A 24 mins video essay, a DIY investigation into personal data analysis to create our “portrait”. It’s the result of a year long collaboration with data investigator Vladan Joler, to whom we gave 13 years of our private email metadata and several months of browsing history.
Installed at Careof, Milan
The carpet is a “physical” manifestation of one of the graphs that appears in the video essay. Composed of office carpet tiles of 12 different shades of gray, it shows the intensity of our email communication over an entire year, with dark squares representing more activity, lighter squares representing less email exchanges, and holes representing time “off the grid”.
The inside of this home office cabinet was printed with two graphs produced analyzing our network of “friends”: all the people we had an email exchange within the last 13 years.
Online, our every action leaves an invisible trace buried in data. Analyzed together, these traces can reveal very intimate details about us. Like the famous portal in Spike Jonze’s movie led to John Malkovich’s head, this video is a portal into our minds.
Screenshots from the video
Collection of the GAMeC.
Realized with the support of the Italian Council.