The tyranny of tiny tasks

I wasn't expecting much from the apple watch announcement, I wore a Basis watch for 9 months and have been wearing the much cuter Android Gear from Samsung. No surprise -- sensors, batterylife, tethered to a phone, what can you do on a watchface...problems are still a cobbled mess. But, I've been looking at all the reviews with great interest this week to see the blogosphere weigh in. And this is the most insightful Seth Feigerman citing Tim Wu in a Mashable article.

"It's the productivity side, I realized after a few hours of thinking, that makes me sweat. I recalled one paragraph in particular that writer Tim Wu published last month in The New Yorker discussing the downside of "convenience technology" like the smartphone:

Our technologies may have made us prosthetic gods, yet they have somehow failed to deliver on the central promise of free time. The problem is that, as every individual task becomes easier, we demand much more of both ourselves and others. Instead of fewer difficult tasks (writing several long letters) we are left with a larger volume of small tasks (writing hundreds of emails). We have become plagued by a tyranny of tiny tasks, individually simple but collectively oppressive. And, when every task in life is easy, there remains just one profession left: multitasking.

The "tyranny of tiny tasks," as Wu called it, may only get more tyrannical if the Apple Watch draws in more developers and users, pushing the smartwatch beyond the early adopter community. Computers shifted us from writing occasional time-consuming letters to writing a mounting number of emails. Smartphones allowed us to fire off an exponentially larger number of emails as well as quicker messages through other applications."

I'm still in the studio making new works built on 'time', the way we feel time, use time and place ourselves solidly in time. Something has shifted, and we're all feeling it.

Time is both squishy and stretchy

You know who you are by where you are in TIME. When you get knocked out, and come to….the first thing the doctor asks is “what is your name” …and “what day is it?” Who you are and where you are in time is vital to your grasp of consciousness, your sense of self.

Time is sequential, ordered and related to what comes just before or after. It’s the one thing we have that is pretty-much free and simultaneously valuable. Even though we don’t let ourselves think about it….time for each of us is finite. Do we agonize, procrastinate or consciously think about how we spend our time?

I’ve been reading tons of physics books about time lately, and I’ve begun to consider how abstract the notion of time can be. What really is it? We measure and remember time from the activities we do in time. But time is squishy and stretchy, some things are tedious, boring and go on forever, or time slips by without notice.

We make split-second decisions about what we do now, next and then after that…how we spend our time must be a reflection of our basic nature.

It’s become so easy to track your time, I turned Moment on my iphone and know how often I touch the screen and how many minutes I looked at my phone today. Manictime on my laptop tracks every click, every website and app I use. Some days it’s scary how many hours I spent online when I thought I was making stuff in the studio all day. Think of everything else that tracks your time.... your car knows how fast you pressed on the gas pedal and every minute you drove today. The MTA pass, the security swipe at work, your front door probably knows when you walked into your apartment.

Time is measured, and we are so close to knowing exactly how we spent every minute of it. and we are so close to knowing exactly how we spent every minute of it.

If we are what we do, will tracking time help me understand who I am?

Do you feel bad about how you spend your time?

I always thought how you spend your time was like women buying shoes... no matter what else is happening with how clothes fit your body at any moment, it's always fun to try on shoes. You feel good about shoes. I imagined people were like that about their time. I'm learning the answer is NO. After scrolling thru Amazon unlimited looking at hundreds and hundreds of books on time management, I asked a friend how there could possibly be so many books published on getting control of your time. And the friend blankly looked at me and said "because people feel bad about how they spend their time". Which is all very curious because I'm investigating the notion that YOU are your time, you are defined by how you spend your time, the activities and even unconscious use of time says loads about your psyche, your personality and your inner-self. Your sense of who you are is based on the recollection of recent events, and what you are doing and intend to do. It's your basic orientation in the world.

If you hit your head in a car accident, the very first question is "What day is it, can you tell me your name?". To be cognizant in the world is to know who you are in time. Are you connected and aware of time and place...etc, etc. It's so basic, we rarely even notice time. For the most part we have control over the many, many decisions for what we do and how time is used.

Yeah, yeah we have a job, go to work, return calls to clients, have deadlines. But even within what is believed to be a tightly constrained world, we make decisions about our time. All those little decisions add up to your life. Little bits make the whole.

I'm intensely curious about the unconscious spurts of time that drive the pattern or rhythm of time as you work online. As I write this, there are fast clicks as I spew out a fast phrase, and then pause as I decide how to make the second half of this sentence connect and make sense. Even as you click, click, pause, click as you read and delete emails, or flip thru research. How much do you read and how fast do you click a link. There is a rhythm to the clicks.

Manictime is a backgroud app that runs on my laptop to capture every click, every app, webpage, link...everything I do as I work. Have run it for almost 3 years and I know my time online has a rhythm. (Oh jeez, I just grabbed the manictime link and realized it's described in google as a 'time management' app, ugh...sorry.)

I know my mornings are a burst of clicks...and afternoons are slower, longer as I read things or work on longer things. Am right in the midst of working this out, and imagining the physicality of your time in textured pattern. Would you recognize yourself? Do you swing wildly, or have a repetitive pattern like hearing the chorus of the melody over and over and over? If you read this and have any ideas about how you see yourself in time -- message me (not here, I turned off comments on my blog ages ago...no need to explain.) I'm easy to find online.

