Le Carrefour des SHN / DH-Hub

Digital Humanities, Embodied Technology, and Selves

Isabel Pedersen

Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media and Culture

University of Ontario Institute of Technology

Friday May 19, 04:45 PM – 6:00 PM  Richcraft Hall (River Building) Room 2228

As networked culture progresses, wearable media devices will continue to evolve. Such devices will read our feelings, anxieties, delights, and fears in addition to mundane information about what we buy, where we go, and who we know. Our digital selves will accrue datafied emotional profiles through biofeedback geared to represent affect. Along these lines, implanted technology is poised as the next phase of embodiment in increasingly everyday contexts. The ambition to develop and adopt affective computing technologies reveals a utopian hope of a future that could be radically transformative, but in other ways it is fear that provokes us. The transhumanist response to feelings of vulnerability and precarity pushes society to become digital in ways that seem precautionary. For this talk, I will describe several multiyear digital humanities creation projects that respond to embodied technologies and affective computing. One project, Fabric of Digital Life is an open digital humanities archive that explores the emergence of digital devices through its broad archival mission, collections, curatorial practices, and metadata development. Several critical arts projects explore the juncture between human agency, mediation, affect, film, art, technoculture, and embodied technology. The critical humanities goal represented by these projects is to engender experiences that are creatively jarring, thought provoking, and methodological.

Bio: Dr. Isabel Pedersen, Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media and Culture focuses on wearable computers, networked culture, visual rhetoric and emergent media.