Beginnings of the 'Quantify-me' installation at the Headlands

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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.

Quantifying-me: what if the the walls produced ambient patterns of how I'm doing?

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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.

 

Use the blog to document an idea..... the bio-art-wall

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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.

Wavelet coherence - nice tools for visualizing patterns

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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.