The Quantified Self Poems
Series of 12 silkscreen prints
26" x 40" (66 x 101.6 cm) each
2016
The Quantified Self Poems is a project that considers the use of tracking applications and devices for self-improvement, in which a series of poems were produced through an experiment with self-tracking technologies. Over a period of three months during the summer of 2016, I reported my moods three times per day on Emotion Sense, a smartphone application developed for mood tracking by researchers at the University of Cambridge. Each time I was prompted at a random moment to respond to the questions that came up on this app, my feelings were logged as numerically encoded data, effectively quantifying the unquantifiable.
At the end of this three-month period, I requested a copy of the raw data collected by the app, and hired a programmer to create an algorithm that translated this data into words drawn from a unique dictionary compiled for the project by poet Daniel Zomparelli. This process resulted in six poems that appear to be the work of an emotive automaton and represent my self-reported moods in chronological order—in a sense "written", but not penned, by me. The six poems are produced as part of a suite of twelve screen prints, the other six of which feature views of the user interface of Emotion Sense.
Relevant links:
Quantified Self - article by Erdem Taşdelen in Canadian Art
The Quantified Self Poems was produced with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, with the collaboration of poet Daniel Zomparelli and programmer Ali Bilgin Arslan.
Installation views: Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2017. Photos by SITE Photography.
