How many things can you work on simultaneously?

I saw a friend in New York a few weeks back who explained his epiphany that you can work on several serious projects simultaneously. This notion that you give yourself 110% to one single thing is hogwash. If you focus and give the right amount, you can successfully deliver several things at once.

I've been repeating this inside my head as I work to launch FRICKbits, get the feedback from beta testers, prep a kickstarter campaign, finish works for my LA dealer to take to the Houston Contemporary artfair, take on a new consulting assignment for a major (seriously huge) mobile phone manufacturer who thinks art from data is cool.

Here is one of four works I'm prepping for the artfair in Houston.

Floating Data piece during installation

Last week, I flew to SF with great nervousness....I'd worked for months on a piece fabricated by Neal Feay Company in California for a 2-story indoor installation of 60 panels in anodized aluminum. 25 ft x 15 ft piece, going into a Big-Data company in San Francisco - new construction on Howard and 1st St. And because I'm pretty excited that it all worked, I'm posting pics here of the construction site. We were scheduled to install during the last week before they handed the building over to the new owners, and we were using a big elaborate scaffolding to get to the ceiling 25 feet above. These are iphone pics...I'll take the gorgeous shots next month.

Art from data slides, and why my motto is don't hide...get more

This is the link to slides for my talk at ITP summer camp at NYU (5mb pdf). Frick_art_from_data_v2

At this moment, data gathering and surveillance feels like it's at the bleakest point. No place to hide and we individuals have no power in this big-data conversation. If we press companies to be socially responsible...to share the data they collect with us for DATA transparency, we can cause a slow shift of power to the user and shift the equilibrium. Resulting in an ecosystem of apps, that we as users can play with....for example, abstract art and textured wall patterns from our data. Your hidden patterns and data have meaning, and can be the core of understanding who we are. Apps like FRICKbits will start to give artful insight to data about us that we normally ignore.

In the meantime, start tracking yourself and notice what it might say about you. "Don't hide, get more".

"Don't hide....get more" my motto for the new data transparency

Fear of surveillance is high, but what if societies with the most openness develop faster culturally, creatively and technically?

Open-privacy turns out to be an incredibly loaded term, something closer to data transparency seems to create less consternation.  "What if?" ...in the future we had access to all the data collected about us, and sharing that data willingly was the norm?

Would that level of transparency gain an advantage for that society or that country? What would it take to get to there? For me personally, I want access to ALL the data gathered about me, and would be willing to share lots of it….especially to enable new apps, new insights, new research, new ideas.

At the International Quantified-Self conference last month in Amsterdam, with an international group of about 21 progressive self-trackers and folks super tuned-in to the quantified-self I was curious to hear how this conversation would go. In the US, data privacy always gets hung-up on the paranoia for denial of health-care coverage, and with a heavy EU group all covered with socialized-medicine, would the health issue fall away?

Turns out in our discussion, health coverage was barely mentioned…but paranoia over ‘big-brother’ remained. The shift seemed to focus the fear toward not-to-be-trusted corporations instead of government or health agencies. The conversation was about 18 against and 3 for transparency. An attorney from Denmark suggested that the only way to manage that amount of personal data was to open everything, and simply enforce or penalize misuse. All the schemes for authorizing use of data one-at-a-time are non-starters.

“Wasn’t it time for fear of privacy to flip?” I asked everyone, and recalled the famous Warren Buffet line “…be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful”. It’s just about to tip the other way, I suggested. Some very progressive scientists like John Wilbanks at the non-profit Sage Bionetworks are activists for open sharing of health data for research. Respected researchers like Danah Boyd, and the smartest folks at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard are pushing on this topic, and the Futures Company consultancy writes “it’s time to rebalance the one-sided handshake” and describes the risk of hardening of public attitudes as a result of the imbalance.

Once you start listing the types of personal data that are realistically gathered and known about each of us TODAY, the topic of open transparency gets very tricky.

• Time online
• Online clicks, search
• Physical location, where have you been
• Money spent on anything, anywhere
• Credit history
• Net-worth
• Do you exercise
• What you eat
• Sex partners
• Bio markers, biometrics
• Health history
• DNA
• School grades/IQ
• Driving patterns, citations
• Criminal behavior

For those at the fore-front of open-privacy and data transparency it’s better to frame it as a social construct rather than a ‘right’. It’s not something that can be legislated, but rather an exchange between people and organizations with agreed upon rules. It’s also not the raw data that’s valuable – but the analysis of patterns of human data.

I’m imagining one country or society will lead the way, and it will be evident that an ecosystem of researchers and apps can innovate given access to pools of cheap data. I don’t expect this research will lessen the value to the big-corporate data gatherers, and companies will continue to invest. A place to start is to have individuals the right to access, download, view, correct and update data about themselves. Seems a much more healthy way of actually knowing what is gathered about you, and for those of us who care taking some ownership of it. Many have ridiculed the recent EU rule to cause Google to delete links, seems a very literal and simplistic approach. Couldn't you envision the google algorithm operating more like actual memory, where distant experiences begin to fade from the front page of your recollection.

Am sticking with my motto “don’t hide, get more”.

The beginning of collecting personal data

Almost four years ago I started collecting data. It began with daily timekeeping. Everywhere you looked, on the subway, sitting in restaurants, even walking down the street, we had become obsessed with constantly checking our phones. Described by the writer, Linda Stone as ‘continuous partial attention’ it felt like something had shifted in our daily routine, time felt more sliced and fragmented than ever. This deserved some study, and the best way to understand something is to measure it.

But keeping track of time, minute-by-minute is even harder than it sounds. After several amateurish attempts I googled methods to track daily time, and found Ben Lipkowitz. He had not only had been logging his time since 2005, he generously and fastidiously shared all of online at www.fennetic.net. Go take a look, it’s all still there. He stopped recording at the beginning of 2011, but the html files and graphics of page upon page of detailed time logs 24 hours a day for more than 5 years are all documented, annotated and available online. Rather than be totally intimidated by Ben Lipkowitz’s prodigious talent and relentless recordkeeping, I instantly snagged and downloaded all of his data and combed thru it for patterns. My theory that the rhythms of daily time are familiar and visually appealing held true.

Undeterred by the difficulty of tracking how you spend your time, I decided to focus on data gathering using gadgets that do all the work for you. Forget manual recording. Sensors would only get smaller, cheaper and more invisible over time. Maybe I could try to live just a little bit in the future and use myself as a test subject using sensors and devices that did the data collection with no effort on my part. And voila! My very next purchase in early 2010 was a Zeo sleep tracker. It was brilliant, all I had to do was strap the headband on and fall asleep. In the morning, I had minute by minute record of deep, REM, light and awake sleep states using a finely calibrated dry EEG sensor.

Sleep had always been described as 90 minute cycles, and I imagined sleep as big blocks of uninterrupted time. Turns out sleep is similar to waking hours, there is a definite pattern, with much more activity than you’d imagine. It’s ragged with shorter 5, 10, 15 minute bursts of deep sleep and REM sleep than I thought. I wake up a lot. My brain is pretty busy at night, evidently sleep rhythms are not so different than waking rhythms.

Don't hide....go get more (data about yourself)

Talk from Creative Mornings, Austin March 28, 2014. 20 mins. Video by Paul Raila (nice work Paul!)