The Art of Self Tracking

Join us for a conversation with artist Laurie Frick. Frick will give a visual presentation and then we’ll have an open discussion about self tracking and the work on view in the exhibition “Quantify Me.”

Laurie Frick’s statement makes her passion for self tracking and art making clear.

“I’m convinced the way we unconsciously slice our time reflects the underlying structure of our mind. I began self-tracking as a way to measure and then reverse engineer the unique pattern of ourselves. I believe there is something comforting and compelling about human metrics and realized I was not alone. Many, many people measure something about themselves every day.”

“I’ve been thinking about a high-tech future where everything can be easily captured and significantly added to my daily measurement in order to build a patterned language for self-tracking. What if walls could eventually produce ambient patterns of how we’re doing, where we subtly adjust behavior in response to those measurements? The installation at Women & their Work is an experiment to test out this idea. I’ll also talk about a ton of ways to use current gadgets to measure yourself, and how it all makes its way into my art practice.”

Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built work and large scale installations that explore the nature of pattern and the mind. Using her background in engineering and technology she explores self-tracking and compulsive organization. She creates life’s most basic patterns as color coded charts. Steps walked, calories expended, weight, sleep, time-online, gps location, daily mood as color, micro-journal of food ingested are all part of her daily tracking. She collects personal data using gadgets that point toward a time where complete self-surveillance will be the norm.