Current Event. Walmart Patents Biometric Shopping Cart to Track your Vitals

Kristin Angelo: Current Event
Current Event Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/the-rise-of-the-data-artist/392399/
My current event is an article from The Atlantic titled "From Paint to Pixels" by Jacoba Urist. The article discusses the genre of data art, which is essentially artists utilization of data for the creation of visual art. This article shows how artists use self-tracking data to create a piece of art that portrays hidden patterns and meanings that existed within the data, but become evident through the art. One story in the article that stood out to me was about the American artist Hasan Elahi who was detained at an airport post 9/11. Even though he is a frequent safe traveler, the FBI received a "tip" that he had explosives. Because of this experience and after months of investigation,
Elahi decided to document his activities by taking a picture a day, whether it be of hotel beds or receipts, resulting in his art piece composed of 32,000 images titled "Thousand Little Brothers". These pictures were essentially self-tracking data points combined to make a statement about the collection of personal data. Another artist named Laurie Frick manually tracked her feelings using an app which allows users to express their emotions in colors. She then created a mural of all these colors from unique materials. A quote from Frick in the article is "I think people are at a point where they are sick of worrying about who is or isn't tracking their data. I say, run toward the data. Take your data back and turn it into something meaningful." This article showcases many examples of artists taking self-tracking data and creating artwork that expresses what the data itself could not.In chapter 3 of "Self-Tracking, Neff and Nafus discuss creative uses of self-tracking, one of those ways being aesthetic curiosity. Aesthetic curiosity is using data to create a piece of art that is meaningful in some way. Neff and Nafus make a point that one does not need to be an artist to explore aesthetic curiosity. They give the example of someone taking a picture of their food every day to create a collage that explores patterns in the colors of foods, which could potentially reveal more about one's eating habits. They also give another example of a student project to document objects, specifically ones that aren't placed into existence by corporations, into a collage or other visual form, which makes "the students more aware of objects' prevalence, changing their perspective." This concept of aesthetic curiosity is essentially a synonym to data art from the current event article. Both the chapter and the article emphasize this idea of utilizing self-tracking data to create something more meaningful, whether it be to the individual themselves or to a larger audience. Even if the data art does not have a grand hidden meaning, it is still very helpful in making sense of the data, rather than just looking at it as a bunch of numbers. The current event shows that aesthetic curiosity is frequently conducted in real life.Reply