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Desire Lines: Quantified-Self-Portraits Produced with a Fitness Tracking Watch

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Wearable Objects and Curative Things

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body ((PSFB))

Abstract

I am an artist and researcher examining self-tracking practices to understand how these forms of measurement and judgement employ an ideology of health to produce particular (gendered) neoliberal subjects. My fitness tracking watch records bodily movements and presents data as indicators of health. The watch encourages self-optimisation and competition. In contrast, the performances I track do not focus on health or self-improvement but bring attention to hidden labour, often gendered and unpaid, such as admin, cleaning and care. In Desire Lines, the geolocation diagrams produced when working at home are reproduced in linocut prints. These prints, and my body of work on quantification, aim to contextualise self-tracking data within the personal, social and political environment, undoing the propensity of neoliberal capitalism to present health as a personal responsibility and consumer choice. This chapter discusses some positive and negative aspects of self-tracking practices and the Quantified Self movement to outline the position from which I appropriate self-tracking techniques as creative practice-based research methods. By viewing quantification through a queer, feminist lens I hope to draw attention to the inequalities that are concealed by neoliberal notions of health. Using a phenomenological approach, I describe some of the preliminary findings of this ongoing research, including the augmented and outsourced ways of looking and varying temporalities of self-tracking.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Neoliberalism is an economic system characterised by deregulation and privatisation that extends into social life and influences the way people behave. Neoliberal subjectivity denotes the way that individuals are expected to view themselves as flexible entrepreneurs and health as a personal, rather than social or governmental, responsibility. Individuals also optimise the self to increase productivity and competitiveness in the free-market economy. For in-depth discussion, see: Dawn Woolley, 2022, Consuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodiciation, London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

  2. 2.

    Artworks can be viewed at www.dawnwoolley.com.

  3. 3.

    Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Eric Butler (London: Verso, 2017), 28.

  4. 4.

    Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus, Self-tracking, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

  5. 5.

    QSers attend Quantified Self meetups and conferences, and their interest in self-tracking exceeds the average consumer’s engagement with the devices. QSers often have high levels of tech know-how and adapt existing devices for their own means or create their own methods.

  6. 6.

    Anonymous, ‘What is quantified self’, Quantified Self: Self Knowledge Through Numbers. Available at http://quantifiedself.com/about/ what-is-quantified-self/ (accessed 3 August 2019).

  7. 7.

    Gary Wolf, 2010, ‘The data-driven life’, The New York Times Magazine, 28 April 2010. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?_r=0. Accessed 6 May 2022.

  8. 8.

    Wolf, The data-driven life.

  9. 9.

    Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman, ‘This One Does not Go Up To 11: The Quantified Self Movement as an Alternative to Big Data Practice’, International Journal of Communication 8(2014), 1784–1794, 1788.

  10. 10.

    Nafus and Sherman, ‘This One Does not Go Up To 11’, 1793.

  11. 11.

    Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self, Cambridge: Polity, 2016.

  12. 12.

    Lupton, The Quantified Self, 120.

  13. 13.

    Lucy Aphramor and Jacqui Gingras, ‘Helping People Change: Promoting Politicised Practice in the Health Care Professions’, in Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives, eds. Emma Rich, Lee F. Monaghan and Lucy Aphramor, 192–218, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

  14. 14.

    Neff and Nafus, Self-tracking, 39.

  15. 15.

    Neff and Nafus, Self-tracking.

  16. 16.

    For discussion of healthism and self-tracking see Woolley, Consuming the Body.

  17. 17.

    Neff and Nafus, Self-tracking, 9.

  18. 18.

    Han, Psychopolitics, 25–6.

  19. 19.

    Han, Psychopolitics, 28.

  20. 20.

    Fitbit band Apple Watch, 2017, quoted in Steffen Krüger, ‘The authoritarian dimension in digital self-tracking: Containment, commodification, subjugation’, in Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche eds. Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa, 85–104, London: Routledge, 2019, 95 (emphasis original).

  21. 21.

    Krüger, ‘The authoritarian dimension in digital self-tracking’.

  22. 22.

    Mike Featherstone, ‘Body, image and affect in consumer culture’, Body and Society 16/1 2010, 193–221, 205.

  23. 23.

    Benigna Gerisch, Benedikt Salfeld, Christiane Beerbohm, Katarina Busch and Vera King, ‘Optimisation by knife: on types of biographical appropriating of aesthetic surgery in late modernity’, in Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche, eds. Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa, 131–145, London: Routledge, 2019, 135.

  24. 24.

    Gerisch and King, quoted Gerisch, Salfeld, Beerbohm, Busch and King, ‘Optimisation by knife’, 136.

  25. 25.

    Gerisch, Salfeld, Beerbohm, Busch and King, ‘Optimisation by knife’, 136.

