An Impersonal Portrait explores the construction of identity in the age of digitized personas. Drawing information from my DNA dataset and my Twitter archive, this data visualization installation assembles data from both sources into a hybrid strand of ‘text-DNA’. An approximation of the strand is simultaneously printed onto a continuous sheet of paper, fabricating a tangible length of this data composite. As text and numbers in a spreadsheet, the two datasets are impersonal by nature, yet they are also deeply personal representations of my identity — my Twitter archive in the emotional sense and my DNA data in the biological sense. While at its conceptual core it is a piece about identity, An Impersonal Portrait remains visually impersonal and scientific, alluding to the neutrality of our digitized personas in today’s technological context — we are, to some extent, just letters and numbers existing somewhere in a database.
Technical details:
The letters on-screen come from words that are chosen from my Twitter archive using a DNA-guided method. The program randomly selects a genetic marker (thousands exist in my dataset), and reads the position of the marker on the genome. The genetic position is then mapped onto a time position in my Twitter archive, at which a tweet is selected — for instance, if the genetic marker is located at the very start of the genome, then the program picks the very first tweet in my archive. The contents of the selected tweet undergo a textual analysis process using the RiTa library, resulting in one word being meaningfully picked. The word is printed onto the continuous piece of paper along with the ID of the genetic marker, while its individual letters slowly populate the strand of ‘text-DNA’ being created on-screen.
Created for the 2019 UCLA Design Media Arts Senior Exhibition. Built with Processing. Special thanks to my project advisor Casey Reas.
