Tag Archives: data collecting
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Tonnes of carbon produced by the personal transportation of a ‘professional artist’
This graph was first compiled as the central illustration of Harrison’s 2019 book The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint to illustrate the artist’s increasing amount of travel in the years running up to her 2016 project and the dramatic impact it had on reducing her carbon footprint for transport. It was updated in 2020 for display at Edinburgh Art Festival.
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The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint
On 4 November 2019, Luath Press published Harrison’s first book. Inspired by her 2016 ‘durational performance’ The Glasgow Effect – for which she refused to travel beyond Glasgow’s city limits, or use any vehicles except her bike, for the whole calendar year – the book provides the complete context for her thinking and action. (Word count: 119,000)
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For Love or Money
Created in 2015 to highlight the main causes of Harrison’s breaches to her own Environmental Policy and the amount of carbon each produced, For Love or Money paved the way for The Glasgow Effect in 2016.
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Progress Report
Created in 2014 by analysing more than a decade of personal data, Progress Report reveals how, despite espousing “sustainability“, Harrison’s own lifestyle (measured in ‘work’ – no. emails sent and ‘leisure’ – no. lengths swimming) has simply been mirroring capitalism’s “growth fetish”.
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Attempt at an Inventory…
Created specially for The Hospital for Dazed Art exhibition, for which artists were asked to revisit and rescue old or discarded artworks, Attempt at an Inventory… is Harrison’s attempt to take account of all the creative production she was responsible for in her formative years, exhibited alongside her first known self-portrait.
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Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector
Harrison edited the first book about her work Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector, published by Plymouth College of Art in April 2009. The book profiles twelve of her former ‘data collecting‘ projects, for which she obsessively recorded information about different aspects of her daily routine. It is introduced by artist and curator Hannah Jones and features a specially commissioned essay by Sally O’Reilly. (Word count: 5,394)
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Transactions
Developed to accompany The History of Financial Crises installation – for the duration of exhibition, Harrison sent an SMS message to the phone installed in the gallery every time she made an economic transaction. The Coke can dances with joy every time a message is received.
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I’ve Been Watching You
For three-and-a-half years Harrison was ‘undercover artist-in-residence’ at Broadway Cinema in Nottingham. Assuming the role of usher, she spent her shifts getting to grips with the inner workings of the cinema and expanding her knowledge of contemporary film. After ‘coming out’ as an artist in 2007, she was asked to present her findings as one of the commissions for the launch of Digital Broadway – the cinema’s new digital arts programme alongside works by Marcus Coates, Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie and Annie Watson.
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Timelines
For almost five years Harrison documented and recorded information about nearly every aspect of her daily routine. These laborious, demanding and introverted data collecting processes grew ever more extreme until she devised the ultimate challenge for Timelines – to attempt to document everything she did, 24 hours a day, for four whole weeks (26 June – 23 July 2006).
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Daily Data Display Room
For the duration of the Day-to-Day Data exhibition at Danielle Arnaud contemporary art in London, Ellie collected information about 10 elements of her everyday routine. Each morning the results from the previous day were emailed to the gallery and used to reconfigure and adjust the 10 different objects comprising the installation. Over the course of the exhibition, the display aimed to test and visualise an experiment as to whether there was a correlation between different elements of this information.
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Tea Blog
For three years from 1 January 2006 – 31 December 2008, Harrison recorded what she was thinking about every time she had a cup of tea (or a different type of hot drink). During this period, whilst archiving a total of 1,650 thoughts in the Tea Blog, Harrison began to learn the perils of instantaneous ego-broadcasting and so made the decision to ‘quit’ data collecting.
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Day-to-Day Data
Day-to-Day Data – ‘an exhibition of artists who collect, list, database and absurdly analyse the data of everyday life’, was Harrison’s first major curatorial project. It developed as a way of further exploring the ideas at the core of her practice, and as a way of bringing together a group of artists who shared similar interests. The project featured newly commissioned works by twenty artists and comprised a gallery-based exhibition touring to three UK venues, a publication and a website.
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