>> John Bolan: I'm John Bolan. I'm recently coming in to help coordinate some of the Studio 99 projects. And you will probably see more of me. This afternoon we have Laurie Frick, a data artist, has been working as an artist for almost 10 years and deals a lot with data about the self and self-tracking data, lives in Austin, works in New York, and recently was featured in an article in The Atlantic, which I believe I don't know if that was an invitation or not. It's easy to find. It was a good portrait. In any case, I'm not going to stand up for too long and will just say welcome to Laurie. [applause]. >> Laurie Frick: Have you ever thought about what's known about you? Not just if you Google yourself and it's like right here's what's public, but some of the juicy stuff. Like every time you've ever used your credit card. Or every video you've ever watched. Or maybe every time you swiped your ID here on campus, every single time I work with self-tracking data and it was a couple of years ago and what's really known about me. Privacy was starting to heat up and I started to make a list in self-quantified fashion, I scored it from 1 to 5 depending how public or how private. And hundreds, I mean if you really -hundreds and hundreds of things. And every couple of days I'd think of something else. Recently I realized Amazon knows how fast I read a book. They know if I cheat, if I read the end. And so you can kind of get creeped out by this, but I actually looked at this list and I thought it's kind of like more compelling, more complex, more thorough view of myself than I can even remember. And so it's some of this that's got me to really see that maybe this data that everything that's collected about you, all the surveillance, all this stuff, could start to be a way to see the hidden part of you. So I'm on a mission to get you to think about your data in a totally new way. So I've got 20 minutes to convince you, and let me start by explaining I'm a data artist and I make hand-built work from data. I count it and measure it and chop it up. A lot starts digitally. I use data viz tools. I'm super hyperorganized and I have a background in tech. I have a whole other life. I have been to this campus in another life. I've pitched Bill Gates in another life. I have been here. So let me just tell you a story, and it's kind of the story of how I came to this, and it all started with time. It was a few years ago and felt like something had really shifted. Everything started to feel like all these little bits of time and there was a writer, Linda Stone. She describes it as continuous partial attention. And it really describes like everything was in these tiny little chunks. So I was starting to make work based on that little bits of imagined time, forward, backward, and I always felt like the perfect painting was 24 hours. If you think about it it's like a metaphor for a day. These big quiet areas of sleep and then you have this perfect and you have this ugly argument and then you have the boring part where you're sitting in your car. I knew if you really want to study something, you need to measure it. So I thought, all right, I'm going to buckle down and really measure my own time. And I started. I don't know if anybody -- it's really hard. And it was really amateurish attempt. So I Googled it. And I found Ben Lipkowitz. And Ben has been measuring all his time, every one of the horizontals is 24 hours, for two years he's been putting it all on shrine. And it was like holy shit, this looks exactly the way I imagined time, all these little bits. I've become friends with Ben. He's a developer his parents are neuro scientists, he has a whole theory about why he's doing this. But I didn't even hesitate. I scraped his data and I started to make drawings from it. Based on real time. And then I started to chop it up, color-coded. And at the same time I really love this. But Marco -- but I really wanted to measure something of me. And I knew that measuring time is really hard but at the same time I had this consumer tech new products background and I thought all the sensors, this is all going to get much easier and my very next -- I bought a Zio, which it's so sad they've gone out of business. It's a little dry EEG sensor and it measures your sleep. And I thought this is so easy. I can measure all my time right when I'm asleep in bed. I actually don't have to do anything. And I was really surprised as I started measuring sleep. Each one of these verticals is a night of sleep. The first thing was sleep is not so different, waking sleeping, it's all in these little five and ten minute bits. It's really similar. I'd always heard that sleep cycles were these big 90 minute chunks. It turns out no, waking, sleeping, not so different. And I was also really taken aback. I don't really know. It's one of these hidden things about you. You go to bed at 11:00. You wake up at seven, you think you've got eight hours of sleep but you don't remember. I don't remember anything. And it was this moment where I'd always thought that I was this really good sleeper. And it was a moment where I realized I wasn't the person that I thought I was. Turns out I'm a terrible sleeper. And it's like I'm measuring it's real data it's about me and it turns out I'm bad at something. It wasn't my nature. I'm accomplished, I could get -- it was a moment where data was you kind of have to confront it, and it was