Relational Technologies by Lagerkvist, Amanda; Smolicki, Jacek;

Short description:

This collection explores technologies and the broad relations they form with the world and how such relational technologies of our datafied and biometric lifeworlds intersect with and redefine our embodied selves.

Long description:

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This open access collection gathers thinkers, media practitioners, scholars, and artists to bring attention to how our relational selves, lives, and lifeworlds emerge within a range of digital platforms, media environments, creative media practices, and performances to probe what it means to become subjective by evolving in and with a world of relational technologies.

As biometric artificial intelligence, datafication procedures and algorithms increasingly saturate and reconfigure human and more-than-human realms, technologies, and selves co-evolve in deepest relationality. Nearly every form of existence has today become subject to computational harvesting and utilization. This renders our relations with technologies-those we actively compose and those that are forced upon us-ever more complex and inconceivably entwined.

Topics covered in this collection include: face monitoring and modelling practices, quantified applications, writing techniques, biometric identifications of age and health, AI informed decision making, biohacking, voice recognition, social media, and algorithmic cultures of datafication. The overarching motivation is to generate new forms of understanding, but also ""counter-measures"" for negotiating this relational condition existentially, socially, and artistically. Thus, offering a unique contribution to the debates on data selves, Relational Technologies provides manifold possibilities for a co-existentialist understanding of technological developments of datafication and biometrics. This way the volume brings posthumanist critique into conversation with the young field of existential media studies, in search of new inflection points of change and transformation through new modes of knowing, reflecting, and crafting media futures of relationality.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation.

Table of Contents:

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Introduction - Technologies and Selves in Deep Relationality
Jacek Smolicki (Uppsala University, Sweden) and Amanda Lagerkvist (Uppsala University, Sweden)

I: Facing, Reading, Voicing
1. This Person Does (Not) Exist: Facing AI Faces and Tracing Extraordinary Selfhood in Barren Lands of Automation
Amanda Lagerkvist (Uppsala University, Sweden)
2. ALGO-READ: The Creative Automation of the Reading Subject
Joanna Zylinska (King's College London, UK)
3. Voices as Relations: Artistic Ways of Exploring and Co-existing with Voice Technologies
Jacek Smolicki (Uppsala University, Sweden)

II: Knowing, Caring, Healing
4. Epistemic Agency and the Self-Tracking Subject
Btihaj Ajana (King's College London, UK)
5. Beyond Optimal: Making Health Data Selves between Spoonfuls of Cornflakes
Maja Klausen (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark) & Stine Lomborg (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
6. Relational Interventions of Ogbon Gaia: ""Theory and Practice of Biohacking for Designing Co-existence 7,5 ECTs Fall 2038 Course code: 2IV168""
Maria Rogg (Uppsala University, Sweden)

III: Forging, Aging, Judging
7. Three Scenes of Fabricating the Self By/For/And Against the Borders
Mahmoud Keshavarz (Uppsala University, Sweden)
8. ""My Mother Gave birth to Me: Your Machine did Not"": Technologies of the Temporal Self in Medical Age Assessments
Matilda Tudor (Uppsala University, Sweden)
9. Cyborg or Pilot: Technical Rationality or Relational Autonomy in Contemporary Exercise of Public Authority by the Judging Self
Jenny Eriksson Lundstrï¿1⁄2m (Uppsala University, Sweden) & Charles M. Ess (University of Oslo, Norway)

Author Biographies
Index