Stitch , Bitch , Make / Perform : Wearables and Performance

The current technology fervour over wearable technology that collects user’s intimate body data, under the pretence of medical or fitness monitoring, highlights that it is time that critical questions were raised, in a variety of ways. The ethics of corporate ownership of body data for consumerist agendas is rarely discussed beyond the fine print on these devices. More awareness and education on these ethical issues would allow more access, ownership, and creativity in the use of one’s own body data, enabling new methods to express personal identity through this data. This paper will discuss how the ethical issues of wearable data collection can be addressed, and the new collaborative project by the authors, which focuses on bringing performers together to address data ownership and personal identity using wearable technology through performance experiments.


INTRODUCTION
Wearable apps and device development is a growing commercial field.With smart watches, fitness trackers and sport tech, such as Nike Fuel Band, Fitbit, and Jawbone, there are many devices that are designed to collect user data through sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and pedometers, breath sensing, heart-rate monitors, and calorie trackers.These technologies and other concurrent developments in electronic textiles, medical/biotech, have all evolved to the point that there's a community called the Quantified Self Movement based upon bodily self-monitoring.BBC recently reported that there are "97,000 apps are on sale in the mobile health sector" (IBID, BBC, 12 November 2014) that track this data.Many tech companies and start-ups are working to make the next wearable device or application for body data tracking.
General users and the public must be made more aware of the ethical issues of body data collection.Everyone should have the right to access, own, explore, and use their own body data, as well as to interpret or reinterpret this data, however we choose, to express our own personal identities, which is presently not possible (BBC, R&D blog, June 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2014/06/qs-ethicsof-data).
Currently the wearable tech companies, who can then sell it on to whomever they wish, own our physiological data, collected by wearable tech companies via mobile apps and devices.In one recent news story, (BBC, 12 November 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29952998) fitness data from these devices is being used to monitor one company's employees' fitness, which could easily be used against them.
During a time of public cynicism around data collection practices by governments and corporations, brought to light by the Edward Snowden, artists, designers and performers could to be more involved in wearables discourse and development, as critical agents to educate the public on activities of the corporate colonisation of and through our bodies.In this context, the authors have developed a new research project intended not only to help performers make their own physiological sensing devices and costumes, using electronic textiles and accessible technologies, also to enable them to use these devices and garments to express and perform their own identities as they choose.
As researchers and artists we question how this physiological data can demonstrate how we perform?How does this data demonstrate who we are, through movement, through our biology and physiological changes?Does this relate to the performance of identity?How can we explore these issues while enabling people access to their own data to interact with, especially in performance contexts?

EXPLORING THROUGH PERFORMANCE
Researchers in recent years have been exploring these issues from the mobile health dimension, but as Susan Elizabeth Ryan has noted in her recent book Garments of Paradise (2014:8), few are exploring the full potential of wearable technology in performance, let alone the other related issues of identity and body data ownership in performance.

