Body Politics of Data (2020)
Solo show, research
London Gallery West, University of Westminster. 25th jan - 7th feb 2020

The exhibition The Body Politics of Data showcases the production of postgraduate artistic research produced between 2013-2019 featuring individual and collaborative projects exploring the embodiment of data in new forms of labour emerging around digital economies.

The relevance of reconsidering how bodies are structuring their data or being structured by data are increasingly important. The social, financial and political value is accumulating in a way that often benefits governments and corporations rather than individuals or communities, and in turn creating new forms of social and personal risk. Terms such as ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ are commonly conceptualised and crafted as ‘body-less’ and technical processes, which is unpacked through the practice that seek to bring visibility to the relationship between bodies and digital economies.

The exhibition featured a series of artistic research projects that explore the bodies behind big data: from smartphone users and gaming children trading their data for services to pregnant mums and midwives feeding healthcare databases their numbers. While data is often conceptualised as ‘body-less,’ the labours behind data show that bodies must be taken into account.The research explores how feminist art practice can inform new ways of thinking about the enormous amounts of data that we produce on a daily basis by shifting the focus from what data tells us to the conditions under which it is made. The artworks bring out new foci on the intersections of healing, control and unknowing to conceptualise the bodily and social costs underlying digital ecologies.

The show features work informed by concepts of maintenance and care. From drawing experiments, data collages, body maps to care installations, the exhibition brings experimental engagements, collaborations and performative artworks, ushering the social costs and risks of data production to the fore. By bringing bodies back into view, the works offer new perspectives on how relations between bodies, machines, corporations and governments are reconfigured in digital society.


Team:
Anika Tabachnick, curation and communication
Renee Carmichael, design and graphics
OddHut Collective, production
Loes Bogers, installation 

And the amazing support of those little and big helpers. 

PhD & Acknowledgements
The PhD was supervised by Dr. Margherita Sprio and Dr. Tom Corby and funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council PhD scholarship with additional grants to support the artistic practice from A-N Artist Development Bursary, Fran Trust Travel Bursary, Global Engagement Development Fund and Westminster 125 Fund.