Look at me! Look at me! I’m writing about attention. I’m trying to be clever and ironic. Right? If you’ve decided to read on for Part Two then it must be working. So here is the explanation of the said idea.
Having had a few shows on recently I found myself becoming obsessed with my own analytics feature on my website; often delving straight into the statistics and not bothering with the page layout update as I should have done…. Who’s coming from where? What are they looking at? Which is the most popular page? I didn’t even realise I was doing it at first; more like a match day analyst than an artist, wasting time on the figures. Granted, it’s fascinating to find out such things (weird results do come up) but this is precisely what I was talking about in Part One - searching for the gratification that your own efforts didn’t go unnoticed.
How to turn this very modern fixation into a visual form gave me a lot to think about. How best to represent or symbolise the ever changing information in front of me? The complexities of running a website and what it actually tells you about your level of success as an artist needed dealing with.
The visitor traffic graphs provided the answer. I can fix the algorithm to capture data over any length of time and interestingly, the analytics tell you if this month was better than the last by way of percentages. This created natural ‘competition’ within the forms themselves and once I had created an overlay of peaks and troughs, it was evident that they represented the obsessive feeling that I was after.
Layout experiments 1 & 2 August 2020
Furthermore, without any attached indicators or descriptions, each overlay has the potential to symbolise pretty much anything really; how much booze you drink, how much you can’t stand your job at any given time, the bloody virus…
But I digress, the real point of this work is to capture what it’s like to be a part of the attention culture and the concept lies in the attempt to visualise how my work is being perceived as an artwork itself.
As in any creative endeavour, your momentum from one thing to the next is crucial and validates which ideas are good and worth developing. Thus, I think that the transformation of entirely banal information such as IP addresses, visiting times and click rates into a visual form has some legs…
Coming up next week in Part Three: The expanded waveform