sort of this weird conflict I was sorting out. So then I got really, really interested in sleep and realized everything good happens when you sleep people talk about I'm a power sleeper, I only need four hours. It's horrible. Everything good, if you're sick, it's when you get better. If you're on a diet, it's when you metabolize carbs. If you're a little kid, it's when you grow; it's how you reorganize long-term memory. Everything good happens when you sleep. So I was pretty into it. And I started to really come up with this whole system for sleep. So I created these rules. So I had a rule system. So red is the deep sleep. And yellow is awake. And pink is REM sleep and I took all the light sleep which is really trash sleep, folded it up out of the way and got rid of it. So I had all these rules like little art algorithms. And I put it in a show in Los Angeles. And it was kind of a big moment, because it got a big fat review in the LA Times. And then it got picked up in New Scientist. And in Gadget and it went all over the net and all these reviews. Zipping around. And the guys at Zio that made this little sleep device they saw the reviews online and they send me a little note. Laurie, love your work. What can we do to help you? And I said send me more data. And it was the first time that I could compare my sleep -- so before I had it vertical. I switched it it's horizontal. Every one of those horizontal it's a night of sleep. It's a month of sleep from each. And it was the first time I could see other people's sleep. And I realized they were very individual. It's like a fingerprint. So you're actually looking purple is the really good stuff, that's deep sleep. Orange is waking up. And you can start to see people have a very, look at this poor guy. I mean, really, it's like -- and so I asked the research guys at Zio, they said yeah, yeah, very identifiable. Sleep is very unique. I can see your sleep. I know exactly who that is. And it was funny it was right about this time I am wearing this thing on my forearm. I have a thousand nights of sleep data. I'm wearing this thing on my forehead. I didn't want to be the only one jumping into bed every night so I got one for my husband. Ding. And he goes, I'm a terrible sleeper. I have insomnia. And he wears it the very first night he scores 140. I didn't even think it went over 100. I'm scoring like in the 60s. So it turns out he sleeps great most of the time. And every now and then it's horrible. But he only remembered the bad. And I thought that's so him. It was like that's so him. Right. So he has this huge standard deviation. I have a very narrow standard deviation. And I thought it's not only like a fingerprint, what if it's actually measuring his personality. Hmm. So I doubled down and decided all right this is so cool. I'm going to measure everything. So I really started measuring things like the sleep, like the ZIO. If I could live in the future, particularly things that are really easy. It's living in the time where it's just ambient data, things are going to be collected about you. Internet of Things. Everything that I'm doing is just going to be automatically -- so how can I live in that world. So I've got a Wi-Fi scale. I spit in a tube. I got my DNA. I log all the time on my computer. I put apps on my phone. Anything I could find. And there's -- I mean this is sort of a short list otherwise I look crazy. And I decided to use myself for research. And really pay attention. Measuring this, how does it feel, and there's the tradition of artists both using themselves for their work, but sometimes artists have the, they've anticipated a scientific breakthrough where art precedes science. And I have a fantasy that some of this is really going to prove out. But artists can also imagine themselves through research. They get to make stuff up, that's their job. And so I decided to really watch, notice, pay attention, and I studied patterns in the data. So this is it's human data. And I started to see it was sort of these rhythms of me. Almost like a neural Fibonacci. The patterns, the proportions of me played back to me. And at the beginning I was really convinced I'm going to cause and effect and I'm going to to be able to correlate this many steps. I slept this much. I weigh this much. Even if there was a lag effect I figured I was going to figure it all -- turns out humans are really noisy. Like really noisy data objects. And so I kind of let go of the cause and effect. It's very hard and I thought, well, just let me look at the pattern. Let me just look at the patterns themselves. It's me reflected back to me. And I started to think of them as data portraits. Kind of jokingly call them data selfie. So I'm really -- I realized it's sort of this familiarity, fluency to it. And I started to see the data. Okay. Pay attention. And think of them in spaces. Right. What if we lived with these patterns what if they covered the walls. We live like intelligent wallpaper. What if our patterns -that pattern is something we spend time with. It's not so hard, laser cutters, 3-D printers, fancy machines, Rucco vacuum on your walls, big X Y-Axis. I started to think about art in terms of textures, the physicality of it. I imagined them recyclable. It's efemoral and update and goes against the wall and it ends up in a bucket, recycle. I thought there was something important about getting the actual texture of them. And