Data Dance

THE WORLDIn a possible near future, where quantifying of the self is taken to its logical extreme, every person has their own “supermetric”. This is an informatic that encompasses every possible data set related to one’s life: financial, emotional, health, genetic makeup, carbon footprint, online influence ranking and so on are all included. Given the intertwining of vast amounts of both objective and what was once understood as subjective data within the supermetric, extreme and aggregated quantification has led—rather paradoxically—to near abstraction.

Updated in real-time, the supermetric is a dynamic version of the self outside the self, a digibody. People have come to think of it as a metonym for one’s “total” state of being. Your metric is you. This quantified self exists independently from the physical self and yet everything from friends, to employees, to spouses, to politicians are chosen based on it.Increasingly, however, there is a desire to physically experience the data world; to reintroduce in the ambiguities and ontological weirdness of everyday meatspace.

Date : March 2012
Collaborators : Zubin Pastakia
Context : Performative Design Workshop at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
‍Taught by : David Gauthier and Di Mainstone