Twists of the smart body
Authors: Rogg Maria 
Published: July 2024

In critical data studies, biometric AI is commonly recognized as a mechanism of exclusion (cf. e.g., Amoore, 2006; Gates, 2011). The technology which is "built to measure life" (Ajana, 2013) processes digital representations of biological data in order to identify and authenticate individuals. Founded on the ideology and governmentality of dataism (van Dijck, 2014), the datafication of embodied identity reduces existence to discrete measurable results, within an imaginary of data as a source of unlimited knowledge. In search of a queer counter narrative of biometrics, this paper presents a philosophical-empirical inquiry of biohacking that endorses sensuous knowledge (Salami, 2020) to flesh out the limits of metric measurement (cf. Lagerkvist 2022). By interlinking existential media theory (Lagerkvist, 2017, 2020, 2022) with a critique of the "robotic way that dominates how we view knowledge today" (Salami, 2020, p. 17), "queer" is mobilised as a subject position particularly at risk in the binary configuration of digital existence; and a theoretical ambition to "bend and challenge ideas that are commonly taken for granted" (Tudor, 2021, p. 12). Based on ethnographic data collected between 2021-2023, biohacking is presented as an anticipatory existential media practice that twists biometrics for an operation of becoming. Biohackers incorporate technology into their own bodies to explore the relationships between embodiment and computation. Despite being a diverse community of practice (with purposes as varied as, e.g., interaction design; citizen science; body politics; do it yourself (DIY) and do it together (DIT) movements), the masculinist transhumanist call to live computational metaphors and maxims for human enhancement, prevails as the dominant narrative. By juxtaposing qualitative interviews conducted with biohackers self-identifying as queer against participatory observations of public biohacking performances, this paper interrogates an ethos of biohacking that exceeds this transhumanist imaginary and its adoption of functionalist attitudes towards the body and self through a spectrum of existential practices. I submit that these emancipatory, relational and caring practices illuminate the ethic-onto-epistemological dimensions of biohacking, as biometric data gets reappropriated to perform queer embodiment and subjectivation: By meshing and repurposing the subjective and objective perspective upon the body to reveal existence as a performance, the technology is both mimicked and debunked. Through claiming biometric data for an operation of becoming, the approach to data itself is queered, explored as a sensuous knowledge device for incommensurability. These existential twists of biometrics stress the limits of biometric AI. By countering the enforced classification, categorization and compartmentalization of identity, existential biohacking practices transcend mainstream techno-utopias by fleshing out human needs and qualities. Such a view is embedded in an understanding of media as existential media - that is technologies that condition human and more-than-human life by reflecting our technological entanglements while confronting us with our limits - our situated, embodied and mortal existence (Lagerkvist, 2022). Following Karl Jaspers (1970), limits are approached as a privileged reality to trouble figurations of unboundedness; by reconceiving of living with data as an ethical quest which reintroduces figurations of limits to datafication as a counter move to the ubiquitous belief in digitized data as supreme to human ways of knowing, based on "an aura of scientific authority" (Lupton, 2016, p. 56; van Dijck, 2014). At the threshold, sensuous knowledge can provide a partial and perspectival framing (Pink et al. 2018) to challenge the rational by the immeasurable and expose the existential implications of today's media technologies. By embracing the "emotional, embodied and poetic partner to our rational and logical intelligence" (Salami, 2020, p. 15), biohackers seize the limits of measurement to anticipate the nexus of ethics, technology and the body at stake with biometric AI. As biohacks of biometric existence, their biomedia present tools to intentionally restrict our aspirations to unbounded transparency, certainty, and resolution, and remind us that "the direction of technology cannot be looked for in technology itself, but must be thought of in a conscious ethos" (Jaspers, 2011, p. 119). Such existential knowing offers an approach to knowledge as an ethical activity to realize one's relational self (Nancy, 2000). This process is never stagnant or fixed, but fluid, multiple, uncertain, and in its incommensurability essentially queer. Galvanizing biometrics as existential media opens up a generative and imaginative, yet concretely situated ethical potential through which we can learn about being in the world with data in face of the inexhaustible diversity of the volatile, relational and vulnerable human body as our universal human condition, despite its asymmetric co-implication in different power regimes.