Painting by Numbers
What can art made from massive amounts of facts and figures about our lives reveal about the human condition? JACOBA URIST | MAY 14, 2015 | 7:00 AM ET
It’s unlikely Claude Monet would have been Claude Monet without the portable paint tube, which
allowed him to work outside and experiment with capturing natural light. Andy Warhol wouldn’t have
been Andy Warhol without the modern movie star or the mass-produced Campbell’s soup can. Art is as
much a product of the
technologies available
to artists as it is of the
sociopolitical time it
was made in, and the
current world is no
exception. A growing
community of “data
artists”
is
creating
conceptual works using
information collected
by mobile apps, GPS
trackers, scientists, and
more. Data artists generally
fall into two groups:
those who work with
large
bodies
of
scientific data and
those
who
are
influenced by self- Making Tracks installation at Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT. 13 ft x 40 ft, wood, abet laminati
tracking. The Boston- countertop samples, paintpen numbers. 2012
based
artist Nathalie Miebach falls into the former category: She transforms weather patterns into complex sculptures and
musical scores. Similarly, David McCandless, who believes the world suffers from a “data glut,”
turns military spending budgets into simple, striking diagrams. On one level, the genre aims to translate
large amounts of information into some kind of aesthetic form. But a number of artists, scholars, and
curators also believe that working with this data isn’t just a matter of reducing human beings to
numbers, but also of achieving greater awareness of complex matters in a modern world.
Art confronts the uncertainty of human existence: Why am I alive? What makes me different from
anybody else? Handprints made some 40,000 years ago, are a common feature of Upper Paleolithic cave
art—a kind of prehistoric selfie. National Geographic describes the early artists as sending a timeless
message: “Like you, I am human. I am alive. I was here.” So it’s unsurprising that many data artists are
responding to an increasingly data-saturated culture. After all, almost every human interaction with
digital technology now generates a data point—each credit-card swipe, text, and Uber ride traces a
person’s movements throughout the day. The smartphone, as The Economist recently described, is a true
personal computer, the defining innovation of the era, on par with the mechanical clock or the
automobile in past centuries.
In turn, there’s been what the Pew Research Center calls a self-tracking explosion, whether it’s counting
the number of calories or using a mood app to glean patterns in one’s mental state. Like a fingerprint, no
two people have the same data set. A couple sharing a bed follow independent sleep cycles. Friends who
spend the day together count different steps; their phones connect to different IP addresses. But what’s
more remarkable is the idea that within all of these numbers lies a better way of understanding
ourselves. The information doesn’t just provide a broad document of a life lived in the early 21st century:
It can reveal something deeper and even more essential.
One data artist who
believes
this
is
Laurie Frick, who
splits
her
time
between Austin and
New York City. She
came
to
art
circuitously,
after
spending 20 years in
tech working for HP
and Compaq and cofounding a software
company.
Frick
believes that while
numbers
are
abstract
and
unapproachable,
human
beings
respond intuitively—
and emotionally—to
patterns.
Unlike
many
of
her
peers,Frick has no Floating Data, Walking Patterns, 2014.
assistants. She uses self-tracking
data to construct objects and large-scale installations, including
one called Floating Data that’s about two stories tall and made from 60 anodized aluminum panels that
represent her walking patterns. Frick used her own records, gathering steps on her Fitbit and combining
it with location data from the online program OpenPaths and her iPhone’s GPS. “I drew a little track that
tries to capture the experience of walking speed, and the feel of walking through a busy neighborhood
near my apartment in Brooklyn,” she explained.
In a series called Moodjam, Frick took thousands of Italian laminate countertop samples from a
recycling center and created a series of canvases and billboard-sized murals based on her temperament.
