Tag Archives: data collecting
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Eat 22
A year after completing Greed, Harrison began Eat 22 (11 March 2001 – 11 March 2002), her seminal data collecting project. For one year and one day she photographed and recorded information about everything that she ate. Eat 22 is now on permanent display at the Wellcome Collection in London.
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Greed
Harrison’s obsession with data collecting – documenting elements of her own everyday life – began in New York City in February 2000 with Greed. During a four-day visit to the city, Harrison challenged herself to eat as much as was humanly possible and to document everything single last bit.
Project website