there was something about this that just had this familiarity. There's something about our patterns. We repeat the patterns. I think the patterns of our behavior are beautiful. We go to the same places all the time. I look at the log data. I have this intense period in the morning when I'm online and then I have these longer stretches in the afternoon. People always say to me, Laurie, my patterns in my travel are so boring. I just go to work. I go home. Maybe the grocery -- those intense areas are actually the good parts. And so for months I had this cut drawn patterns in my studio. The walls are filled with this stuff. And I realized I really liked it. Felt like me. I mean, it felt recognizable. It felt human. It felt personal. It felt soothing. It had this comfort quality. It was recognizable. And I thought maybe that's the point. Maybe this data is a way to see this hidden part. Like sleep. It's a way to see this hidden part of you, the part that you just don't see, you don't notice. You're kind of trained to ignore yourself. And maybe there's this idea that the hidden patterns of you, all this data that's going to be collected, that's collected now, all this data of us, gets played back to us, abstracted. And it becomes a shortcut to mindfulness. Kind of this crazy way. It's like a technology boosted immune system. Your brain doesn't know the difference between meditative self reflection and the intake of a selfie. It just knows that what it's seeing is somehow playing back this sense of self. It's feeding the human loop. It's you. It's grounded. And so I imagine there's a whole connection. There's a huge scientific work around meditation and immune systems and how immune systems are fed. I think in the future it's going to be a really, really big deal. And so along the way people are buying this. This stuff is in galleries. People are taking it home. It's kind of crazy because it's my data. But sometimes it's -- in this case it's a lobby. It's actually a team of developers and it's all the chat metadata of a group that works together. And in the lobby it's 24 hours, all of the chat sessions, the time, the timestamp and the length of the message, all the developers are yellows and oranges. All the designers are shades of blue. The management are shades of gray. And it's kind of the interaction. It's like the human data of a group of people. But I realized in doing this that it got people to really look. I tried to think art makes data sticky. It gets people to look at it much, much longer. And I realized that these patterns -- they mean something to me but I realized they mean something to other people, too. And so I worked on and launched an iPhone app. The team the lobby, the guys helped we made a trade. So it was a digital shop. And Frickbits is a way to take -- I was kind of an experiment. It was a way to take back your data and turn it into something meaningful. I mean for the most part there's all this data collected about us but we never get to see it. We don't know. It doesn't come back to us. And for Frickbits, it's live. It's in the Apple store. It takes your location data. It keeps track of it. You get extra bits for the places that you live, all the intense colors of the places you go all the time. And it uses that art algorithm, the rules. Some of those rules I started creating when I did the sleep, sort of assigning colors and sort of coming up with an algorithmic way to produce art. And it was -- so at this point I kind of paused and I thought why? I'm working like crazy on this. And I thought why am I doing it? Laurie, you've got a Fitbit on, you're putting these sensors all over you, you're trying to figure out who you are. I mean, I'm using these external means to try to figure out who I am. In artist residencies the artists we would sit around and analyze other artists work to sort of decode them or analyze them. This actually works for you guys, too. Looking at what people work on it says a lot about them. And then I thought I'm using all these external means to figure out who, like who am I? But I think we all do this. It used something external to figure out who we are. I completely changed jobs. But you move. You get a new place. You get a new apartment. You get a new boyfriend. You change cities. I mean, you're trying to use these external means to try to figure out who you are. Do I like it? Do they like me? Do I like this new place? I mean, you can't know. And I thought well maybe this is it. It's the way data starts to see this hidden part of us, a way to reveal the part that's really hard to know about ourselves. There's this really, really wonderful book called strangers to ourselves. Timothy Wilson. And he describes the you, the other you, the you that your friends get to see, the one that you don't get to see. And so you think well maybe, right, maybe what would, so maybe all this data comes back to me. What would my data say about -- what would it say about you? You start thinking okay what if I got all my data back, my sleep, is it going to be like my husband who swings wildly or your data if it measures sort of something about you what would it say about you? I just think that it's this really compelling story, interesting possibility to use my data to understand and answer this question that I've been trying to sort with, who am I. So what if I could figure out a way, take back my data, what if I could get back all