Welcome To Maria Rogg's final seminar!

Title

Twists of the Smart Body: Biohacking as Existential Practice

Discussant

Professor in design Kristoffer Gansing, Linnaeus University
The text will be available for interested readers about a week before the seminar from Maria:
maria.rogg@mau.se

Abstract

In my dissertation project, I explore the fate and future meanings of the body in ‘the age of AI’.
Through a refunctioned ethnography and the interpretative framework of existential media
studies (EMS) in conversation with the new materialism, I investigate countercultural, arts-based
biohacking practices as existential practices that both disclose the ruling techno-logics regarding
the body and bodily mediation, and ways to question and re-interpret them. Theoretically my
contribution to EMS is a 'relational existentialism', which enables an emphasis on responsibility
in an entangled world. I demonstrate through empirical chapters that biohacking as existential
practices are both risky and opportune manifestations of possibilities of tending the body, in all
its vulnerability and potentiality as a relational subject. Thereby the biohacked body becomes a
prism for more responsible futures with AI.

That is based on a refunctioned para-ethnography predominantly pursued between 2021–2025
across Europe as well as online. The approach shifts traditional ethnography toward a
collaborative, dialogical intellectual partnership in which pre-existing analytical acumens of
epistemic communities and reflexive subjects are actively incorporated. The interlocutors involve
practitioners within the arts and design, including Mary Maggic; Giulia Tomasello; Idun Isdrake;
Theresa Tanenbaum, and; the collective BruiXes_Lab, who employ biohacking, in one or another
critical way, as their medium.

Combining online and hybrid interactions with qualitative interviews, field trips (within Sweden
and to Austria and Slovenia), and participatory observations at art performances (Vienna and
Ljubljana 2022, Stockholm 2024), the empirical material of the thesis contains transcriptions of
interviews and video demos; fieldnotes and voice memos produced during fieldwork,
photography and contextual, ethnographic data produced by the interlocutors and online. The
dissertation pursues a two-fold aim to illuminate the existential dimensions of biohacking
practices and the ethos found among arts-based biohackers; and, to explore how existential
perspectives on biohacking can contribute to current discussions of the relation between technology
and the body. I intend to achieve this aim by answering the following research questions: RQ 1: How
are the existential limits and potentials of advanced technologies articulated through biohacking?
RQ 2: How are the relations between the mediated and the existential body experienced, thwarted
and re-conditioned through arts-based biohacking? RQ 3: To what extent does arts-based biohacking
render and tender ethics?