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I’m playing with this fantasy future where all the spaces you live will have wall texture and patterns built from data about YOU. Where ‘fantasy future’ are the operative words. This doesn’t actually work yet, and I have to bridge the gap using art-world science. And I think there is something magical and crucial that these patterns are physical….yes, generated digitally, but physical texture you can touch and know is real…not digital pixels.

So, I’ve begun to find my way to actually make laser cut pieces that can be WALL size. For regular people, laser cutters have size limitations that are  maybe 18 or 24 inches on the short side and only 32 or 48 inches on the long side. Here I stitched together GPS walking tracks, fitbit steps and cumulative data from a week walking around my neighborhood in Brooklyn. All gathered, and drawn…using a little magic with illustrator vector files and cut from Rives BFK printmaking paper on a laser cutter while I was at NYU ITP summer camp. I used a sewing machine to sew them together…this piece is about

While at NYU’s ITP camp this summer (it’s the graduate program for art+technology) am on a mission to investigate 3D printing.  Am convinced the walls in the spaces we live will be textured by our self-tracking data produced by 3D printers and laser cutters.  Physical patterned texture from digital data.

Have been imagining and fantasizing about how insightful data about ourselves….bio data, self-quantified, but also our physical movement and virtual movement through the online world will be reproduced easily and almost real-time. It’s a way to watch our unconscious behavior and understand ourselves. Because we both  don’t pay attention in the first place, and then forget.

Couple things so far that are quite interesting one of the other campers is producing clothes via 3D printing, yes you can order this bikini today.

And here is a thoughtful piece about how 3D printing is just the beginning of making digital technology in the physical world that learns to grow like biological organisms. Neri Oxman from MIT  media lab – likens the growth of 3D printing to the democratization of the printing press and moveable type. Totally right.

Random incoming email yesterday from James Showalter, who writes a thoughtful blog about evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and it’s force on culture. Barbaric Rage & Love Totally worth clicking, one of the best things he does is keep a list of books and articles, which I’ve never had the discipline to compile. Plus frequent updates and posts…at it about 6 months – hope he keeps it up.  Very cool.

Love it when you find people spending tons of personal energy toward something high-quality that pays absolutely no $$. Restores faith in human-kind. .

Here’s a little promo for him. Go take a look, and keep an eye out, he’s writing a novel.

Very soon, all the data about us will be easily and invisibly tracked via sensors in our clothes, and little patches we stick on our skin. But then WHAT? You’ve got to have a way to extrapolate, summarize, compare and deliver a quick portrait of how you’re doing and what it means. I think pattern is the answer.  And physical texture (hello 3D printers!) will be the way to produce little art objects quickly, easily, disposably.

This 12in x 12in has a moodjam chart, pointcare plot of heart rate variability, 8 nights of REM and deep sleep and daily upset stomach scores. Encoded in a language that you begin to read and understand.

I’ve been working for several years on the premise that eventually neuroscience will find a relationship between visual patterns you experience in the world and an innate or embedded neural pattern in your mind.  I have no desire to sound nutty.  But as an artist I get a little leeway here.   Researchers are describing their quest for mapping neural brain wiring….the connectome, much like mapping human DNA the human genome.  The belief is that eventually with computer assisted analysis and electron microscopes, the billions of neural connections…the wiring of the mind can be mapped.

If the recall of a memory is stored in a series of neural connections, then the pattern and location of synaptic spikes could be captured, decoded and replayed.  What if we eventually understand that the desire to see and anticipate patterns in the world….are not so different than the unique neural patterns in our mind.  Memory and the feel of memory is captured as pattern in time.  I think there is a relationship, and am excited to see the new images of Connectome mapping of the C. elegans (worm) and one neural muscle of a mouse.

Sebastian Seung’s TED talk is simple and easy to get…’I am my connectome’.  His MIT course syllabus has much more detail of Connectomics reading. And his recent book… Connectome: how the brain’s wiring makes us who we are is an easy read.

One of the best visual descriptions is this short 3D reconstruction (click to see the video here). 

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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.