For weeks, she manually tracked her feelings, using the online diary Moodjam, which allows users to
express their emotions in color patterns. The smaller Moodjam pieces capture only a day’s worth of data,
Frick’s ups and downs over a
24-hour period. Larger ones
reflect weeks of journal keeping
and internal swings. For her
upcoming solo exhibition this
May, at New York’s Pavel
Zoubok Gallery, Frick has made
wood, leather, and paper
assemblages based on accounts
of her daily activities. In several
pieces,
she
used
apps
like ManicTime on her laptop
and Moment on her iPhone to
track each click and touch of her
screen for almost a month.
Frick is adamant that her work
is about more than simply
visualizing information—that it
serves as a metaphor for human
experience, and thus belongs
firmly in the art world.
The distinction between data
presentation and data art is Moodjam 1, 2012. Abet Laminati Italian countertop samples on alumalite panels.
often fuzzy, and the art world still struggles to separate the two. For example, MOMA’s recent show, Scenes for a New Heritage:
Contemporary Art from the Collection, included digital prints with images generated from ArcGIS
software. The work, Million Dollar Blocks, was designed at Columbia University’s Spatial Information
Design Lab and showcased a series of maps based on data from the criminal-justice system. According to
the project, of the more than two million incarcerated people in the U.S., a disproportionate number
come from a handful of neighborhoods in the largest cities. The maps are meant to pose ethical and
political questions about criminal justice reform, and they do that successfully. But Million Dollar
Blocksmay just be powerfully presented data, rather than conceptual art, which is where the artist’s
underlying idea is more important than the execution.
Similarly, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s current show, America is Hard To See, includes a 1971
piece by Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System.
The work comprises 146 photographs of Manhattan apartment buildings—mostly tenements—maps of
Harlem and the Lower East Side, as well as charts documenting the ownership structures of the
buildings. Haacke culled the data from public record, and the art, according to the Whitney’s label, is an
“institutional critique” that “chronicles the fraudulent activities of one of New York City’s largest
slumlords over the course of two decades.” Yet in a world of enhanced graphics, simply displaying data
effectively—with or without photography—won’t constitute compelling art on its own. Nor does every
important data pattern raise existential questions.
But by blurring the boundaries, conceptual
artists are helping scientists see their research
more creatively. The New York Times recently
chronicled Daniel Kohn, a Brooklyn-based
painter, who spent roughly a year at the Albert
Einstein School of Medicine teaching geneticists
ways to represent their digital data in more
intuitive ways. And while algorithms have
seeped into daily life—informing everything
from consumer music choices to dating
options—they’re also edging into conceptual art.
In March, the website Artsy held what it called
the world’s first Algorithm Auction, “celebrating
the art of code.” Works included Turtle
Geometry, an 11-inch stack of programming on
7 Stages of ALS, 2010. ALS is a disease that defies pattern
dot-matrix printer paper from 1969 made by
recognition: This work color-coded the cases of 264 patients at
Hal Abelson,
a
professor
of
electrical
the Neurology Clinic in Charlotte, N.C. by severity of symptoms. engineering and computer science at MIT. In
Cut 2x4 wood and pigment
fact, many data artists straddle art and science
as Leonardo da Vinci did. Curators and historians still disagree about how to classify him: great artist or
scientific genius? Or does the divide even matter?
Current tools make self-tracking more
efficient than ever, but data artists are
hardly the first to express themselves
through their daily activities—or to try to
find meaning within life’s monotony. The
Italian
Mannerist
painter
Jacopo
Pontormo kept records of his daily life from
January 1554 to October 1556. In it, he
detailed the amount of food he ate, the
weather, symptoms of illness, friends he
visited, even his bowel movements. In the
1970s, the Japanese conceptualist On
Kawara produced
his self-observation
series, I Got Up, I Went, and I Met(recently
shown at the Guggenheim), in which he
painstakingly records the rhythms of his
day. Kawara stamped postcards with the
time he awoke, traced his daily trips onto
photocopied maps, and listed the names of
people he encountered for nearly 12 years. Red Pokey Sleep, 2011. Nightly sleep data captured using a Zeo,
EEG sleep monitor. Color-coded by type of sleep. Watercolor and
ink on paper.