  26. 26.

    Neff and Nafus, Self-tracking, 24.

  27. 27.

    Amelia Jones, Body Art Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 180.

  28. 28.

    Gary Wolf, ‘The Quantified Self: Reverse Engineering’, in Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life, ed. Dawn Nafus, 67–72, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016, 69.

  29. 29.

    Elizabeth Barrett, ‘Experiential Learning in Practice as Research: Context, Method, Knowledge’, Journal of Visual Art Practice. 6(2): 2007, 115–124.

  30. 30.

    Ben Spatz, ‘Embodiment As First Affordance: Tinkering, Tuning, Tracking’. Performance Philosophy. 2(2): 2021. 257–271 https://doi.org/10.21476/Pp.2017.2261 Issn 2057-7176, 259.

  31. 31.

    Spatz, ‘Embodiment As First Affordance’, 164.

  32. 32.

    Nafus and Sherman, 2014, ‘This One Does not Go Up To 11’.

  33. 33.

    Dana Greenfield, ‘Deep Data: Notes on the n of 1’, in Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life, ed. Dawn Nafus, 123–146, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016, 139.

  34. 34.

    Greenfield, ‘Deep Data: Notes on the n of 1’, 139.

  35. 35.

    Eric Topol quoted in Greenfield, ‘Deep Data: Notes on the n of 1’, 132.

  36. 36.

    Gavin J. D. Smith and Ben Vonthethoff, ‘Health by numbers? Exploring the practice and experience of datafied health’, Health Sociology Review 26/1: 2017, 6–21, 12.

  37. 37.

    Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964, 79.

  38. 38.

    Michael Newman, ‘Decapitations: The portrait, the anti-portrait … and what comes after?’, in Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait, eds. Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber, 25–68 London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

    Newman writes that portraits that visually resemble the sitter are iconic signs of the imaginary self (an expression of an idealised, whole self), whereas anti-portraits reject the imaginary in favour of the symbolic in word portraits (a self that is constructed through culture and language) or the real in data portraits.

  39. 39.

    Newman, ‘Decapitations: The portrait, the anti-portrait … and what comes after?’, 54.

  40. 40.

    Tamar Sharon and Dorien Zandbergen, ‘From data fetishism to quantifying selves: self-tracking practices and the other values of data’, New Media and Society 19/11, 2016, Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816636090. Accessed 12 June 2017.

  41. 41.

    Kevin Kelly quoted in Neff and Nafus, Self-tracking,. 78.

  42. 42.

    Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 126.

  43. 43.

    A term used by Newman when describing Susan Morris’s work as ‘a destructive/productive knotting and unknotting, or weaving and unpicking’, Newman, ‘Decapitations: The portrait, the anti-portrait … and what comes after?’, 58.

  44. 44.

    Wolf, ‘The Quantified Self’, 72.

  45. 45.

    Wolf, ‘The Quantified Self’, 72.

  46. 46.

    Han, Psychopolitics, 9.

  47. 47.

    Wolf, ‘The Quantified Self’, 70.

  48. 48.

    Wolf, ‘The Quantified Self’, 72.

  49. 49.

    Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, 20.

  50. 50.

    Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 5.

  51. 51.

    Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 56.

  52. 52.

    Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 2006.

  53. 53.

    Lisa Baraitser, Enduring Time, London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

  54. 54.

    Lisa Baraitser, 2015, Touching Time: Maintenance, Endurance, Care, in Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism, ed. Stephen Frosh, 21–47, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 27.

  55. 55.

    Baraitser, Enduring Time, 49, 50 and 180.

  56. 56.

    Dawn Nafus. ‘Biosensing and Representation’, in Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life, ed. Dawn Nafus, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016, 1–4, 3.

  57. 57.

    Han, Psychopolitics 59.

  58. 58.

    Han, Psychopolitics 60.

  59. 59.

    Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa (eds), 2019, Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche, London: Routledge.

  60. 60.

    Baraitser, Enduring Time, 49.

    Baraitser, Enduring Time.

  61. 61.

    Jones, Body Art Performing the Subject, 203–4.

  62. 62.

    Merleau-Ponty paraphrased in Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, p. 53.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leeds Arts University, Leeds, UK

    Dawn Woolley

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  1. Dawn Woolley
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Correspondence to Dawn Woolley .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leeds Arts University, Leeds, UK

    Dawn Woolley

  2. Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Fiona Johnstone

  3. School of Design, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Ellen Sampson

  4. Leeds Arts University, Leeds, UK

    Paula Chambers

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Woolley, D. (2024). Desire Lines: Quantified-Self-Portraits Produced with a Fitness Tracking Watch. In: Woolley, D., Johnstone, F., Sampson, E., Chambers, P. (eds) Wearable Objects and Curative Things. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40017-9_9

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