Culturally
Embedded
Computing

/ Losing It

How do personal informatics and self-tracking tools incorporate, and contribute to, the shifting political meaning and importance of our health and our bodies? Where do these algorithms and applications fit into our developing understanding of our boundaries and possibilities? This project explores these questions via a multi-year auto-ethnographic effort that began with the goal of losing weight but grew to include the transformation in self-understanding that accompanies these systems and the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that their use generates. As an exploration of the self-in-transformation, it details the absurdities, contradictions, and pleasures of “modern”, “healthy,” quantified living as negotiated through these tools, and provides insights on how the efforts to gain control of one’s own body and consumption through the use of technology & community affects one’s person physically and politically.

Participants: Kaiton Williams