Through my work I often seek to map unseen spaces and hidden connections, so after learning of the Quantified Self, a movement that incorporates technology to collect data on aspects of daily life, I became intrigued to find what I might discover from self-tracking. The vast quantities of information about us collected by the government, banks, health insurance companies, places we shop, and sites we visit on the internet has given rise to the existence of digital selves, data doppelgangers which we feel a certain amount of wariness about, because they aren’t totally within our control. The Quantified Self seeks to take ownership of personal data, and use it to understand behavior and mood, create or break habits, or optimize health and productivity. The act of paying attention to the tracks we make reveals connections and patterns in our lives of which we may not be aware, and allows us to better see where we are going by understanding where we have been.
The installation has three components: photographs that reveal aspects of my personal data collection, a networked grid of sensors in the ceiling that track the movement of visitors in the space, and a screen upon which the movement data from the sensors is visualized and displayed as both real-time and accumulated visitor presence.
To read more about the inspiration behind this project, click here.
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