Slides for the art-talk!

The work pulls from my background in engineering and high-technology to explore science, human pattern and self-tracking.

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. Big data about me is meaningless if it can’t give me a picture that is compelling and something I want to see.

Combine personal data with a mix of complex environmental data to produce visual patterns of individual human behaviour – a human fingerprint in patterns that are beautiful and recognizable. Notice shifts and deviation in routine. A rules-based algorithm to represent human patterns of time, stress, movement, mood gathered from a range of sensors embedded in the phone and on the body (fitbit, zeo, manic-time, open-paths, and more). Rather than infographics, the output patterns are understandable and feel like art, built from libraries of hand-drawn objects.

Numbers are abstract concepts but we recognize pattern intuitively. I’m experimenting with wall size patterns that anticipate the condition of our daily-selves. What if the walls and spaces we occupied were filled with easy to decode patterns -- a visual record of how we're doing. Reinforcing, maybe anticipating, but definitely responding to all the data collected about you.

Textured, patterned spaces that are subtle, updated, recycled in physical form.... data meets hand-built art using technologies of laser cutting and 3D printing.

I’ve been thinking about a future where everything can be instantly measured and significantly added to my daily regimen to test a patterned vocabulary and grammar for self-tracking. Steps walked, calories expended, weight, sleep, time-online, GPS tracks, daily mood as color, food ingested are all part of my daily tracking -- simple and easy to collect using gadgets that point toward a time where complete self-surveillance is the norm.

What I know so far is that a daily habit of measuring and tracking adds weight and a sense of being in the world. And I believe the old-adage ‘you can’t change that which you don’t measure’.

I don’t think self-tracking is OCD, or sinister, or eliminates the mystery of life. Soon, tracking sensors will be invisibly embedded in how we live, the data will be OURS, and we’ll look back and can’t believe there was a time when our genome and DNA wasn't used as our base-line for everything we ingest.

I’m convinced the way we unconsciously slice our time, waking and sleeping reflects the underlying structure of our mind. Capturing time-based activities is a way to reverse-engineer subtle underlying brain rhythms. Each work and installation I make is an experiment to find the exact resonant rhythm which tracks the underlying spaces and neural patterns of our mind. Not a total fantasy, this follows from an emerging theory in neuroscience.

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 all long-term memory. Recently I’ve learned you dream in all stages, not just REM sleep. I’ve been measuring my nightly sleep using a ZEO eeg headband for almost 3 years and have in excess of 800 nights of sleep data. 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. My brain is pretty busy during sleep -- clearly, sleep rhythms are not so different than waking rhythms.