my data and not just understand who I am but the possibility of who I can be? It's like how am I feeling? Am I up? Am I down? Do I have MIMO Joe today. I'm super super interested in data's ability to predict. Not just how am I feeling now and the data showing me here's my stress level at this moment but how am I going to feel tomorrow at 11:00. It's almost like this weird smart drug where what if I can know that at a certain time in the future I'm really, really on, and I just am so curious about what data could be, and I start to think of it as this irresistible possibility. It's funny, human data, data, the Fitbit, all these companies that are doing self-tracking data they keep describing it in terms of health or fitness, very Calvinist purposeful, what's the purpose, what's the purpose of the data, we want to get people to walk more. But I don't think it's about that. I think that human data is going to be, and it really is about identity. Who am I? So if data is a way to get to know ourselves, if data is the way I'm going to figure out who I am, why am I running from it? Why would I hide? I say take back your data. Turn it into art. Thank you. [applause]. John Bolan: Do we have questions? >> Laurie Frick: about this. I hope. This is where I'm dying to talk to you guys >>: So you alluded a little bit to cause and effect. But then you sort of dropped a little bit. Do you think doing all this work looking at your data has changed you, in other words, has changed the data? So do you feel like there's been a few [indiscernible] or has it just been ->> Laurie Frick: No, I think it's a fair question. If you measure yourself, what changes. I mean, one of the things because I've measured so many things for so long I don't stress over it short term. But the thing -- I mean, there's a few things I can tell in my behavior. Like stepping on a scale you manage your weight by having the data. Just the presence of the data makes the difference. One of the things I learned about sleep is it's kind of anti intuitive. The earlier you go to bed, the better you sleep. People think if I'm really tired and I go to bed late I'll sleep better. You'll actually sleep better if you go to bed early. I also know just kind of intuitively now if I stand longer during the day, if I stand in my studio, not only can I get 10,000 steps in, but I sleep better. I mean, so there's a level of self-knowledge that you just sort of start to intuitively understand. I'm not consciously writing down, I'm more productive. But I think the knowledge and the exposure to the data subtly affects you. But I understand -- but I don't think -- I honestly don't think that's the point as much as the sense that art can show you back your data in a way that you care about. >>: I have an extension of that question. If feedback is a big part of this experience, we've seen something like wallpaper, which is relatively fixed, do you think you'll expand into animation? Or other forms that change? So that there could be a kind of feedback in something that's not many months or iterating on many different data snapshots or more continuously. >> Laurie Frick: How do you get the data to be real time and update? Part of me wants to do that with physical work. So the physicality of it. I mean, I'm really -- I'm kind of a mind that it's like a shortcut just to go to a pixelated screen. But if there was a way to maybe project it on to something bumpy or have a way to have the physicality of the work updated all the time, I'm serious, I think it should be recent and current but I'm still figuring out a way to make that physical and make it -- I mean, so could it be interactive and move, absolutely. >>: I understand a lot of the pieces you use have a very judicious use of color, if I can use that term and also numbers appear a lot. Kind of curious where those come from, where in your work? >> Laurie Frick: Some of the pieces are based on walking, tracking, and I'll make drawings as I go. And I'll look at the Fitbit and what -- it's like steps from that time or numbers. I also have this weird sense that the things that you see all the time, some things you forget. Some things you remember. It sort of seeps in. And so the numbers come from that. The amount of stuff you're exposed to and the parts of it that you actually remember. I mean, the judicious -- I actually think I'm making stuff pretty bright. I mean, I'm trying to inject as much color as people can stand in the pieces. >>: They vary -- like the background piece on the wall and some of the other ones in the lobby look very, very comfortable, but then some of them especially with wood I notice -- there was just a little bit here and there. But I was kind of curious what your inspiration -- was that coming from something in the data to you or was that coming from how you felt about ->> Laurie Frick: One of the pieces with the data they were about time and it was winter. Sometimes it's about place and the color relates to the sense of time of that place. But I also have this theory. A lot of color is what people like about color is based on the fluency of what people have seen before. I mean, people's music tastes and their food tastes come from what they have tasted or heard early on. I thought color taste comes from what you experienced or seen. And I started realizing super saturated PhotoShopped color, it's so much media. There's so much media now that's not