Ameera Kawash
PhD Work
PhD work
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'Bath Motes: Liquid Architecture for Pain Relief' (screenshot), Ameera Kawash
Video -
'Bath Motes: Liquid Architecture for Pain Relief' (screenshot), Ameera Kawash
Video -
'Bath Motes: Liquid Architecture for Pain Relief' (screenshot), Ameera Kawash
Video
Nested Intimacies: Traumatic Embodiment, Datafication, Digital Wellbeing
My current video work Bath Motes: Liquid Architecture for Pain Relief explores datafication, digital wellness, and traumatic embodiment through the story of a woman seeking relief from pain through a personalised biosensing platform that turns her bath into responsive liquid media. ‘Bath Motes’ is an imaginary platform that uses tiny microprocessing units to capture health and biological data about the bather, which then feedbacks into a personalised guided meditation. ‘Bath Motes' speculates on the ambitions of the digital wellness industry and the capacity of body sensor networks to relieve physical and emotional pain.
Info
Info
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PhD
School
School of Arts & Humanities
Programme
Arts & Humanities Research–
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Contact
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I use nested intimacies to explore embodiment, datafication, trauma, and digital wellbeing. As a methodology this helps bring sites of intimacy into my research, and vice versa, as well as explore techno-ontological imbrications of inside and outside.
Nesting can be neutral, beneficial, contested, parasitic, or traumatic. It can include human, nonhuman, and other-than-human agencies. Drawing from an analogy to hyperparasitism used by Benjamin Bratton to describe users embedded within other users, I try to apply this model towards auto-ethnographic reflection and visual art practice. Nesting evokes both the sense of preparing an embodied ground for oneself and an embedded and technical harvesting of different forms of information into one another. Nested intimacies becomes a way of conducting research and practice in a space of vulnerability and openness, while intimacy reaches beyond the ‘I’ as a biographical container.