Vibrant Lives and Data Archives

Vibrant Lives and Data Archives proposes to juxtapose “human” and “artifactual” metadata as a real-time experience of data production to educate audiences about the torrents of data we produce in our everyday lives and to raise questions about how we value persons, art objects, and information. Our team of scholar-artists embody expertise in media studies, digital humanities, data/information capture, digital privacy and information security, improvisational dance, movement and wearable technology, and feminist performance. Rather than investigating more traditional audio/visual methods for sharing data information, we will explore haptic (touch‐based) feedback and movement to provoke a visceral understanding of what it means to “shed data.” If data is moving from the body to a disembodied abstraction or from an object to an immaterial form, we consider haptic feedback and participatory, real‐time improvisation structures as uniquely situated - eliciting a deep cognitive/emotional or somatic understanding of this loss.