July 5, 2006
Takes a Blogging, Keeps on Ticking
“My Beating Blog” is an attempt to take the journaling aspect of blogging into a surrealistic future in which the author literally and metaphorically bares his heart. For three weeks, a series of posts contextualizing heart-rate visualizations, GPS-maps, and personal journal entries will give online users a rare entrance into personal medical-grade statistics, stalker-level location tracking, and the private thoughts of the blogger. Inevitably, issues regarding privacy, exhibitionism, and voyeurism playfully emerge as the blogosphere is infused with biofeedback and location technology. Rather than play into a dystopian or Orwellian future, blogs and biofeedback are given poetic license, reframing our awareness of our own and each others’ beating hearts.
I’m imagining what Kenneth Goldsmith would have done with a heart monitor and a similar concept.
And, I wish I could remember the science fiction story or novel in which stock market fluctuations followed the real-time medical data of the president, but similar writings from J. G. Ballard and the medical and market data feeds in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis seem to have erased the citation from my memory, and flipping through Mirrorshades and Semiotext(e) SF didn’t turn it up.