“Black Body Radiation: Rescripting Data Bodies” is a collaborative art project by Ameera Kawash and Ama BE. It reimagines the relationship between embodiment and datafication by weaving together live performance, AI-generated avatars, and body sensor networks to challenge dominant configurations of identity and data. Drawing from West African traditions and the concept of avatars, the project explores how integrating live performance and digital art can transform the relationship between data, self, and commodification.
The project received an award of disctinction for STARTS Prize Africa and was showcased in Ars Electronica in September 2024.
This collaborative project rethinks the relationship between data and embodiment, explor-ing new ways of documenting and funding performance artworks. Ama BE’s performance explores tobacco as a material, ritual, and form of value. Ameera Kawash designed a framework for capturing performer metrics and created AI-generated avatars that respond to the performance. Ama BE wears sensors that track heart rate, body temperature, and blood oxygen levels. This data interacts with blockchain architectures, generating avatars that respond to her breath, exertion, and performance duration.
The project challenges data colonialism and digital practices based on exploitative relationships between data and self. The choreography and the avatars, as extensions of the self yet also empty of the self, serve as mediums through which ritual and embodiment can be expressed and reimagined digitally.
The choreography uses tobacco as both a commodity and a sacred material, with ceremonial costuming inspired by West African masquerades like Zangbeto. The digital architecture and art rescript data bodies as agential forces arising from the physical expressions of the performance.
