serial consign

Last week, Kevin Kelly wrote about a web service right on point with some of the recent projects examined here on Serial Consign. Trixie Tracker is a parental database and scheduling application developed by interface designer Ben MacNeill. The service is designed for parents to track the daily rhythms of their infant(s) and over time, build up a body of data pertaining to sleep schedules, diaper changes, breast feeding, milk inventory and diet development. The goal of collecting this information is to provide analytics to make for more efficient parenting (i.e. realizing and capitalizing on the fact that junior is very susceptible to 3 PM naps). Trixie Tracker is a commercial application based off the research, tracking and visualization that MacNeill has been engaged in since the birth of his daughter Trixie four years ago.

The above image is a Sleep Probability Chart which tracks the sleeping patterns of an infant over the course of a day at a resolution of 10 minutes. From top to bottom, the diagrams track the sleep habits of a newborn, a 6 month and year old infant. MacNeill describes the logic of the visualization as follows:

The Sleep Probability chart uses a gray scale to display the probability of your child being asleep at a certain time of day for the selected dates. Areas of high contrast (black and white) mean your child is on a predictable schedule. Areas of low contrast (light, middle and dark gray) mean a less regular schedule. A uniformly gray chart would mean a completely random sleep schedule.

Armed with crystal clear visualizations, which are in turn based on months of observations, parents would most certainly have the means to "optimize" their caregiving. In Kevin Kelly's post on the matter, he identified Trixie Tracker as just one example of a growing movement called Data-Driven Parenting. Dr. Spock please step aside and make way for Mr. Tufte!

[trixie tracker / sleep telemetry chart]

I recommend poking around on the Trixie Tracker site as it is a strange and wonderful experience to see web 2.0 aesthetics applied to parenting. One of MacNeill's most interesting pre-Trixie Tracker projects was his animated feeding chart based off data culled in 2003. MacNeill also took part in a 2006 interview on parentdish in which he contextualizes his views on data and parenting.

[c5 / softsub]

Quite possibly the publication I most anticipated in 2007 was Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, a recent addition to the excellent Electronic Mediations Series published by the University of Minnesota Press. The book, edited by Victoria Vesna, is a compendium of essays and projects which engage the database as a critical and creative paradigm. Many of the projects and texts in Database Aesthetics were originally shown or published around 2000-2001 but the consolidation of this material into a single volume accentuates the importance of this body of work in the present day.

The text includes Lev Manovich's seminal essay "Database as Symbolic Form" from The Language of New Media. Norman M. Klein and Bill Seaman's contributions both contain engaging responses to Manovich's discussion about the future of narrative. Klein's essay "Waiting For the World To Explode" contains a particularly juicy passage which lays bare the shortcomings of the database as a tool for traditional storytelling:

Data are also filled with an unmistakable absence. Data cannot "conclude" a story; they cannot deliver a "suspense" ending, like a murder mystery - not in the traditional way (and I am not convinced that interactively choosing your own adventure solves this problem, even with high-resolution effects). Data are part of a process without an arc that requires a dramatic ending. Instead, they proceed by insinuation, by involution - towards a beginning, towards an aporia (the road without a name). That kind of journey can be extremely charming, like "a making-of" that is so massive that it does not even require a movie.

While the tone of Klein's observations is pessimistic, it does quite adequately describe the obsession with taxonomy evident in work such as George Legrady's Pocket Full of Memories, a key project mentioned numerous times throughout the text.

[george legrady / vital statistics - installed at the seattle central library]

In addition to several important reference texts which draw on literary, filmic and photographic schools of thought, Database Aesthetics also contains a few lucid survey texts which catalog impressive swaths of multidisiplinary work. These include Steve Dietz's "The Database Imaginary: Memory_Archive_Database v 4.0" (which is available on his website) and Christine Paul's "The Database As System and Cultural Form" which glides through a number of my favourite net art & visualization projects including 0100101110101101.org's Life_Sharing, Bradford Paley's TextArc and The Secret Life of Numbers (produced by Golan Levin, Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan Feinberg, Shelly Wynecoop, David Elashoff and David Becker).

Database Aesthetics also reminded me about two projects that I have not thought about for several years, Nancy Paterson's Stock Market Skirt (pictured above) and John Klima's ecosystm. Given my continued interest in Meta-Markets, it is quite timely to revisit these early financial data driven projects which, respectively, automate skirt length in relation to the market index and animate simulated ecologies based off real-time stock information.

While I only really touched on about half of the excellent content within Database Aesthetics, I hope it is clear that the text has made quite an impression on me. It works as a (recent) historical text, archiving and contextualizing an impressive array of work but perhaps more importantly it serves as a definitive reference through which to interpret much of the visualization and software art being produced today.