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Installing the show at Edward Cella in Los Angeles this week. In addition to the 4 collage pieces in the show based on self-tracking data — I built a 12 ft by 12 ft wall ‘Moodjam’ based on tracking your mood in color. Made from 5000 Abet Laminati, italian countertop samples I found at the recycle center (and after I ran out the president of this company kindly sent me more). Based on the premise that not so far in the future a combination of facial recognition, GSR (galvanic skin response) and HRV (heart rate variability) will be able to automatically capture and assess your stress, nervousness, and general mood. I manually track my mood most every day at my friend Ian Li’s site www.moodjam.com . Try it, it’s more accurate than you’d imagine.

Show opens on Saturday Feb 11. If you’re anywhere in Los Angeles before end of March 2012, totally worth a visit. Edward Cella on Wilshire, directly across from LACMA. Tim Hawkinson (loooooong time favorite artist) and Lynn Aldrich, amazing sculpture are the 3 artist exhibiting in this show. ‘Death and Life of an Object”.

I’m convinced the way we unconsciously slice our time reflects the underlying structure of our mind. I began self-tracking as a way to measure and then reverse engineer the unique pattern of ourselves. I believe there is something comforting and compelling about human metrics and realized I was not alone. Many, many people measure something about themselves every day.

Have been thinking about a high-tech future where everything can be easily captured and significantly added to my daily measurement in order to build a patterned language for self-tracking. What if walls could eventually produce ambient patterns of how we’re doing, where we subtly adjust behavior in response to those measurements? The installation at Women & their Work is an experiment to test out this idea. I’ll also talk about a ton of ways to use current gadgets to measure yourself, and how it all makes its way into my art practice.

Photo credit.  Image of me above is from Leon Alesi’s Personal Space project.  See more of them here. Great work.

Mike Lee from KUT in Austin recorded and cut a short radio story about the Quantify-Me show.  You can listen here.

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Laser cut drawing of upset stomach 22" x 30" | Laurie Frick

Have been working hard on the concept of a unique patterned language for self-tracking. There has to be a metaphorical language that translates primal patterns of ourselves. Something far from data visualization or graphical output of data.

I think the way to come at this is to find a more instinctual approach to numerical cognition. Read about the Amazon tribe that can only count to five – we learn linear representation of numbers from using rulers, tape measures and simple arithmetic….turns out our brains can accurately recognize one, two, three and then it gets fuzzy.  Large numbers are totally abstract in our heads, a million, a billion…how many trillion was the (fill-in the blank) war/bailout/deficit?

Young kids estimate numbers on something closer to a logarithmic scale, small quantities are far apart, and then large numbers squish together as they get larger.  Just read ‘Number Sense: how the mind creates mathematics-updated’ by S. Dehaene – he is THE GUY for numerical cognition.  And Alex Bellos “Here’s looking at Euclid’ – interesting, easy ….reads like a Malcolm Gladwell book.

We humans look for patterns, like puzzles, have an intuition for simple arithmetic – there has to be a more intuitive way to convey personal tracking data about ourselves than the line charts and graphs that the gadget companies serve up. Tweet  

Totally heads-down at the Headlands….

Have decided the way you figure something out is to take a stab at the idea, and then experiment.  Isn’t that what scientists do?  Hypothesis and then scientific method to test and compare results.  Then test again and compare.  I can’t be sure what the pattern for self-tracking feels like until I just make more, and then more of them.

I’m in the midst of installing a huge room studio size piece at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito (more on this later, this place is fabulous).

With little distraction at night, have been pouring through books.  Loved this one, ‘Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious” – which questions the notion of the other self, the one who controls our actions beneath conscious thought.  Maybe self-tracking is a way to measure and watch the behavior of that other self.  Philosophically, what if we’re almost entirely controlled by our primal-subconscious …. the one that drives home without remembering anything.

The other books have been about non-western mathematics.  Stay tuned.

or click on this link HERE to view it full screen on your machine.  All the links work, click freely.

All the good stuff happens while you sleep.  If you’re sick, you heal. You build procedural memory, grow taller, resolve conflict, reorder and organize long-term memory.  I’ve been measuring my nightly sleep using an EEG headband for over a year, and there is a definite pattern to the brainwaves, with much more activity than you’d imagine.  It’s ragged with shorter bursts of deep sleep and REM sleep than I thought.  I wake up a lot. It’s weirdly comforting and reaffirming to receive a sleep score everyday.  This morning I got a 73, for me it’s about a B+.

After building a body of work on sleep patterns and daily activity charts and showing it in Los Angeles. I’ve begun to think about a future where everything can be passively measured.  What if walls could produce ambient patterns of how we’re doing, where we subtly adjust behavior in response to those measurements. So, feeling good about quantifying-me, a few months ago I significantly added to the daily regimen. And now measure my weight, how many steps I take, mileage, calories burned, heart rate variability, pulse, my color mood, daily micro-journal of an upset stomach, my tweets, movement of my computer mouse, all web browsing, everything on my laptop, phone data, webstats, my DNA from 23andMe….and realize it’s almost bottomless.

All these self-tracking systems have scores, numbers and infographics….but none seem to match how these activities feel or capture the sensibility of what’s measured.  Believing in a connection between visual pattern and brain rhythm, I’ve set out to map a language to convey self-quantifying metrics.  Numbers are abstract concepts, but our brains recognize pattern intuitively, I’m working on the vocabulary and grammar of pattern for self-tracking that’s more visceral and direct.  It’s work in progress, and harder than it sounds.