data collecting - Ellie Harrison

Installations

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.
Writing

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)
Exhibition

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.
Exhibition

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”.
Performance / Events

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.
Writing

It’s like 10,000 ‘friends’, when all you need is a friend

Harrison details how social media makes us feel as though we’re "employed as administrators for our own lives" in this special text for Oliver Braid‘s exhibition My Five New Friends at The Royal Standard in 2012. (Word count: 903)
Writing

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)
Installations

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.
Media

The Obsessives

1 Jul 2007
Print Magazine (USA) (p.68-77)
Performance / Events

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.
Project website
Media

24 Hour Survey of Activity

12 Jul 2006
Leisure Centre (Issue 7 p.6-8)
Installations

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).
Installations

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.
Internet / Broadcasts

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.
Project website
Social / Networks

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.
Project website
Installations

Daily Data Display Wall

For the duration of the Day-to-Day Data exhibition in Nottingham and Portsmouth, Harrison collected data about 20 different elements of her daily life onto Daily Data Log sheets. Each morning the Log Sheet results were emailed to the gallery and used to reconfigure the 20 different items in the installation, so that it took on a slightly different appearance each day of the exhibition.
Writing

Day-to-Day Data

Harrison edited the publication for her 2005 curatorial project Day-to-Day Data. Featuring the work of twenty artists who ‘collect, list, database and absurdly analyse the data of everyday life’, the publication offers an introduction to the project’s key themes and an overview of each artist’s work. Harrison wrote the Curator’s Introduction as well as an Introduction to her new work for the show, the Daily Data Display Wall. (Word count: 736)
Installations

Gold Card Adventures

For her solo exhibition at Piccadilly Circus Underground Station in 2005, Harrison created a series of 20 large format posters to visualise the data collected during her Gold Card Adventures project, for which she recorded the total distance of every journey she made on London Transport in a year (9,236 kilometres). These posters were used to mark the stages of this cumulative journey by featuring a series of imitation postcards from different global destinations at progressive further distances away from London.
Project website
Internet / Broadcasts

Swear Box 2005

Throughout 2005, Harrison recorded every sentence that she uttered which contained a swear word. These sentences were uploaded to the online Swear Box at regular intervals over the course of the year, alongside a summary of the reason for the outburst. The work involved in updating the online Swear Box had a similar effect to the more traditional version of the box, in that Harrison only swore on 142 occasions the entire year which was considerably less than the 2,427 she did during her Daily Quantification Records project in 2003.
Project website
Installations

Sneezes 2003

Throughout 2003, Harrison recorded the exact date and time of her every sneeze. For this solo exhibition at the Wallner Gallery in Nottingham, she transformed the gallery walls into a giant two-way timeline. Mini colour-coded prints representing each of the 318 sneezes were positioned around the walls to indicate the exact date and time at which they occurred.
Internet / Broadcasts

Trans-Atlantic Challenge

This web-based programme monitors Harrison’s progress as she strives towards achieving three momentous challenges over the course of her lifetime. For the first of these, the Trans-Atlantic Challenge, Harrison records and adds together all the lengths she swims weekly at her local pool in the hope of one day having swum the 5,400 kilometre distance from the UK to America.
Project website
Installations

The Monthly Sculptures Determined by the Daily Quantification Records

Throughout 2003, Harrison also collected data about 14 different elements of her everyday life onto Daily Quantification Records. Each month this data was converted into a set of averages, which was then applied to a set of scales and systems to output the specifications for a monthly sculpture. The first six months’ worth of sculptures was installed at the 2003 Goldsmiths Postgraduate Degree Show.
Internet / Broadcasts

My Head’s Swimming

This random thought generator was Harrison’s first experiment in the collection of ‘subjective data’. For three months during the second term of her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art course at Goldsmiths College she recorded all the thoughts she had whilst swimming lengths at her local pool. She found that swimming provided an excellent opportunity to reflect on all the things happening in her life at what was, during the build up to the US and UK attack on Iraq, a tense time to be in London.
Project website
Installations

Statistics Are Hot Air

This colour-coded vinyl bar chart visualises the exact quantity of gaseous emissions Harrison produced daily throughout 2003. Originally created in 2003 as a studio based wall chart exploring the notion of ‘artistic output’, for which Harrison added one bar to the chart each day. In 2007 the completed chart was installed as semi-permanent installation on glass at Birmingham Moor Street Station as part the New Art Birmingham exhibition Ariston. There is also an online version of the chart.

