Intermediality of lifelogging

Abstract

Digitally recording human experience 24 hours a day became a new practice in the 1980s. Coined “lifelogging”, this computerized practice, quietly gaining popularity, aims to supplement individuals' memory faculty, particularly personal memories. Technically, it involves automated, continuous, and cumulative archiving of information regarding an individual's daily activities. As proposed by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin (2007), the purpose of such devices is to record all events, conversations, texts, audiovisual information, and traces generated on social media platforms, as well as biological data generated by sensors placed on the body, primarily for accessing and cross-referencing data in the future. The personal archive is a multimodal data collected through specialized software and mostly ubiquitous computing devices, omnipresent in the user's environment (referred to as lifeloggers).

This conference aims to trace the intermedial genealogy of lifelogging. It will explore the technocultural series and trajectories that have paved the way for lifelogging in a sociosemiotic and intermedial perspective, including personal diaries to surveillance cameras, parameters, uses and social logics. An analysis of intermedial parameters will be coupled with research conducted among lifeloggers themselves, who sometimes draw very specific links between their current practices and older techniques such as automatic writing.