Humanity Measures Itself:
The Archive of the Lost Embodied Knowledge
Haya Sheffer
The Archive of the Lost Embodied Knowledge is a practice-led art project dealing with the opportunities individuals and humanity are losing by handing our mental skills to technology. Experiencing the rapid technological revolution of our era, which is too quick to analyse and digest, we try to navigate the chaos and messiness of life. We appeal to the help of various self-tracking techniques, some of which we are unaware of. By gathering amounts of personal data, we seek to organise and give meaning to daily existence, letting applications mediate our life, body, and mind to ourselves. My research asks whether we lose something, whether we
are giving up the deepness and richness of the complexity of life by reducing it to limited technological options provided by technology.
Inspired by the famous dictum attributed to African scholar Amadou Hampâté Bâ: “When an African elder dies, it is as if a whole library is burnt down”, meaning that the loss of knowledge and experience is a loss of opportunities, I created a preserving collection of bodily knowledge, a pearl of wisdom we all have that does not require technology to mediate understanding of our own self. This project aims to create awareness of our mental skills eroding and fading under the shining light of data.
are giving up the deepness and richness of the complexity of life by reducing it to limited technological options provided by technology.
Inspired by the famous dictum attributed to African scholar Amadou Hampâté Bâ: “When an African elder dies, it is as if a whole library is burnt down”, meaning that the loss of knowledge and experience is a loss of opportunities, I created a preserving collection of bodily knowledge, a pearl of wisdom we all have that does not require technology to mediate understanding of our own self. This project aims to create awareness of our mental skills eroding and fading under the shining light of data.
