By Julie Funk, XDM MA Graduate.
Pace-Taker is a bio-art and digital media art project that challenges the user to recognize their own feelings of anxiety through interaction with digital technology. Borrowing the notion of “pleasing anxiety” from Soren Kierkegaard’s ontotheological work, The Concept of Anxiety, Pace-Taker aims to create an experience of mindful anxiety by emphasizing the disconnect between the user’s material physicality and the virtuality of digital technology.
Pace-Taker valourizes the corporeality of the user as it asks the viewer to become aware of the somatic responses to these digital anxieties. Centering the biological heart as a metaphor for the human, this project creates various environments of anxiety as the user defines and redefines their somatic relation to digital technology, challenging them to consider this anxiety as “pleasing” or mindful, and urging the user to consider these technologies through more esoteric and speculative conceptions.