nature colors, it's way more. And I almost can't get enough. In fact, sometimes I'll make stuff and I'll have to paint over the top of it or take it back to dial it back because I like color that's, I want to take the saturation knob and move it to 11. >>: You spoke about how data awareness is short for mindfulness. And seemed like you've learned how to read data and how that expresses how you feel, but you must have done that relationally with your husband and other people seen their data and sort of influenced how you experienced them or wonder if you could speak to that, like when you saw other people's data how did it influence your thoughts about that? >> Laurie Frick: It's like now I'm getting this freudian shrink in sight. Somebody asked me once, it was like all right if I'm really super stressed can I see somebody else's data to calm me down. Or there's also the question of if you're really mad and the person that you're talking to sort of meets you with that same, you sort of calm down as opposed to somebody patronizing you, it's something -- so I've always thought like I don't know the answers to this. It's like what part of that experience or feedback to yourself do you want to get like for like or like for different. I think the question of looking at other people's data, I'm not -- I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't know. It's a fair question. I don't know. I don't know. It's sort of like the answer to the universe. So some of it I honestly -- I'm not sure. >>: Your data and it's fascinating. But -- >> Laurie Frick: The truth is I probably spent -- so here's, for example, Ben Lipkowitz, there's one guy and I've probably spent hundreds of hours with his data. And I've gotten so I really like his data. Well, it varies. It goes for years and years. There was this whole one section -- because he also sleeps on a 26-hour clock. So his patterns go on a diagonal, which is interesting. And then there was this one chunk for about six months that he was getting up at the same time. He's a software developer. At one time I said to him did you get a job? Why are you -- he goes no, no, I was on a bike trip I had to get up when the sun came up, I was sleeping in a tent. So there's something about him and he has an interesting variety to it. And then I've been doing these pieces based on time use data and they're anonymous people and some of them I go through it and oh no, I don't like this guy. It's like blech. So there is a response to some of the time-based data. And it's interesting because there's I think to me I'm sitting here sort of answering it like I haven't thought about this before. There's a certain amount of variety that makes the person interesting. And maybe the thing like you marry your opposite. Because I'm pretty steady. And the thing with my husband, this, oh yeah, oh yeah, love him. [laughter]. >>: I almost feel a self-help book coming on. >> Laurie Frick: Oh God don't make me -- I tried hard not to step in new age -- because I think it's hooey but I think there's a scientific connection. >>: No, no, I didn't mean that new age -- >> Laurie Frick: It was like please don't take me there. >>: What I mean is the idea is. >>: Therapeutic. >>: There would be rules for what you want your data to look like in terms of you just said something about variety. Does ->> Laurie Frick: Yeah. >>: Does variety along certain axes indicate someone who is better able to say deal with every day life or something like that. I'm not suggesting a book, but it's that idea ->> Laurie Frick: Like self. You know heart rate variability. Do people -- you actually want highly variable. So it could be that what makes you human has a certain amount of variety in terms of time, heart rate, breathing. >>: But you could work on other parameters. Variety, intensity in certain cases, if you go through life and there's no fluctuation in your data at all. >> Laurie Frick: >>: You're a robot. Effectively, yes. >> Laurie Frick: You're a robot. You know what I love about this group, because I talk about this a lot. And usually the very first groups are like oh my God we are not data. We can't reduce humans. There's the mystery of being human. But nobody's asked that. This group is like data, oh, yeah, because people will say because you can be -- I think we are going to be statistically understood. I think there's a point where we'll be known. Yeah, yeah. If what you're asking, there's going to be norms. >>: This is kind of a -- my mind was going I'm curious if any of this, you found it interesting, but is there a case where it's telling you something you wish you didn't know about yourself. Because this is probably the response you alluded to we need a certain fiction about ourselves in order to maintain our sanity. And sometimes the truth is too stark and too depressing. I watch TV way more than I thought I did. >> Laurie Frick: You know, I started tracking my time, like really tracking -- I turned a couple of apps on my phone and I had Manic Time running on my laptop. Then I started keeping a grid. And I was trying to get at things I did simultaneously and one of the things that did surprise me -- because people always talk about oh God you look at your phone too much. I realize most of the time on my phone I was reading stuff. Maybe actually I felt better about it. But I think there's you don't hear your own heartbeat. You barely -- I think what you