Art610 Project Ideas

This semester I think that I will focus on exploring a single "idea" in two different ways. I have been collecting receipts for all purchases that I have made for the last three years and several months.

Here are some questions that I am interested that I may be able to address with my receipts

• Make tangible the amount and nature of data that can be collected just as a side-effect of living our lives in our commerce-centric culture.


• What "story" can people construct about a person based upon reviewing their purchasing data.


• Can purchase data be predictive of a person's behavior (where they'll be, when, what they'll do, etc.) If so, what questions does this raise about personal safety, the loss of anonymity in our culture, etc.


• What does "permanent" nature of record keeping mean for individual privacy?


• What does the public and long-term nature of some data mean in the context of mistake-making and redemption?


• Given impermanent and imperfect nature of paper record-keeping and the long-term nature of digital records, how does an individual defend themselves when challenged by entities like the IRS?

Possible projects

• Map the actual locations of purchases (differentiate between virtual purchase and "brick and mortar" ones. Use Google Earth or some other technology to move through space following the "path" of the purchases. How can we reconstruct the movement of a person through space and time based solely on purchase data.


• Feed purchase data into some kind of generative program to create graphics based upon it


• Create a locative media experience that "reveals" purchase behaviors as we pass by vendors. E.g., Name names, list purchases, etc.


• Contrast the receipts themselves as physical artifacts to their contemporary digital equivalents (impermanence of information, single-point of access, versus virtual access from anywhere)


• Qualify and quantify receipt data and find mappings between data perhaps using network mapping technologies. What patterns evolve in terms of nature of purchases, items purchased, locations, dates and/or times purchased. How can this data be represented to let someone discover who the "purchaser" is.

Preliminary Art610 Research proposal

I'm interested in learning more about how data is "mapped" in space and how data that doesn't have an inherent link to a physical place still may be mapped either in relationship to other data or in relationship to some objective external measure. In at least one of my projects I will be using a literal interpretation of mapping data by plotting purchase locations on a map. But I'm also interested in mapping relationships among the data themselves.

I want to explore three aspects of how researchers, scientists and artists represent data relationships visually. The first, is mapping of data so that data users can navigate among related information -- that is, they can find "neighborhoods" of related data and move within them, between them, etc. This is data mapping as a navigational aid. It's allows a stream-of-conscious movement through data following a path that is meaningful to the data user, perhaps revealing new ideas that have some relevance to them given where they are coming from (both literally and subjectively).

Second, I am really fascinated with how people derive "meaning" from data. In particular, I would like to understand better the ideas of Edward Tufte about visualizing data and learn both about other like-minded researchers as well as their detractors.

And finally, I am interested in what can be done artistically using data that has been mapped or quantified in some way that it can feed into some kind of generative system to create art that reveals the patterns or character of the data rather than the meaning of it.

For example, pieces by George LeGrady use commuter patterns to generate graphics that reveal nothing about the underlying data other than mirroring the frequencies of commuters through waveforms represented on pieces mounted in LA Subway entrances. Other pieces, like those commissioned by the new Seattle Public Library, tell a story about the movement of materials from the library out in to the public. What subjects, titles, topics are being checked out? How many people have borrowed books? How do those texts map to standard Dewey Labeling systems? All of these are represented graphically in such a way as to convey something about the borrowing public.