Encoding the Everyday: Feminist Conceptual Art’s Resistance Self-Quantification

This paper addresses the visualization of personal data and the politics of self-quantification in the works of three feminist conceptual artists from the early Information Age, exploring how they uniquely encode the everyday in ways that materialize embodied experience and routine activity. By analyzing the works of Teresa Burga, Mary Kelly, and Adrian Piper, I examine how feminist approaches to data visualization provide an important model for resisting and reimagining the quantification of one’s daily activity. Although the visualization of personal data today (via phone apps, fit bits, etc.) often appears neutral and straightforward, these feminist projects remind us that, despite its “allure of objectivity” (as Ruha Benjamin characterizes it), data is drawn from and structured by hierarchical normative systems (based on gender, class, race, nationality, etc.). Against this allure, these three artists represent data in ways that expose its instability and non-neutrality, as well as their own ambivalence around its capture. For instance, Kelly charts the daily feeding cycles of her infant to mark his development, and simultaneously her “own sense of loss,” while Burga transposes biometrical data from electrocardiograms into complex visualizations that stress the coercive and controlling force of self-quantification, as well as its potential for empowerment and interpersonal connection. Counter the quantification of embodied experience into seemingly objective and all-encompassing data-sets, I argue that Burga, Kelly, and Piper frame data from a feminist perspective, as tied to concrete bodies, localities, and temporalities, and visualize it in a manner that is incomplete, contingent, and constructed.