see in the mirror is not -- there's all kinds of things that you just cope with, yeah, just, yeah. Please. >>: Kind of back to work side of it a little bit. I'm curious, there's some here and some in your presentation, this has both, this has both but a lot of the work you showed you have either color or extrusions of some sort coming off a surface of the wall typically. And sometimes you have these frame that you're seeing through that have data punched through. >> Laurie Frick: Negative, positive. >>: Yes. And I'm curious what leads you one direction or another and how do you think about those two kind of -- they're pretty different expressions, right. I'm just curious how you, what do you think about that? >> Laurie Frick: So the thing that makes it live in the world of art for me is there's the experience of the data and then the data itself. And there's data Viz that tends to take the data and represent it really accurate. And I tried to stay -- I showed a few examples that I actually work from like the real data. But I try to find something in the experience like when I did the walking it was the time of year, what the color of the light was. Sometimes I wore these selfie cameras and did pictures as I went and looked at all the images. You can run the time lapse. I wore my iPhone around my neck for a while. I would look for something in it. It's funny, because the sleep -- I took the bad sleep and folded it out of the way and made it missing, but then other times I would make like the time with stuff that would poke out would be something that I felt had more emotion. So I mean I used the same metaphor to mean completely different things, but I was trying to get at like it's almost like you've got color, size, I was trying to find more dimensionality to play with. >>: Is there anything along those lines that leads you towards, if you will, the negative space of these sort of frames and the panels that you look through? Is there anything that typically leads you that way or is that just whatever the spirit, however the spirit goes, what you're trying to express? >> Laurie Frick: You know, all the -- well, a lot of it was because I was playing -- I belong to a laser cooperative. I get endless amounts of laser time. I just experimented with laser cutting and could I draw with a laser cutter and they're hand made with a laser cutter. I mean, I haven't -- I don't have a -- you can tell, I don't know. One of the things I did figure out I've tried to sort out how to represent bad data. It's different than just -- it's something you don't want to know but every now and then things are not okay or I used to -- I measured for a year and a half if I had an upset stomach, one was good, five was a bad and you just score it every day. And I went back and looked at the data and thought how do I represent those 5s, and I took the data and stacked it. When something went bad, because I'm that really tidy person, I would let it spill out. And I thought if it was live and I was getting the data real time, I'd probably could make my stomach feel better in order to stack that stuff up neat. My desire for neatness was so high. When I looked at your office I was so horrified. [laughter] my house is clean. And I thought it's kind of a secondary way to represent data to give it to them not just smack them like you're bad, but it's messy. And if you want to clean it up you might have the dial to switch it the other way. >>: I'm a pilar. >> Laurie Frick: >>: I know where everything is. >> Laurie Frick: >>: But that is memory -- As soon as I organize it I don't know where it is. >> Laurie Frick: time-based. >>: Exactly. No, no, because chronologically, it's historically It's just bananas. >> Laurie Frick: And the stuff on the floor? >>: I know where everything is. [laughter] because even that has a location and it has something associated with that location. >> Laurie Frick: You've read about the rats in the maze that scored location-based where they are. This is in your neuro transmitters. >>: It's like the rats nim. [laughter]. >>: Actually relates to my question. Feels like maybe at least when you started a lot of this was representing your data to yourself. But when you think about the space like data viz on one side and something really abstractly art on the other, there's a big tradeoff in terms of how interpretable it is. I wonder if you thought about how would you present somebody's data to them based on their particular personality. So would it be -- if I commissioned you to do something with my data and you knew me, what were the things that you would think about or would it vary? >> Laurie Frick: It's like the art algorithm of the future. Art can be literally, could be coded to be a learning algorithm with a set of rules that I don't even have to intervene. does it measure? It makes art for you. What >>: In these particular instances, at least for yourself, other things you mention the spilling out effect, are there other things like that that you kind of code it for your understanding? >> Laurie Frick: It's almost what you're trying to get at it's like the amount of humanness. How much hand, you know, how much edge, where do you -- it's in that super messy, super tidy, right, it's sort of mechanical, how mechanical, how handmade. That's some of it. I had this project that I started working on, and it's part way through, was to be able to look at the person and