First you make, make, make....then you talk, talk, talk.

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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.

How do we ....really count and translate numbers?

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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.