Dr. Hannah Drayson [BA (Hons), MSc, PhD]
Transtechnology Research,
Room B318 Portland Square,
University of Plymouth,
Drake Circus,
Plymouth,
PL4 8AA.
mail : hannah.drayson [at...] plymouth.ac.uk
Transtechnology Research Seminar
Gestalt Biometrics and their Applications; Instrumentation, Objectivity and Poetics
23rd March 2011, 14.00
This seminar included a presentation of my PhD thesis.
Abstract
This thesis explores the theoretical territory around the use of instrumental sensors for human body measurement. It draws upon the literature of a range of disciplines, medicine, anthropology, history, philosophy of science and technology, to produce a broadly interdisciplinary, philosophical and historically situated account of human body sensing. The thesis aims to engage with the question of how the practice of human body sensing might be recalibrated, re-imagined and validated as a practice that is not inherently and specifically understood as one of objectively revealing, but alternatively as a productive, active and poetic.
The thesis embarks from certain observations. The first is that (i) by rejecting the western philosophical tradition which contrasts instrumental ‘objectivity’ and bodily ‘subjectivity’, philosophical and anthropological discourses of the body offer alternative ontologies within which the relationship between instruments and bodies might be understood.
Similarly, (ii) approaches in the philosophy of technology and medical anthropology offer an understanding of instrumentation as ‘productive’ of the physical world, rather than ‘revealing’. Drawing on this work allows the thesis to position itself in a particular way regarding the interaction between bodies and instruments which goes beyond a model of a pre-existing and natural body being made visible or revealed by instrumentation, and instead offers an account in which the body is produced or enacted by instrumentation and practices incorporating instrumentation of instrumental measurement.
Based on these observations, the thesis assembles a clarification of the role of objectivity from philosophy and the history of science alongside a materialist, and embodied account of the human. It provides an interdisciplinary synthesis of literatures pertaining to the discussion of bodily and instrumental production. By re-describing the thermometer, controlled trial, and polygraph, the thesis demonstrates how non-reductive accounts of human meaning and experience may be related to instrumentation and explores a number of applications of body measurement in different arenas, medicine, science and jurisprudence.
The major contribution of the thesis is to show that instruments may be talked about in a way that incorporates a sense of the human as an embodied subject within the context of the operation of the technology, rather than as an either opposing or marginalised aspect of the practices of instrumental sensing. The thesis offers a description of instrumentation that explains the relationship between device, information and perception through a discussion of the ‘meaning effect’ and suggests might be extended in later investigations of a poetics of instrumentation.
Projects
Gestalt Biometrics and their Applications.
Funded by the European Science Research Council (EPSRC).
Gestalt Biometrics is a cross-disciplinary project which combines a philosophical analysis with a computer science and engineering design approach, informed by perspectives from both arts and humanities and computer science. The research focus is upon biofeedback technologies, a group of sensors and methodologies which include a range of physiological instruments.
The intention of the project is to elucidate a critical and practice based response to the paradigms which surround contemporary sensing technologies as they are applied to the body. Rather than approach these instruments at face value, as objective devices, the project surveys disciplines such as philosophy, science and technology studies, health psychology, parapsychophysiology and medical anthropology to look for alternative models of the human body that might be compatible with these technologies.