Pseudorandom: generative animation as performance in Emergent (2020–2022)

ABSTRACT The body is the database of lived experience. Emergent was created during COVID-19 from the desire to explore the extended possibilities of digital performance beyond lens-based media. The work includes generative animations and sound compositions using data collected from a consumer fitness tracker worn since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As a portrait of experience through the data body (as both body of data and body producing data), Emergent engages with the memories of the flesh, becoming the impetus for aesthetic encounters through digital performance. In this article about the work, Putnam describes how it was produced, provides a detailed overview of the work and its theoretical context, and discusses how it functions as a digital performance between the artist and computer. The result is a work where data visualisation and sonification generates ambiguity, rather than clarity, introducing difference in how biometric sensing devices are used and understood.