I’ve been challenging myself to do something beyond helping curate speakers and organizing Quantified Self Amsterdam together with Maarten and Joost, which results in a new talk each time. Presented were the results and ruminations on and off topic around memory, more specifically, from 2 months of field research, spending every Tuesday evening with my mate Bas. This led to the insight in applying a software development methodology, version control systems, to the Self.

Programmers are raised these days on geek tools like Github to make sure they can work together without destroying each others work for each new software release cycle. After a release or new version occurs, new functionalities and code ideas recommence. This is done via a system of ‘branches’ connected to a main ‘trunk’ of code. Each new version selectively incorporates code ‘commits’ from these branches back into the trunk which are then released in a new code version. My point was in wandering what we get if we exchange code for our most personal memories and software versioning switched for rites-of- passage, key events, turning points in how we decide who we are. Each age transposes its current orientating metaphors on the sedimentation of human knowledge. What will ‘the network’ and ‘computation’ do to our sense of Self and how we look at our history? What impact will it have on our identity formation process?

Check out the other speakers from our recent event held at Mediamatic.