Paper short abstract:

Part of a larger ASTS project, Curves & Reverbs is a real-time data-informed participatory performance that aims to communicate my experience of migration and exile through transforming biosensor data into sound and data-responsive images to create an atmosphere of affect contagion.

Paper long abstract:

Curves & Reverbs is a real-time data-informed participatory performance that grapples with biosensors as data generating techno-extensions, processing of such data as a normative technoscientific practice, and its radical subversion by turning the results into sound and data-responsive images. The performance is part of a larger ASTS project that examines different possibilities for creating atmospheric events based on a range of strategies to integrate biosensor data into a techno-performative practice—from longitudinal personal data collection to live and freeform ways of treating biosensor data. Drawing on several years of experiments with wearable biosensors and the use of sound as a sensory medium, Curves & Reverbs thus builds an atmosphere for affect contagion to communicate my experience of migration and exile to audiences. In doing so, it leverages biosensors to activate body, software, hardware, bio and acoustic signals to go beyond the crisis of imagination to speculate other-than-personal lived realities and spaces of existence. Sensor-to-sound reconfiguration draws the data close to body for sensemaking using "data visceralization" as a strategy, while acknowledging its reductive nature particularly when capturing complexity of bodily processes. Using strategies of interaction and participation, the performance builds on exchanging biosensors in a sequential and rhythmic interval across the audience without a distinct division between the performer and the audience. Such an experience aims to create a shared exploration of affective responses centered on migration and exile while illuminating the reciprocal influence between individual and collective expression through intermingling the physiological with the affective in co-creation.