Andrieu, Bernard

Hybridization with the body: Transmutation through immersive osmosis - 2016.


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The quantified self, or wearing activity monitors on one’s own body, is not only a new form of biopolitics stemming from the administration of data from the moving body; it has also led us to discover limits of biofeedback. Knowledge about one’s rhythms, motor functions, energy consumption, and blood pressure maintains an illusion of bio-control over oneself, while establishing a new knowledge of oneself through an awareness of one’s living body. This self-diagnosing approach obliges the subject to consider their own health by defining their hybridization and maintaining an illusion of correspondence and an exact measurement of what is produced by our living body and by what we are conscious of while living. To bypass this discrepancy, the quantification of self using this wearable technology creates a fictive bio-control. Hence, a biological transmutation takes place and the human must confront involuntary actions, accidents, or the internal logic of life as it unfolds.