Laurie Frick uses data to examine what we can know about ourselves. In her hand-built installations, drawings and small works she experiments with how we will consume the mass of data increasingly captured about us. Evidence of her engineering background and long-history in high-tech are seen in the deep data analysis and detailed explanations of how this future will unfold. Her work about the future of data were recently featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Atlantic and Wired Magazine; she has been invited to talk at Google, SXSW, Stanford and TEDx. Recipient of numerous residencies and awards, including Samsung Research, Yaddo, Bemis and Facebook. She holds an MFA from the New York Studio School, an MBA from University of Southern California and studied at NYU’s ITP program that melded art and technology into her current data work.
Laurie Frick uses data to examine what we can know about ourselves. In her hand-built installations, drawings and small works she experiments with how we will consume the mass of data increasingly captured about us. Evidence of her engineering background and long-history in high-tech are seen in the deep data analysis and detailed explanations of how this future will unfold. Her work about the future of data were recently featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Atlantic and Wired Magazine; she has been invited to talk at Google, SXSW, Stanford and TEDx. Recipient of numerous residencies and awards, including Samsung Research, Yaddo, Bemis and Facebook. She holds an MFA from the New York Studio School, an MBA from University of Southern California and studied at NYU’s ITP program that melded art and technology into her current data work.
Lecture
I Want My Data
Laurie Frick’s lecture focuses on using data about mood, exercise, and personality to turn them into vibrant, carefully crafted art using various materials. The results look like abstract paintings and beautiful sculptures. Laurie wants to help create a future in which self-delusion is impossible. She thinks this shift is inevitable once people wake up to the transformational power of big data. In her lecture, she also introduced the public arts she created. Data may seem abstract, but Laurie aims to make it personal. She says the moment in time where the data that’s gathered about us is astronomical. Her lecture enlightened SJSU students about how data can turn into not only beautiful art pieces but visually compelling measurements of personal narratives through big data.
Workshop
The Secret for How to Turn Your Everyday Life into Artful Pattern
Laurie gave a very exciting workshop about visualizing mood with papers as a hands-on art workshop. The workshop started with Digital Moodjam exercise (
moodjam.com). Students signed up on the website and created simple abstract patterns about their current moods. It’s a simple way to create vertical or horizontal line patterns by selecting colors that reflect their moods. Students created the patterns intuitively and learned about how to express their moods visually. Based on the first exercise, students were given colored papers to create handcut paper moodjam in a small size. Laurie also gave slideshows about color associations, emotion, and color in squares with examples from abstract painters, artists, and designers. Students used colored papers to cut patterns for time tracking data and combine them with mood to choose colors for activity categories. The final results were beautiful and showed a variety of data visualizations. BFA GD students created absolutely stunning results that impressed Laurie very much.
