... the ultimate ‘data-selfie’. It’s your life, your data, why not turn it into art? FREE iphone app from artist Laurie Frick.
RIP 2014 - 2017, if you already have the app, it will continue to run on your phone. As of Sept 2017 no more downloads or support. The experiment was super fun :-).
the iOS app, yes... the whole thing is opensourced if you feel compelled to modify FRICKbits as an app for art and data. Github links here.
FRICKbits, your location builds art. It's your life, it's your data, why not turn it into art?
Everyone has now been trained to look at maps, we used to hand-draw little diagrams for each other, and now we always see our travel path in perfect accurate scale. But, that’s not how we remember it. We don’t recall or reconstruct our physical travels in linear time or with accurate coordinates. It’s a good metaphor for art. After tracking my location for years now, we tend to travel the same places repeatedly, and occasionally venture outside our normal rhythms.
FRICKbits uses location data from the phone that we down-sample and abstract into line and bits based on frequency of travel. It’s organized (like me) so things keep to a grid. Color palettes are made to feel like the light and color of a city or place. You earn small bits and clusters for the places you go all the time, like home and work. It’s vector based, but we modeled the look after a series of my watercolor pattern portraits.
I’m Laurie Frick, an artist who makes hand-built work from self-tracking data, and realized the rules and procedures I follow are really an algorithm to turn anyone’s data into abstract patterns of art. Two years ago, I set out to make an iPhone app…and long story short, I met thirteen23 and we made a trade. One of the most amazing mobile technology shops in Austin Texas got a full lobby installation based on their chat metadata, and I got the first iteration of the FRICKbits iPhone app.
PRIVACY - your data belongs to you, we NEVER see it, or collect it. You gather data from the sensors on your phone and the app displays it on your phone. Your choice to share, tweet or post the art. Life makes beautiful patterns it belongs to you.
Just watch, tracking data will be the ultimate 'data-selfie', personal data portraits gathered over time on our phone. A new way to really see yourself. It's your life, it's your data, why not turn it into art?
