Dear friends and witnesses,
In this letter, I’d like to tell you about some recent & ongoing art/research projects related to building body knowledge through reflection. This has been a persistent interest for a very long time, but over the last year+ I have poured more energy into it than in the past, and also started to externalize the work in various artifacts.
I got interested in self-tracking in maybe 2008, when I was first asked to track my time, in 15-minute increments in a spreadsheet, as part of an undergrad research internship that had to do with self-tracking for chronic illness management. Truth be told, I managed to keep a streak of maybe a couple of days at a time at most, but I was intrigued by the idea.
Since then, I’ve incorporated the tracking of my body or its activities into making abstract artworks, typically obscuring the actual data. What’s really difficult about working with one’s own data is not even necessarily its (technical) imprecision or its (logistical) difficulty of collection, but rather having to face something I (probably already know to be) devastatingly true. Then, in 2020-2021, I taught some courses at Berlin’s School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe about it. In 2022, I will have a short contribution in an upcoming Critical Coding Cookbook that contains the most essential parts of the curriculum I developed on data feminism x self-tracking x collaborative art practice.