Digital Shackles examines the subtle violence of self-tracking in the digital age — how we have learned to monitor, measure, and discipline ourselves through technology.
I am fully aware of how this constant monitoring feeds my anxiety and obsessive tendencies, yet removing the device triggers a loss of safety and control. This contradiction — between data-driven security and emotional confinement — is where the work begins.
The project is informed by Michel Foucault’s theory of the docile body in Discipline and Punish (1975), where power becomes internalized — the subject both watches and punishes itself. In the context of today’s health apps, digital rings, and smart earbuds that can now monitor heart rate, the panopticon has become intimate, wearable, even comforting. Do we really need so many devices to measure our hearts?
Digital Shackles also draws on Kate Crawford’s idea of AI as “embodied and ecological” — a system made of natural resources, human labor, and energy. The work links the inner economy of self-tracking with the outer material networks that sustain it, revealing how our pursuit of optimization mirrors the extractive logic of the digital world.