FRICKbits is live!! It's free, no catch. Download it now.

Don't hesitate, hit the download now. It's going to take you a few days, weeks to really collect enough data to actually have it feel like art or anything resembling your patterns. Don't worry, I never see your data, everything all resides on your phone. If you are super curious, --go to my FRICKbits site, the privacy policy is on the front page.

It's taken years to get this first step. I almost can't believe it's live.

And this is just the beginning, I believe all that data and surveillance about you is meaningful. Perhaps the secret to figuring out who you are, rather than hide…I say grab it all. “Take back your data and turn it into art”. This app will get better, the algorithm will convey more and have more complexity. Just get started. !!

Holy crap... you did something great!

YOU made something impossible in the regular world ....possible. Reaching out to explain how it feels...you are changing the culture of art and innovation. Be proud. Kickstarter funded at 450% of goal with almost 700 backers. It's the beginning...take back your data!

FRICKbits? Where did this come from?

It looks a little obscure, but Jennifer Lepies  from Business Geomatics sent me a note last week saying "... I meant to write something about geo data connecting with art for a long time, your idea and the upcoming app FRICKbits seems to be perfect."

You describe yourself in your CV as a "data artist". You have a background in engineering and high-technology. How come you finally got hooked on art? Even so intense that you went back to school for it.

I was always a ‘Maker’, and for my whole life was always making things. Even when I worked in tech, I ran a computer hardware team that created and made new consumer products. My mother and sister were artists, it didn’t seem that odd to me. What I learned from art school is that you pull from your own experience, and my experience was the love of data and technology.

How did it happen that you got your first steps to the iphone app?

Mostly I make hand-built artwork from self-tracking data. After making a studio full of wall size patterns from weight, sleep, daily time, internet use, mood, walking and location data I could see we unconsciously have very eloquent rhythms. We recognize something human in these data patterns, and don’t know why it feels familiar. I thought “why can’t everyone have human data portraits of themselves?” Maybe the future is 3D printed textured wallpaper from our data…but in the meantime, how do we do this on an iPhone? We all carry a phone everywhere, maybe that is the best place to keep a data portrait with you at all times.

How does the program FRICKbits work? Which data sets are used for the portrait? And how do the color patterns evolve?

We imagined FRICKbits could produce pattern from an algorithm, a set of rules that draw colored pattern based on a set of measurements. I had made a series of hand constructed artworks that combined steps, GPS location, weather and scenery to make abstract collage, that were actually based on a bunch of measurements. We used this idea and simplified it, knowing we can add more complexity to the algorithm later on. FRICKbits uses GPS location data that we down-sample and abstract into line and bits based on frequency of travel. It’s organized so things keep to a grid. Color palettes are made to feel like the light and color of a city or place. You earn small bits and clusters for the places you go all the time, like home and work. It’s vector based, but we modeled the look after a series of my watercolor pattern portraits.

Before you started transforming location data /tracking data into art you gathered all other sorts of data like internet use, sleep or weight. What is - as an artist - so special and appealing about location/tracking data for you?

Everyone has now been trained to see maps from a google view, we used to hand-draw little diagrams for each other to find our house, or find our way to a party. Now we always see our travel path in perfect accurate scale. But -- that’s not how we remember it. We don’t recall or reconstruct our physical travels in linear time or with accurate coordinates. It’s a good metaphor for art. After tracking my location for years now, I could see we tend to travel the same places repeatedly, and occasionally venture outside our normal rhythms. The pattern of where you move in a city or travel is a very personal type of portrait, a GPS ‘location-selfie’.

Nowadays collecting data to use it for some reason is sort of a sore spot. Can you explain why you go with your FRICKbits app to that "wound"?

Right now, it hurts when people talk about the data surveillance of their personal habits. Lots of data is tracked about us and it’s hidden or simply not shared. As a data activist, it feels like we’ll get further if we don’t hide, but demand more. I love the things I learned from self-tracking. I say, go the other way, and push companies to share your data back with you. I bet people would be astonished with how much is known about them, and the patterns extrapolated and predictions made about them.

People look at me and ask “what would I possibly do with my data?” – “Turn it into art!” I say. It’s not so crazy, it’s another version of a data-selfie. How else will be begin to shift the equilibrium and have a chance as individuals to fight back, and have a say about the data collected on us?

FRICKbits is a project on kickstarter these days. The campaign still runs until September 7th. The pledge was 7,500 US-dollars and the people already contributed almost 3 times that amount. You're probably quite happy about that result?! How does it bring FRICKbits forward?

Yes, I was stunned. I think people are starting to realize they want their data to mean something, to take it back. We learned from our initial beta testing this month that users were captivated by their travel patterns, but it wasn't enough to see the art-patterns animated on the screen. Because it’s an app, they wanted to play with it, have a little more control to manipulate  their personally made data portrait. We’re scrambling to add some gesture controls, and then add a way to print out what you've created. I’m using the funds raised for more development to make FRICKbits work better. It’s really exciting.