DESIGN

Digital distances become data art

The biological patterns and rhythms of bodies are transformed into full-scale installations.
9 June, 2017
The anodized aluminium panels reach two stories high, in an intricate but seemingly inexplicable web of squares, lines, and angles, occasionally interrupted by a dense solid block.
There is an explanation, though, and the answer lies in data artist Laurie Frick's commitment to understand her walking patterns

Data artists like Frick often work within scientific disciplines like biochemistry or meteorology, taking the raw data and transforming it into meaningful patterns and a morphology one can see. That's what Julia Bontaine of the SciArt Center does, for example, with the complicated images of neurotransmitters.
Images: Laurie Frick
Other artists – Frick among them – are fascinated by tracking data, and the kinds of patterns you might see recorded on your FitBit or other monitoring device. Frick's work, called "Floating Data," joins together 60 separate aluminium panels in a single screen-like installation, but it also joins together all of the data points Frick recorded from GPS, thumb counters, hand-drawn maps and photos. The result of data collected over a long period of time is a beautiful mesh tapestry hung in aluminium.

The effect is to wonder what it would look like if one's daily routine was 3D-printed, layer upon layer and year after year, until it actually took a physical form that existed outside of your human memory.

"We go the same places, we repeat ourselves, and occasionally we visit someplace new," says Frick. "People think their movements are boring and they just make the same track from home to work, back and forth, over and over. And it turns out it's actually the repetition and density of travels with occasional outliers that make it visually interesting and memorable."
Images: Laurie Frick
Frick – a resident of both New York City and Austin, Texas – was so taken with the experience that she wanted to make it accessible to others. As a software entrepreneur with two decades' worth of IT know-how, she was well-positioned to develop and launch an app called FRICKbits that will take personal geolocation data and interpret it as abstract art, appearing in various display forms. One popular example is the colorful DNA-like strands woven together from one's crosstown travels.

The artist's other projects include a series called "Moodjam," which was based on the data she recorded on the online journal site dedicated to the feelings, outlook, and experiences that make up what we call "mood." She then took blocks of recycled alumalite-composite samples and created the mood data set.
Images: Laurie Frick
"Very soon walls and spaces we occupy will be filled with easy to decode patterns – a visual record of how we feel, stress level, mood, bio-function captured, digitally recorded and physically produced using 3D printers and lasercutters," Frick explained. She's also worked in wood, leather, and paper to create art that's based on her sleep cycle patterns as measured by EEG recording bands, or the patterns of her online meanderings recorded with software that tracks her site visits, screen touch, and key strokes.

With the sleep-cycle art, Frick took all of her sleep-cycle data and entered it into Excel spreadsheets, assigning it a numerical value and then color-coding the bands and displaying them. "I found it compelling because it's something a lot of people don't understand," she said. "There are weird myths about sleep." That's essentially the point with "Floating Data" and all of her projects, which seek to represent the data we want to explore within the evocative world of art and its many connections.
Banner image: Laurie Frick