“Datafying Sweet Secrets” (TiM Public Launch) – Tamalone van den Eijnden

In her talk on the occasion of the celebration of the launch of Transmission in Motion, Norah Zuniga Shaw advocated for an “ethics of care,” not only in the face of the ubiquity of technology but also in view of the intimacy with it. Until now, when I was thinking about intimate and affective relationships with technology, it was mostly in very literal terms, for example, how we cherish our mobile phones, often carry them very close to our most intimate body parts, how we seek refugee in technologically mediated realities and not at least the huge sector of sex-technology. However, listening to Nora Zuniga Shaw, I realized that we can experience intimacy with technology also in another way, namely through enhanced ways of making visible, such as for example annotating dance through visual motion capture.

Sometimes, when we tell a secret to a person, afterwards, we feel closer to them. This is partially, as I would like to argue because we believe that our exposure enables the other person a more nuanced view on us which, simultaneously, also comes along with increased vulnerability. Our body (including all the possible movements it can produce) could be considered as one of our secrets. Our body is never fully hidden. However, as for example the self-awareness, which comes with dancing when knowing one is closely watched, shows: we rarely fully expose our body. This is why I believe that watching somebody move can be experienced as ‘listening to the secrets of the body,’ a very intimate act. It is imaginable, that a similar shyness and feeling of intimacy is experienced when being exposed to motion capture technologies. Because small motions can be recorded with high degrees of accuracy, a heightened experience of nakedness can be imagined, a knowledge that there is no hiding. This, I believe, can also be regarded as an experience of intimacy with technology.

Very tellingly, the artwork, with which Norah Zuniga Shaw ended her presentation was the E.E.G KISS by Karen Lancel and Herman Maat, a performance installation, where through E.E.G headsets brain waves while kissing were translated in real time into audio-visual output. This is another example where intimacy intersects with an enhanced way of making visible what happens with the body, where a secret of the body is revealed, increasing vulnerability. Interestingly, however, (and this may be also said about the Motionbank) the installation does not only expose the deep entanglement of technology and intimacy, but also critically asks questions about the feeling evoked by it and about ownership of this very private data.