Take back your data and turn it into art. Your data is now art on your iPhone, from artist Laurie Frick. You make the ultimate ‘data-selfie’. Don’t be a data victim, it’s your life, it’s your data...why not turn it into art?
Walk the dog, sit in traffic, drive to work...the data from your location and travel patterns are meaningful.
• Uses location data to abstract line and bits based on frequency of travel. It’s organized (like me) so things keep to a grid.
• Gathers occasional movements, a clever means to not impact battery life and show location with brightly colored dots on a pale map. Tiny grey dots show detailed locations.
• Earn small bits and clusters for the places you go all the time, like home and work. We modeled the look after a series of my human data watercolor portraits.
• Choose and change color at any time, and gather bits of more intense color for locations traveled most. Color palettes are made to feel like the light and color of your city...choose wisely.
• Zoom in and out, then flip back and forth between real map data and abstract art. The pattern paints and animates as you watch, all that movement over days and weeks is squished into just a couple seconds as you watch your pattern unfurl.
►► PRIVACY - your data belongs to you, we NEVER see it, or collect it. You gather data from the sensors on your phone and the app displays it on your phone. Your choice to share, tweet or post the art. Life makes beautiful patterns, it belongs to you.
Just watch, tracking data will become the consummate ‘data-selfie’, personal data portraits gathered over time on our phone.
►► Hidden patterns reveal something unusual about you
All the tiny measurements add up to a data portrait of you. Have you ever wondered what’s really known about you? Everything you post, every time you use a credit card, your phone log, search history, your location...mostly it’s a little creepy, and after we revoke a couple permissions for apps we don’t much care about, we try to forget about it. It feels hopeless. Usually when things are the darkest it’s exactly the time it starts to turn around. We’re at that moment right now, it’s not hopeless...take back your data and make it something good. Use technology to boost a little self-reflection. Not ugly graphs and charts...but genuine art.
Everyone has now been trained to look at maps, we used to hand-draw little diagrams for each other, and 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, we tend to travel the same places repeatedly, and occasionally venture outside our normal rhythms.
►► Data artist
I’m Laurie Frick, an artist who makes hand-built work from self-tracking data, and realized the rules and procedures I follow are really an algorithm to turn anyone’s data into abstract patterns of art. Two years ago, I set out to make an iPhone app…and long story short, I met thirteen23 and we made a trade. One of the most amazing mobile technology shops in Austin Texas got a full lobby installation based on their chat metadata, and I got the first iteration of FRICKbits iPhone app. Check out our amazing Kickstarter that helped us launch and work on the next update. Click to see video, pics from the studio, and lots more background.
Here you go. No catch, it’s free.