gather data about them that then would feed into the algorithm, the speed they walked, how fast they signed their name. The pitch of their voice. I thought there was something interesting in people's their basic proportions. You can measure like people's basic sort of just the amount of this to the amount of this based on the proportions of their hands. Hands have a lot to say about people. It was like all right what are the things that I can very objectively measure about you repeatedly and use that to feed into the algorithm. And some of it is personal. The speed thing or the pitch thing. And it was like the colors that they wore and one of the things you can start to gather about somebody that are unconscious choices about them but are very insightful. So how do you start to make yours -- I also imagine in the future, you can have like the super abstraction or the super realism. You could start to make stuff, I don't want any, it's like the filter in PhotoShop, hypersharp. A little bit fuzzy. I think there's something in it. I don't have all -- in some of this I don't even figure out in my own head until later I realize there was something that was causing me to make something in a certain way that felt right and I sort of analyzed why. Artists will tell you sometimes they figure it out while they're making it or soon after they've made it and they don't know why. >>: Have you done this for your husband? >> Laurie Frick: >>: Made something? Yeah. What has been his response and interaction with it? >> Laurie Frick: He likes some better than others. What was his interaction. I did a lot of his sleep stuff. It's possible he didn't tell me, I mean I'm sitting here he goes honey I like it, thanks. He knows enough not to say too much maybe. >>: I guess to combine two questions, then, when you did do -- in a sense your husband was new in a way. You produced something for someone else. >> Laurie Frick: Then I sold it. [laughter]. >>: Did it look like -- >> Laurie Frick: You laugh. It's all gone. >>: Was there different colors you used, different textures, different materials. >> Laurie Frick: Uh-huh, you're right, there were. His colors were duller, not because he's dull. But he wears tan and gray, sort of a common color. I didn't make him as bright. Some of it I don't even think I thought about it. >>: But it still came out that way? >> Laurie Frick: Yes. >>: So have you thought about using government [indiscernible] two hours based on 911 calls, like all input publicly available? >> Laurie Frick: Yeah, yeah, because I really like data that's sort of human-based. Sort of that about individual people can you create portraiture of individual -- because once up go into the line of data it's bottomless. >>: Like identities, [indiscernible] like you could sort of picture them. >> Laurie Frick: It's partly where I started using time use data from timeuse.org and I wrote to the people at University of Oxford, a time use database. And I've been gathering data that was anonymously gathered about how people spent their time. But I haven't looked, like 911 calls, yeah, I haven't -- part of it is it's the data is overwhelming. >>: So I think we'll go with Banker's question and then end. >>: So when I look at the physical manifestation of the data that you've made, obviously there's great many artistic and aesthetic qualities to it. And as you're creating it, do you ever -- I don't even know how to say it, do you ever worry about how much better the information needs to know to understand the piece, because there's obviously ->> Laurie Frick: Yeah, yeah. >>: If you go to a space and about it purely from artistic data, and do you like -- like direction and how much do you you look at this, you can just think perspective. I don't know if it's about how much of the design goes into that think you gain by knowing the information, this is my sleep data? And my secondary question is how do you actually convey to people or do you convey to people that it is your sleeping data? >> Laurie Frick: That's a really good question I have a show right now in New York and I put legends in the show. For one of the first times. And I used to put little clues, because if I was at the beginning, I thought it's enough that I know what it is and I would name it something that would kind of be a clue. Or I would put dates in it or I would do little things because I thought it was kind of cheeky for me to know about what it was but not so much for other people. Now I've decided to start being more straightup. I do these seven days of time use made out of leather and I hand draw give them exactly what the colors are of what each of the categories of time. And I show what's happening in the thing. And I thought it would ruin it, because it's like kachunk, kachunk, and actually people like -- so it seems to help. So I've started creating these little legends. And what's kind of weird as I look at maps and other things I always read the legend. I want to know. I decided that the legends are part of it and I've started to explain more. Yeah, excellent question. These are like little baseball cards, they're business cards but honestly think of it more as a party favor. It's like you get -- they come in different ones. There's a ton of them. >>: Collect them all. >> Laurie Frick: Collect them all. >>: Thank you all. John Bolan: >> Laurie Frick: [applause] This was great. Thank you, Laurie. Thank you.