Fifteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

The paper will describe the methods behind a collaboration between Cardiff University, National Museums Wales and the Economic and Social Research Council, UK. The project involved monitoring movement, heart rate, and skin conductive responses via wearable sensors to detect emotional arousal and intensity within a range of museum environments. The paper discusses the challenges of working with bio-data and finishes by looking at some of the implications this technology presents for understanding the role of emotion and identity in museums and wider society. The analysis investigates the implications of technologies that can record, visualise and share some of our most personal and intimate data. Such devices allow one to collect data at every scale of our lives, from the corporeal Quantified Self, the domestic intervention of devices like Amazon’s Alexa, through to the level of infrastructure represented by the Smart City. In recent times, we have come to see more clearly how data is collected, shared, regurgitated redeployed, and resold between environments. Whether research grade or commercial, these devices come packaged as part of a technologically glossed future where our quotidian events run like clockwork, efficiency has been achieved to the nth degree and control is algorithmic. As such technologies are normalised, how should they be used, critiqued and deconstructed? The paper discusses how these technologies might enable facilitation and discussion rather than instruction and measurement, arguing that an approach of this type routes research towards collaborative, praxis driven exploration of the relationship between us and the machine.