Tag: Follower

“Quantifed Self” Art

Laurie Frick, "Quantify Me"

As a follower of the “Quantified Self” work catalyzed by Kevin Kelly et al, I was eager to see Laurie Frick’s exhibit “Quantify Me” at “women and Their Work” – Marsha and I hung out there last night exploring the aesthetic representation of Frick’s 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.

Though I’m interested in the subject, I’m not into self-surveillance because it takes too much metatime. I’m a cyborg at heart, but not particularly organized about my cyborganic data. Building a project like this around it is a way to make it more attractive to track and evaluate processes of body and mind.

Obligatory comment about Google Buzzzzz

I feel obligated to post about Google Buzz, as a social technology evangelist and follower of all things Google. It’s another way to post drive-by messages in random activity streams, conveniently integrated with  Gmail. If you don’t use Gmail, and especially if you’re already feeling deluged, this probably isn’t for you. I don’t think it’s a Facebook killer or Twitter killer – it’s just another example of Google acknowledging and implementing a communication pattern that many people find useful. It’s also another step toward the Google singularity, i.e. the plausible future wherein all the Google collaborative tools-in-development are integrated in a more seamless way. The great Google pie is still in the oven, and we find ourselves dipping our fingers into it – it’s very hot.