“Have you ever thought about how much is known about you?” Frick asked in one of our conversations.
Not what pops up in Google or on social media, she clarified, but what companies know about your
character. If you have a Kindle, Amazon knows how fast you finish a book, and whether you’re a cheater
and skip chapters or read the ending first. Netflix knows whether you’re a binge watcher. E-ZPass knows
where you go, even on local streets. Frick understands that this type of data collection can cause
discomfort. Few of us like the idea that the government or Google is watching our every move. As a data
artist, however, she sees her role as convincing people to want more personal data—regardless of who’s
tracking.
“In all of these patterns, I do think
there is an essential idea of who we
are,” Frick said. Data art can’t capture
the essence or totality of somebody—if
either exists—any more than a
handprint on a cave wall can. But she
believes personalized data art can
accomplish something traditional art
forms can’t: It allows a viewer to see
her nuances and idiosyncrasies in
higher resolution—and to discover
things she may have forgotten about
herself or perhaps has never known. “I
think people are at a point where they
are sick of worrying about who is or
isn’t tracking their data,” said Frick. “I
say, run toward the data. Take your
data back and turn it into something
meaningful.” To prove her point, she’s
developed a free app, Frickbits, which
allows anyone to “create the ultimate
data-selfie,” by turning personal data
into personalized art.
The American artist Hasan Elahi
turned to data in the wake of 9/11. A
Austin, Week 47, 2015. Three walking tracks in Austin, light and color to
year after the attacks, Elahi, an match the heat of central Texas. Cut found paper and handmade paper on
associate professor at the University of 9 panels, 2015.
Maryland, was detained at Detroit’s Metro Airport upon his return from the Netherlands. FBI agents suspected him of hoarding explosives in
a Florida locker, thanks to an erroneous “tip” called into law enforcement. Elahi was born in Bangladesh
and grew up in New York City, but is an extensive traveler. On average, he logs more than 100,000 miles
a year, speaking at conferences and displaying his art. After six months of FBI interrogations and nine
lie-detector tests, Elahi was finally cleared. But the experience transformed his relationship with
personal information and inspired him to create a website site Wired called “the perfect alibi.” As Elahi
puts it: When the Feds come after you, you can either resist or turn the tables.
At first, Elahi started calling the FBI every time he would travel to notify them of his itinerary and his
general whereabouts (during the investigation, they’d shared their contact info). Then, he began emailing
them. “I would just say, hey giving you a heads up, I’m going to be out of town tomorrow,” he described.
“Here are my plans. Here’s where I’m staying.” Soon, he began posting minute-by-minute photos of his
life—sometimes a hundred a day at TrackingTransience.net—unmade hotel beds, receipts, Starbucks
cups, toilets he’s used, the beauty of modern tedium. Elahi uses his iPhone’s GPS to sync his movements
to a live map, also on his site. In the past few years, he’s amassed hundreds of thousands of pictures and
data points. “It’s economics,” he said. Personal data conforms to supply-and-demand principles. So the
best way to protect privacy is to give away as much as possible and “flood the market,” so that the
government’s supply is worthless. People can also track themselves much more accurately than a third
party. “You have data?” he asked, “Well I’ve got data too. By putting everything out there, the
government’s data no longer means very much. I can tell them what I ate, where I slept, exactly what I
was doing on every day over the last decade.”
Elahi may be the first artist to track himself in a post-9/11 context, but he’s hardly the first conceptualist
to examine people’s unease with surveillance. During our interviews, Elahi pointed to Sophie Calle, who
has been called France’s most celebrated conceptual artist. In 1980, Calle met a stranger named "Henri
B." at a Paris gallery opening who mentioned he was soon leaving for Italy. Disguised in a blond wig,
Calle famously followed him to Venice—without either his knowledge or prior consent. Tracking him
throughout the city, Calle secretly documented Henri B.’s comings and goings from his hotel, as well
asreportedly sneaking into his room to photograph his possessions. Fans of Calle believe her work treads
a delicate balance between stalking and art. For her 1981 project The Shadow, Calle hired a private
investigator (through her mother) to follow and photograph Calle for a day. The pictures appear rather
mundane—a woman wandering the streets of Paris—and the detective’s notes are dry. In fact, Calle led
the man on a tour of places imbued with meaning for her, such as the park where she had her first kiss.
