Confession of a Recovering Data Collector

Confessions of a

Recovering Data Collector

& I had a love-hate relationship with data collecting. I found it laborious, frustrating and chore-like, but at the same time compelling, addictive and almost impossible to give up.

Introduction On 1st August 2006 Ellie Harrison announced that she had quit ‘data collecting’. No longer would she undertake the timeconsuming, self-imposed projects which both attempted to document, but also plagued, her daily life and routine. No longer would she have to apologise to friends, disrupt meal times and other social situations whilst photographing herself eating (Eat 22 p.18) or noting down the swear words that she uttered (Swear Box 2005 p.32).

No more introspection and no more using the ‘material’ of her own daily life to generate data and produce artwork.

Following this shock decision, Ellie found herself in a two-year period of limbo – recovering from the demands of data collecting and searching for a new way forward. It was during this period of reflection that she discovered what is known as Hysterical– Historical Praxis Therapy, which was to become the core focus of her recuperation and rehabilitation. Before Ellie entered as a patient, she confided in me as a fellow artist and peer, confessing that she hoped the therapy would enable her to ‘stop making work about myself and start making work about the world’ and to ‘develop a healthier relationship with my practice and become a better artist’.

Ellie’s decision to quit data collecting was cumulative – provoked by the increasing demands and pressure of each and every project that she undertook. In 2002, she began Gold Card Adventures (p.20), a project where she meticulously recorded and calculated the total distance she travelled on London Transport in a year (9,236 kilometres). This fascination with numbers led to the piece Statistics Are Hot Air (p.30), a colour-coded vinyl bar chart visualising the exact quantity of ‘gaseous emissions’ she produced daily throughout 2003. Then in 2006 Ellie began Tea Blog (p.36), where for three years she attempted to record ‘subjective data’ detailing what she was thinking about every time she had a cup of tea. At the end of each project, Ellie, consciously or not, appeared to push herself and the possibilities of her data collecting a step further – devising and taking on more and more complex processes. The extreme project 1

Timelines (p.38), for which, in the summer of 2006, she attempted to document everything she did 24 hours a day for four weeks, was for Ellie ‘the last straw which pushed me into quitting’.

I have to admit I was a little saddened to hear of Ellie’s announcement. I liked the projects that she had made by collecting data – I admired her work ethic and aspired to be as successful and prolific in my own practice as she was. Many of Ellie’s previous projects seemed to neatly, intelligently and interestingly respond to and reflect upon the world we live in – questioning, perhaps, why it is we feel the need to attempt to create order, define our tasks, analyse our decisions and communicate something about our daily activities to others. My enjoyment of these projects and others Ellie has worked on perhaps reveals my own attraction to and affiliation with ‘futile’ tasks, attempts at order and collections and collations of things that don’t ‘require’ as much attention as they are given.

This book is a document of Ellie’s public ‘dumping’ of data collecting and the rigorous process of therapy which followed this decision. The Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy has, as a result, enabled Ellie to begin to discover a new set of interests and concerns, to attempt to find ‘useful’ ways of spending her time and, as the therapist suggests, to become ‘aware of the perils of overproduction, and self-edit accordingly’.

I too am guilty of making work that fits into a similar mode of practice. I too have fallen into the traps of producing work that isn’t up to scratch, because I have stretched myself too thinly or said ‘yes’ to too much. And so it falls to me to consider the possibilities of Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy and, attempting to keep an open mind at all times, to try out the suggested methodologies, the proposed solutions, and, as was Ellie’s aim from the beginning, to attempt to develop ‘a healthier and more outward-looking practice’.

Hannah Jones

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Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy Are you an artist that has lost your way? Have you painted yourself into a corner because you cannot break out of the style or methods you spent so long trying to hone? Do you wish your practice lived up to your expectations of art instead of being the easy option you know you can pull off? Do you wonder what the point of it all is anyway?

If you answered ‘yes’ to none, one or more or all of these questions, then read on.

The following inspirational story is about the artist Ellie Harrison, who came to the Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy Clinic having made the shock decision to quit ‘data collecting’. She was suffering from severe disillusionment and asking similar questions to those above. After three months of intensive treatment, however, Ellie has transformed into a vivacious, prolific and fulfilled practitioner. She even feels positive about her past work too and now realises it was a necessary phase that has enabled her to develop her new, improved practice.

Ellie’s former condition is common among young artists. She had become unhappily entrenched in a very rigid way of working, most likely due to pressure from art world expectations, and the market in particular, to develop a signature style or methodology – a ‘brand’, you might say. Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy enabled Ellie to quiz herself on her ideology as an artist and as an individual in history and society, and reassess the relationship between the two. The ‘Hysterical’ and ‘Historical’ indicate the two processes applied to an artist’s understanding of their own practice: the immediate visceral emotional response and the longer, objective perspective. It is seldom that we, as artists or members of society, have the time to join these two things up or perhaps even understand how our roles as each vary.

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While politics is the rickety science of regulating a society made up of individuals, Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy is the science of just and true self-governance with respect to society, history and the future of art. Ellie undertook therapy to purge herself of her ‘branded’ practice, which was increasingly consuming and paralysing her. Ellie’s unique selling point (USP) was an obsession with collecting and displaying data about her own life. She doggedly recorded instances of everyday physiological functions, such as eating (Eat 22 p.18), farting (Statistics Are Hot Air p.30) and sneezing (Sneezes 2003 p.28), for a fixed period that would range from a few weeks to a few years. Sometimes she would even attempt to capture qualitative information – the sort of phenomena that are usually at odds with the scientific method, such as the content of moments of contemplation (Tea Blog p.36) or the emotive prompt for a bout of swearing (Swear Box 2005 p.32).

