Cory’s internet addiction has become a problem. He’s playing
endless rounds of Web Boggle until the wee hours, watching untold numbers of cat
videos, and ranting in chat rooms about arcane details of Civil War history.
His work as a programmer is suffering. He’s become one of those pasty-skinned,
soft-middled computer trolls he always crossed the street to avoid in college.
But his love for computers is true. He longs for purity in
code, elegance in design, and flawless, bug-free programs. A wake-up call comes
in the form of a late-night experiment. Cory decides to track all the cat
videos he’s watched, map them, then rank them according to their proximity to his
hometown of Newton, Iowa, where his own beloved cat Frady is laid to rest.
The result is a beautiful constellation of data. So lovely,
in fact, that Cory prints it out and frames it.
And thus a project is born.
Each day for a year, Cory creates a new work of art born of
data compiled and related to his life.
He charts his body weight, the provenance of each coffee he
drinks, the known locations of ex-girlfriends and lovers, the number of steps
he’s taken and miles driven, every purchase made on a debit card, the
nutritional content of his mother’s favorite recipes, his own heartbeat over
the course of one day.
A lithograph tracking his own trash becomes a starburst of
delight. A list a family members ranked by near-sightedness becomes an intimate
genealogical portrait.
Each day of information yields an aesthetic challenge, to
visually transform the mundane into the mystic and profound. And each set of data
brings him closer to a truth about using computers and the internet: the impersonal
can become the most personal, if you let it.