She writes:
Wearables in the context of performance present opportunities for exploring our relationships with our bodies and how we move them… [or how] communications interfaces, and other soft and sensory technologies allow us to experience or transcend our bodies, and how the concept of theatrical performance can be expanded in virtual space (2014:8) By developing methods of performance creation and experimentation with, and via hacking commercial wearable devices, as well as making handmade wearable sensing and e-textiles devices, we aim to collect physiological data for personal use to create unique and interactive performances, particularly in dance, live art and theatre.
Conceptually the project examines current rhetoric on code, hacking, networks, the quantified self, and data to extend into the parameters of inner and outer states of the human body.Therefore, we seek to address such questions such as: 1) Since so much knowledge of the body is still unknown, how can we expose something new and allow the public to see new dimensions of the body and themselves in a compelling way?
2) The 'quantified-self movement' and fitness industry capitalises on the individual's desire to know and keep track of their own physiological datahow can we challenge and reposition this desire into different discussions around the nature of the data, who owns it, and the ethics of this data collection?
3) Why are these issues compelling and beneficial for use in digital performance and how can we explore them more deeply through our work?
The investigators will develop participatory performances and choreography informed by physiological code and data collection processes, for audiences to interact with their own body data, while incorporating visual, wearable, and mobile media dimensions.
Participants This second collaboration also addresses the ongoing issues, challenges and problems of developing methods to make handmade wearable sensing and smart textiles-based devices, to collect physiological data, be wireless and create unique interactive performances.As such, we aim to share Maker/DIY practices with the performance communities near us and educate these communities in making their own electronic textilesbased devices.We see this as way to draw the performance community into the development, evolution of, and conversation around wearable technology, data collection ethics, and in particular how wearable technologies might enhance performance, while making playful, challenging and thought-provoking works of performance.
One current exploration of this notion by Dr Sicchio is through programmable garments that are used within live dance performance.In this piece, buzzers such as the ones found in mobile devices, are embedded into costumes.The buzzing patterns indicate a choreographic score for the performers.This score is a representation of data previously collected with a fitness tracker by the choreographer.The piece questions if the identity of the choreographer can be revisited through a performance and through a smart textile device.It also raises issues over who is the owner of this datathe choreographer or the performer who is now taking this data and reinterpreting it to their own ends.It may be considered a metaphor for the corporate appropriation of personal data collected through fitness trackers.
At the writing of this paper, the authors were about to undertake a ten-day intensive, to workshop the issues raised here with dancers, using off-the-shelf and handmade wearable devices.Through this intensive we hope to explore issues of personal data and how self-monitoring one's own body data may lead new forms of narcissism and corporate spying, but also how understanding the inner workings of the body processes may or may not lead people to greater overall health and better physical habits.Some of the discussion that emerged centred on how etextiles are more political than mainstream sports wearable tech, and perhaps anti-technology in some ways.As such, the E-textiles Summer Camp, run by the Kobakant founders Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson, which takes place every other year in France, focuses on the reclaiming of kitsch and the political aspects of sharing technique and the craft of making.Thus, it was voiced that artists and designers can be critical in terms of the materials we use (in terms of where they come from and where they end up), and by examining and questioning what the etextiles industry is doing and focussing on, when they are materials sourcing.
The discussion also touched on the female dimension of etextiles work, as well as the artists and writers within this domain, such as Micha Cárdenas (2012), who writes on gender, violence issues with wearable devices as a means of selfdefence and communication.Some discussion also centred on the craft dimension of etextiles, seems to have a more female perspective and involvement, versus the sports industry, which makes body-tracking gadgets with a frightening invisible data exploitation aspect.The group discussion focussed on the fact that the more visible the technology the less questionable.The conversation ended with the opinion that artists and performers can subvert the mainstream wearable technologies and Smart Fashion conversation by networking and collaborating, finding fashion designers and engineers to work with on the issues, and invite or go to the wearable tech innovators to try to encourage them to change their approach toward ethical development and manufacturing.
Three 2) scheming/collaborating on new projects: from organising a symposium to bring academics, artists and designers together with industry experts, to creating a series of activities as part of the Being Human Festival, to creating a lab set up to develop new projects together.This vibrant meeting ended with a strong agenda for the next one at the end of April 2015 at the V&A, with aims for all group participants to bring examples of their own 'wearable and etextiles' projects to show and discuss, as well as having a Master Classes with textiles experts Sara Robertson and Sarah Taylor.At the time of this writing, this meetup had not yet taken place to report on, but can be reported on at the EVA Conference panel.

THE PANEL
The panel proposed for EVA 2015, as an initiative of Dr Baker, is intended as a special event of the Stitch, Bitch, Make/Perform working group, bringing in conference participants to help tackle the issues outlined here, especially for art, performance, fashion, design, and research.It is hoped that we can bring together other wearable stakeholders from: Makers and DIY wearable enthusiasts, quantified-selfies, medical/biotech specialists, fashion designers, computer scientists, sports and fitness techies, interaction designers and electronics engineers, etc.), to participate and address the panel topics proposed above and below, including issues around identity and data ownership in the new era of the Internet of Bodies.This panel will address some of the questions posed in the first Stitch, Bitch, Make/Perform meetup in 2014, listed above, as well as the following: The invisibility of ubiquitous and wearable personal and affective technologies that read, tag, and track bodies in the social sphere… disappears from people's awareness"(Ryan,  2014:108)and make it "difficult to discuss or even react to its presence…" What can artists and designers do about this?  What additional efforts to address these issues can the meetup group address, as starting point to develop a research lab that further aims to explore these issues through research and design?Wheredo we go from here?Potential panellists from the group and outside, may include: Michelle Danjoux -fashion and designer: IDAP EU Project working on smart costumes for performance;  Rain Ashford -Queen Mary PhD Candidate focused on wearable sensing and emotion;  Becky Stewartco-founder of Codasign a small company focused on teaching DIY open source technology to children and adults;  Emilie Gillesco-founder of MzTeKa company focused on teaching technology to women and girls; now working at Codasign.The goal is not to answer the questions definitively, but to have a lively discussion to address the state of things around wearable technology, and which new directions we can go, but specifically what artists and performers, in particular, can bring to this conversation with new expressions to the bodyskin interface.