically or on a substantial global level through performance experimentation and its debate alone, but with additional interventions and the development disruptive technologies, we hope to add to the increasing voices and resistance to such control. We can also initiate more collaboration between artists and performers with wearable technologists and companies, to find a mutually satisfactory way forward, demonstrating how art and performance can influence the research and development of Human Computer Interaction, interfaces and data collection, not to mention creating more ethical, environmental and sustainable technologies and interfaces for the future.

Endnotes

• [1] This concept is unpacked well by Slavoj Zizek in his book How To Read Lacan, especially the about the concept of unknown knowns, which he states, “…Lacan’s claim that the subject is always ‘decentred’. His point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are decentred with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but rather something much more unsettling: I am deprived of even my most intimate subjective experience, the way things ‘really seem to me’, deprived of the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the core of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it.” (2006:52–53).

• [2] Our methods are based on Thecla Schiphorst’s methods which I learned working for her as a research assistant in 2002–2005 on her wearable performance project whispers in Vancouver Canada.

• [3] Such as Transmediale Festival 2015 Capture All in Berlin, where the topic for the festival was focused on critical examining these issues.