blog and news

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.

I’m working on an art installation and series that looks toward the future – where our daily movement, our sleep, nutrition, heart rate variability, online productivity and mood are all passively captured and there is a subtly changing art-bio-wall in our house that plays back our pattern to us. It’s both soothing, beautiful and something like portraiture. Uses game dynamics to subtly nudge us toward patterns that we know correlate with feeling better. Wavelet coherence can capture the relationship of our data with who we live with (and in offices, might be the correlation of how a team is working together). Anyway….rather than digital, I think these are warmer and more appealing if handbuilt (maybe the Makerbot cupcake CNC of 2025 just spits out physical wall texture).

At the outset, I’m totally hand calibrating, and hand building….and will figure it out, somehow. I’m measuring more about myself….and realized after getting a bunch of sleep data from ZEO that everyone’s sleep patterns are very obviously individual….the overarching pattern is similar, but each has a distinct rhythm.

No, the image in this blog is not the pattern….but you get the idea.  I’m working with new materials, and sorting it out….

Wish I could file a patent on the algorithm, but will use copyright, and date time stamps to document where this is going. We’re prepping for an art talk on Sept 13, 2011 in New York with Hyperallergic.  Will bring the maquette, and slides….lots to discuss.

My friend Steve Dean who runs the NY meetup for Quantified Self, sent another friends wavelet coherence chart (will get his permission to use his name here) for Heart Rate Variability as measured during a yoga session with another person’s HRV during the same session.  The wavelet chart captures correlation of frequency over time….the blobby parts (circled) show when they started to synch up heart rate after about an hour. And btw, heart rate variability is a good one.  Worth knowing more about.  But for this post, I’m all over MatLabs Wavelet Coherence charts.

I’ve started measuring people….well actually, I’ve started measuring their hands.  Everything imaginable, and while certain measures are genuinely based in science (2D:4D digit ratio).  Some bits are the origins of English measurements and trace back eons of time, other hand measurements creep into the mystical and are downright wacky. Have been reading about fingerprints, and relationship to personality traits.

But….the basic plan is to use the hand measurements as a mechanism to measure the innate mathematical basis of the person — to capture the pattern that matches the proportions and patterns of their brain.  Am working to measure, reconfigure on the fly and send the resulting  pattern to their phone.  Headed to the ITP summer program at NYU this week to start working on this. Am imagining the patterns can live in the digital and also the physical world.

Saw this pattern from Derek Chan on the blog at the Feltron Report, and felt the glow of possiblity…he’s captures the proportions of the front page of the NY Times and reconfigures it using Processing.  It’s a good one.

Laurie Frick – Sleep Patterns from Steven Dean on Vimeo.

Piece by Brooke Gladstone, for On the Media on NPR, WNYC about self-trackers …was interviewed at the meet-up for the Quantified Self. I’m on at 2min30sec. Also Steve Dean and I are doing a workshop on Personal Data Visualization at the National conference in San Francisco May 28/29, 2011.

During the run of the gallery show at Edward Cella in Los Angeles, a frequent question that I never felt I was able to fully answer, was….. “How closely do your pieces match the data you’ve collected?”   The watercolor drawings were intense replicas of the sleep pattern and daily activity data collected….except for the problematic ones I cut up and rearranged.  The wood assemblage pieces worked from the data, and then I strayed a little, and came back to close attention, and then would stray a little.  Somehow it felt critical to capture the sense of when they’re made in addition to the plan for what they’re intended to be. I’ve always thought the feeling or emotion that you put into the piece can be felt later, and tried to make the work capture the feeling of when it’s made.

I read with huge interest article in today’s Science section (yes, my favorite part of the NY Times)…the article “To tug at the heartstrings, music first must tickle the neurons”.

In conversation with a number of musicians, Pam Bellock quotes Rosanne Cash….”Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections…bending notes in a certain way, and holding a note a little longer.”

Geoff Emerick, a recording engineer for the Beatles said “Often when we were recording, some of those Beatles rhythm tracks, there might be an error incorporated, and you would say…That error sounds rather good…and we would actually elaborate on that.  When everything is perfectly in time, the ear or the mind tends to ignore it, much like a clock ticking in your bedroom — after awhile you don’t hear it.”

The article explains elaborate experiments)  of Daniel Levitin (great writer and researcher….’ see his earlier book “This is your brain on music”) which have recorded music and slightly shifted the rhythm mechanically and tested listener responses….and none convey the emotion or produce the delight of the original with small human imperfections.

They described exactly what I was trying to do.

“Every day I’m a slightly different person,” Yo-Yo Ma said. “The instrument which is sensitive to weather and humidity changes, will act differently. There’s nothing worse than playing a really great concert and the next day saying, ‘I’m going to do exactly the same thing,’  It always falls flat.”

p.s. pic of neurons above.  Still believe the nature of compelling visual rhythm is the relationship to your brain’s neurons…spaces, proportions, rate of synapse firing and the rhythm of mathematical pattern which connect the different types of memory.  More soon.

Deep, Awake, Dreaming 67-66, 2011 | Ink and watercolor, 12.75 in x 10 in

Have read science magazines for years, and love the odd esoteric and sometimes random bits of news.  New Scientist writer Jonathan Keats just wrote a review in the Mar 19 magazine, and they just posted it on their blog….so it’s easy to click and read (with registering or buying a subscription….which is still a good idea).

Click and read it here – New Scientist, Mar 19, 2011 “Laurie Frick: Rhythms of life data replayed in art”

………………………………

………………………………..

…………………………………

…………………………………..

………………………………….

……………………………………