Form, Content, Data, Bodies: Jonathan Zong and Beth Semel on Biometric Sans

The dominant discourse surrounding digital psy technologies such as MindStrong, a teletherapy app designed to detect mental health changes by monitoring changes in typing speed “down to the millisecond”, is that they uncover interior states by gathering psychologically rich data that was always there. But as the Tracking Digital Psy series editors outline in their call for contributors, and subsequent pieces have underscored, digital psy technologies do not merely reveal. Rather, they are key points in a socio-technical assemblage geared toward the making of scientific facts about mental illness, the brain, and the body.

To learn more about the contingency of digital psy—and the labor, ideologies, and moral frameworks that shape its production—series co-editor Beth Semel had a conversation with visual artist and critical computing scholar-practitioner Jonathan Zong. Jonathan created Biometric Sans, an experimental typography system which elongates letterforms in response to an individual’s typing speed. The work is inspired by the practice of keystroke biometrics, the idea that individuals are uniquely identifiable by the way that they type.

In this interview, Beth and Jonathan discuss Biometric Sans as an artifact for disentangling the tensions between care and control that undergird digital psy projects. They explore the possibility of combining art and computation to open up space for contingency, embodied knowledge, and exploring speculation as a mode of intervention.