Interfaces of Illegibility : Poetic computation as an alternative femtech paradigm

Sammanfattning

Self-tracking frames the female body as a resource to be optimised, promising legibility through wearable technologies. Yet these systems operate through significant technical ambiguity. For women, this ambiguity is compounded by datasets that are only beginning to address a longstanding gender data gap, leaving women measured through systems not originally designed for them.The result is a quiet erosion of interoception as an app’s ‘readiness score’ feels more trustworthy than one’s own internal state. Grounded in poetic computation, this thesis treats ambiguity not as a flaw but as a productive condition. It uses illegibility deliberately to return interpretive authority to the individual, rather than deepen her dependence on the system.The outcome is a family of two objects: Umbra, a health data display that renders biosignals as evolving glyphs, and Sibyl, a satellite object that offers questions instead of answers. Together, they propose a practice of self-cryptography for attunement.