Ellie Harrison Louise Haigh and Labour say that they will reform the complex fares system to ensure that passengers are confident that they are getting the best fare; confidence that X is the case, and X being the case are not necessarily the same thing. Simplification of fares would have to include the abolition of many fares. The assertion that simplifying the fares structure would reduce travelling costs is based upon a false premise, that being that the complicated-ness of the fares-and-ticketing structure is the reason why fares are expensive, that is not why they are expensive. They are expensive because the base level is too high. If you massively simplify the fares, one might then always be certain of getting the best available fare because there are no obscure cheaper fare hidden away in a Byzantine monolith, but that best fare is likely the best of a bad bunch. Railway fares are complicated, but it is within this myriad complexity that the nuances which facilitate cheaper options lurk; if you take a sledgehammer to the behemoth you bring down the cheaper options which lurk within the behemoth. If there are presently 18 options for doing Thing X, with 15 of those ways being cheap, and 3 of those ways being expensive, if you abolish the 15 cheap options for doing thing X you have massively simplified the paying-to-do-Thing X process because having 3 ways is much simpler than having 18 ways, and you have made it such that one is highly unlikely to not notice the cheapest of the available fares, because one is more likely to notice something when it is one amongst 3 than if it is one amongst 18, but it is nevertheless the case that the person is selecting the cheapest of the 3 most expensive. (i) Being guaranteed to always get the best fare; and (ii). getting cheaper fares are not necessarily the same thing. Be mindful of the actual specific wording of things: both before and after coming into government, Labour has never in actually promised cheaper fares, what Labour has promised is that one will be guaranteed to get the best available fare. The general public, politicians and public-transport campaign organisations alike have been seduced by the word 'simplification'. Simplification is not a virtue in and of itself. Simplification is a neutral concept, neither a good thing nor a bad thing; what is pertinent and important is the nature of the simplification. One can simplify travelling costs upwards. Simplification can simplify out the cheaper options. I deliberately say 'travelling costs', not 'fares', because thinking only terms of fares when it comes to simplification of railway fares and ticketing, and when it comes to Single-Leg Pricing is a proverbial red herring, one should think both in terms of fares AND in terms of travelling costs. Fare decreases do not necessarily mean travelling-cost. LNER is a prime example: with the June of 2023 introduction of Single-Leg Pricing on LNER, and the February of 2024 introduced of the Simpler Fares pilot, travelling costs for using LNER have gone up. Two halved-in-price Singles are more expensive than one Day Return; a fare reduction, but a travelling-cost increase. The changes December of 2023 fares-and-ticketing changes on c2c have many of the same fare-decreases-but-travelling-cost increases as LNER, plus its pay-as-you-go tap-in-tap-out integration with Transport for London (to simplify things) has necessitated the introduction of a weekday early-evening peak period between 4.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., which has numerous knock-on effects which can hugely increase one's travelling costs. The answer is not reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is not simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is to decrease the price of all existing fares. Do not abolish any existing fares. Do not introduce any new types of fare. Just make all existing fares 45% cheaper, and leave it at that.

As the idiom goes: 'Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true'. Reform will only be good if it is good reform. We don't need reform, we need good reform. Some might fear that prices would inevitably be rationalised upwards. Inevitably, the rationalisation would rationalise out the cheaper options. Some might fear that reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, reform travelling costs upwards, and reform out the cheaper options. Some might fear that simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, simplify travelling costs upwards, and simplify out the cheaper options. Just take a look at LNER. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.