Digital Diversity | Multiperspectivity on Digital Bodies

Investigations concerning the interplay between body representation and bodily experience continue to be a focus of numerous disciplines. With the advent of digitalization and the increasingly pervasive presence of interconnected health apps, social media, data-collecting wearables and extended-reality devices, questions about the societal impact of the generation and dissemination of data bodies only continue to grow in significance.

Taking the publication of the anthology Atlas of Data Bodies 2 as their point of departure, Marlene Bart, Georg Dickmann and others tba will discuss how pluralistic data bodies and body images can contribute to diversifying concepts of bodies. They will consider aspects of biopolitics as well as body mysticism and in how far such a concept of mysticism can productively oppose quantifiable and economic data with new understandings of data bodies. How does multiperspectivity on digital bodies succeed? Is a unified concept of data bodies necessary? To what extent do aspects of body politics and body mysticism interact with our contemporary use and understanding of technologies? These questions will form the starting point for the evening.