After a number of years of dissecting, enumerating and displaying every aspect of her life, Ellie contrived the ultimate exercise in self-analysis, which would eventually propel her into a state of paralysing disillusionment. The piece in question, Timelines (p.38), was conducted over a four-week residency in summer 2006, during which she categorised every single activity performed each day, reconstructing her life in colour-coded timelines that enabled her to ascertain its structure at a glance. The final spreadsheet contained 2,297 entries that indicated the entire array of nonspecific mundane activities, from ‘employment’ to ‘exercise’ to ‘sleeping’. As Ellie said afterwards: ‘it was horrible feeling so trapped – I couldn’t do anything without generating and accumulating data’.

After rejecting her former practice, Ellie sought help in her process of recuperation and has consequently made a full recovery from the cumulative trauma of her many years as a data collector. This book outlines the process, known as Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy, developed specifically to help retrain artists who are experiencing a damaging schism between self and others, history and contemporaneity, practice and theory, instinct and intellect, and art and the wider world.

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In brief, there are four steps to Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy, which can be summarised as follows: 1. emotional honesty in the form of the patient’s confessions 2. vigorous analysis of what lies behind these words 3. historically rigorous case studies of previous solutions 4. conclusive resolutions pointing the way forward 5. motivational slogans to carry the patient onwards to success and happiness The treatment is bespoke, as patients subject themselves to a process of painful frankness and cauterising criticality that is particular to their own practice. The therapist keeps a detailed report of this process, which then becomes the patient’s lifeline in the rare occurrence of a relapse.

Ellie has agreed to publish four unexpurgated sections of this report, as she believes that many other artists could also benefit from Hysterical–Historical Praxis Therapy. The following entries relay a painful journey of self-realisation and historical contextualisation that Ellie hopes will encourage other artists who find themselves in a morass of pointlessness and self-loathing to seek treatment.

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Report Section 1

Target-Driven Society Patient’s Confession Hopping from one project to the next allowed me to maintain a sense of structure and routine in my life. I was able to relinquish all control to the logic of data collecting.

Therapist’s Analysis Data can be used to signify personal phenomena. It reduces the complexity of lived experience to faceless charts, graphs and columns of numbers. Although it may be possible to ascertain how long the patient spent sleeping or working on her computer, there is no way of gleaning nuances or substantial insights into the nature of these activities, their effect on the world, or the patient’s moods or intentions.

This is a prototypical example of alienation in the business age. During the patient’s tender youth, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal programme of privatisation and micromanagement instilled a culture of targets and performance measurement that has infiltrated all aspects of British society.

Hospitals and schools are now gauged on quantitative parameters such as waiting times and grades, while culture is evaluated by way of visitor numbers, opinion polls and so on. This generally causes directors and employees to think in terms of tangible numerical outcomes rather than fuzzy humanist ideals, and can even skew working practice to achieve the correct numerical outcome rather than healthy patients or good art.

The data collecting artist propagates this culture of quantified qualities, effectively dehumanising experience and converting it into unintegrated and therefore meaningless instances of sneezing, eating and so on. By not affiliating these functions with a psychological state or social situation the patient was prioritising bald utility over enriching experience.

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Penguin book cover of Britain by Mass-Observation, 1939

Case Study: Mass-Observation Mass-Observation was a nationwide study initiated in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings with the purpose of collating ‘an anthropology of ourselves’. Through a battalion of observers, diarists, pollsters and photographers working across the country, Mass-Observation collected information on the everyday lives of Britons. Their written studies outlined social and cultural phenomena such as pub going, clothes rationing, savings, the national birth rate, juvenile delinquency, popular attitudes to religion and so on.

As an anthropological exercise, though, Mass-Observation was criticised for its objective means, whereby the will and experience of the individual was lost to the empirical data. By the early 1950s the group realigned their aims from social issues towards consumer behaviour, creating data for the marketing industry.

Conclusion Information culture and target-led endeavour result in dehumanisation and the instrumentalisation of individuals.

The desiccation of culture, society and politics can only be averted by considering contradictory individual concerns instead of abstracting them into figures for statistical manipulation that feed professional achievement profiles.

Motivational Slogan Nine out of ten people dislike statistics!

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Report Section 2

Mindless Administration Patient’s Confession I felt I was spending hours each week employed as the administrator for my own life.

Therapist’s Analysis The 1980s was also a decade in which businesses designed to maintain non-essential functions proliferated. Thatcher’s children, as the patient’s generation are called, grew up in an economic landscape where whole systems of commerce were established where, in the stead of goods, a stratum of abstract advisory, regulatory, alternative and optimising bodies appeared, spawning jobs with mystifying titles like ‘higher hedge fund facilitator’, ‘inter-business under-analyst limiter’ or ‘data collector’.

Time magazine cover showing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 14 May 1979

The unnecessary application of business management models to everyday life is a frightening fall-out of late capitalism’s prioritising of executive structures and administrative controls. Our electronic diaries are based on Fordist models of serial and contiguous synchrony, while high-street clothes sizes are continually altered to reflect the fluctuations in average body shape in on-the-fly computations similar to monetary exchange rate mechanisms.

The data collecting artist too becomes a self-regulating micromanagement structure, whereby fractions, numerical ranges and data categories are objectified in graphs, charts and tables with 8