My Data Body

Artist Marilène Oliver works with collaborators Scott Smallwood, Stephan Moore, and J. R. Carpenter to investigate the digital production and dissemination of personal data, including the MR images of interest to Hertz. Her VR artworks, My Data Body and Your Data Body, are complementary, combining medical scans, social media posts, biometric details, and personal identification numbers to analyze the politics and ethics of disseminating digital information. My Data Body features a high-resolution, volume rendered MR scan of Oliver’s body. As visitors to the VR work enter the semi-transparent body and explore it, they encounter data corpuses downloaded from her Facebook and Google accounts as well as texts relating the data usage agreements of these corporations. Passwords and logins flow back and forth through veins and arteries. Those engaged with My Data Body can read, listen to, manipulate, discard, or re-arrange this digital information; they might also decide to dissect the digital body by removing and examining its organs and bones. Each organ can be pulled out of the body to scatter “particles”; the brain spills password and login windows, the intestines shed data cookies, and the heart sprinkles emojis. Poetry written by J. R. Carpenter dangles from the bones, reflecting on what it is like both to live with and as a body of data. Every anatomical element has a different sound created by Scott Smallwood and Stephan Moore attached to it. As users manipulate the body parts, they activate these sounds and compose a unique soundscape. At the same time, Oliver’s facial recognition scans encircle the scene, alluding to the audiences that witnessed anatomical dissections in the past. With many historical layers and interactive options, My Data Body questions data ownership, dignity, and consent, while suggesting ways to think about how datafication is changing understandings of both ourselves and others.