What appeared to be a set of trivial data points actually told an emotional and personal narrative about
Calle.
But even today, data art isn’t all Google Maps and iPhones—its practitioners embrace traditional
mediums too. One of the earliest examples of the genre is Danica Phelps. In July 2008, two months
before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, The New York Times wrote, “For the last decade, Danica
Phelps has chronicled her personal and financial lives with an exhaustive system of lists and charts
accompanied by diagrams of colored stripes.” Her ongoing project, titled Income’s Outcome, tracks the
money generated by each of her drawing’s sales. Every time somebody buys a piece from the series,
Phelps creates a new series of drawings, depicting what she bought with the money from the previous
transaction. The drawings reflect how consumption and debt are intricate parts of our personal identity.
Phelps has also painted every dollar in her bank account, as well as gray strips for every dollar she owes
her bank for her mortgage—627,000 grey lines. According to Phelps, Income’s Outcome is meant to
question how we assign value and meaning to the purchases we make. In light of the 2008 market crash,
the series is a critique of fairly banal activities—buying things and borrowing for a home—but both of
which cause anxiety and fear in modern life. Art critics have likened Phelps to On Kawara, as she also
documents the passage of time—but in this series she does so through money. “When I started showing
my work, I put the price right on the drawing,” she recalled. “In my first exhibition, there were pieces
ranging from $7 to $1600, based on how much I liked the drawing.”
There’s also the Danish artist Jeppe Hein, known for sculptures that frequently use mirrors in a gallery
or outdoor space to reflect its visitors. But for his most recent show, All We Need Is Inside, at Chelsea’s
303 gallery, he experimented with self-tracking and data art as way to reveal himself to the viewer.
In Breathing Watercolors, Hein’s breath guides his application of blue stripes painted directly onto a
large white wall. As the gallery’s press release explains, “The intensity of color, deep and vigorous at the
beginning of each stroke, gradually fades into a pale shade towards the bottom of each stripe, physically
recording the process of air gradually escaping from the body.”
Art is a constant march of expansion, according to Harvey Molotch, a professor of sociology and
metropolitan studies at New York University, whose research includes the sociology of art. Pop art
incorporated comic books and ordinary soup cans. Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting, The
Scream captured the anxiety and isolation of modern life. “Now there’s the digital self, the newest kid on
the block and so of course, artists are there,” he explained. “Art and environment are very much in
cahoots.” In 2007, the Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelley proposed a new movement. They called
it the Quantified Self and now count over 45,000 members on their website and hold “self-quantifier
meet-ups” around the globe.
For example, the Boston Quantified Self chapter describes itself as a “a regular show-and-tell for people
who are tracking data about their body and conducting their own personal investigations and research
into their bodies, minds, and selves.” “Datification” is a cultural process by which people put enormous
faith in data, explained Gina Neff, an associate professor of communication at the University of
Washington and the School of Public Policy at Central European University, as well as the co-author of
the forthcoming book The Quantified Self, with Dawn Nafus. “What we see in the ‘quantified self,’” Neff
explained, “is that people have taken up an N of 1, truly exploring what data means in their own personal
lives, or in the artist’s case, as a form of artistic expression.” The line between data and self, she believes,
is only where a person chooses to draw it.
Yet the question remains whether data art can endure as much as a simple, striking handprint on a cave
wall. On the one hand, data art may just be a link in a chain of artists who record and display their
personal movements— some of whom will be displayed at the world’s leading museums decades from
now, some who will fall by the wayside. On the other, data art may be the apogee of self-expression—a
digital fingerprint that says more about modern man, and the inevitable forward march of time, than
anything artists have been able to produce before.