Lifeloggers - Chronicling the Everyday

Lifeloggers: Chronicling the Everyday

Counting steps, tracking calories and checking in - new technology allows us to be our own favorite research project.

The artists in the exhibition, LifeLoggers: Chronicling the Everyday, take logging to a new level by translating their data into complex and prodigious artwork.

"Lifelogging" describes the extensive documentation of one's personal experience. Previously the domain of scientific research and recently individual health and fitness analysis, the impulse to track, map and graph now animates artistic practice.

The thirteen artists in this exhibition produce work in different media - from low tech to high tech - that demonstrates the chronicling impulse, not as an objective record of every second lived, but as a thoughtful and studied approach to revealing the complexities of human existence.

By focusing on a particular aspect of their lives, the artists in Lifeloggers turn personal bits of data and lived experience into works of art: Suzanne Szucs chronicled the passage of time through fifteen years of Polaroid self-portraits and Clive Smith painted miniature self-portraits on wood blocks every day for a year.

Others recorded belongings or surroundings: Jennifer Dalton documented both market and sentimental values for everything she owned at a particular time in The Reappraisal, and Elise Engler archived all of the things she carried while traveling in a series called Suitcase Drawings.

more: elmhurstartmuseum.org (182)

Elmhurst Art Museum

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