Relational Technologies - (Thinking Media) by Amanda Lagerkvist & Jacek Smolicki (Hardcover)

About the Book

This collection explores technologies and the broad relations they form with the world and how such relational technologies of our datafied and biometric lifeworlds intersect with and redefine our embodied selves.

Book Synopsis

This open access collection gathers thinkers, media practitioners, scholars, and artists to bring attention to how our relational selves, lives, and lifeworlds emerge within a range of digital platforms, media environments, creative media practices, and performances to probe what it means to become subjective by evolving in and with a world of relational technologies.

As biometric artificial intelligence, datafication procedures and algorithms increasingly saturate and reconfigure human and more-than-human realms, technologies, and selves co-evolve in deepest relationality. Nearly every form of existence has today become subject to computational harvesting and utilization. This renders our relations with technologies-those we actively compose and those that are forced upon us-ever more complex and inconceivably entwined.

Topics covered in this collection include: face monitoring and modelling practices, quantified applications, writing techniques, biometric identifications of age and health, AI informed decision making, biohacking, voice recognition, social media, and algorithmic cultures of datafication. The overarching motivation is to generate new forms of understanding, but also "counter-measures" for negotiating this relational condition existentially, socially, and artistically. Thus, offering a unique contribution to the debates on data selves, Relational Technologies provides manifold possibilities for a co-existentialist understanding of technological developments of datafication and biometrics. This way the volume brings posthumanist critique into conversation with the young field of existential media studies, in search of new inflection points of change and transformation through new modes of knowing, reflecting, and crafting media futures of relationality.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under aCC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded bythe Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation.

Review Quotes

An informed and captivating media-philosophical and arts-oriented collection of essays, this book does not shy away from the most existentially precarious and disturbing questions of our time. What does it take to be a person in the era of biometric technology? And what does it mean to exist both in negotiation with and in defiance of the limit situations of technologized selves?
Maria Hellström Reimer, Professor of Design Theory, Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication, Sweden

This collection is a skillful deep dive into the uncanny valley of measurement as existential media practice: the measures and techniques that produce selves and the measures that also control and limit selves. Through multidisciplinary case studies, this book is an excellent contribution to critical data studies and many other fields.
Jussi Parikka, Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark

About the Author

Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Core Fellow at HCAS, the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Jacek Smolicki is a researcher, artist, designer and 2026 Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA.