Art confronts the uncertainty of human existence: Why am I alive? What makes me different from anybody else? Handprints made some 40,000 years ago, are a common feature of Upper Paleolithic cave art—a kind of prehistoric selfie. National Geographic describes the early artists as sending a timeless message: “Like you, I am human. I am alive. I was here.” So it’s unsurprising that many data artists are responding to an increasingly data-saturated culture. After all, almost every human interaction with digital technology now generates a data point—each credit-card swipe, text, and Uber ride traces a person’s movements throughout the day. The smartphone, as The Economist recently described, is a true personal computer, the defining innovation of the era, on par with the mechanical clock or the automobile in past centuries.

In turn, there’s been what the Pew Research Center calls a self-tracking explosion, whether it’s counting the number of calories or using a mood app to glean patterns in one’s mental state. Like a fingerprint, no two people have the same data set. A couple sharing a bed follow independent sleep cycles. Friends who spend the day together count different steps; their phones connect to different IP addresses. But what’s more remarkable is the idea that within all of these numbers lies a better way of understanding ourselves. The information doesn’t just provide a broad document of a life lived in the early 21st century: It can reveal something deeper and even more essential.

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One data artist who believes this is Laurie Frick, who splits her time between Austin and New York City. She came to art circuitously, after spending 20 years in tech working for HP and Compaq and co-founding a software company. Frick believes that while numbers are abstract and unapproachable, human beings respond intuitively—and emotionally—to patterns. Unlike many of her peers, Frick has no assistants. She uses self-tracking data to construct objects and large-scale installations, including one called Floating Data that’s about two stories tall and made from 60 anodized aluminum panels that represent her walking patterns. Frick used her own records, gathering steps on her Fitbit and combining it with location data from the online program OpenPaths and her iPhone’s GPS. “I drew a little track that tries to capture the experience of walking speed, and the feel of walking through a busy neighborhood near my apartment in Brooklyn,” she explained.

In a series called Moodjam, Frick took thousands of Italian laminate countertop samples from a recycling center and created a series of canvases and billboard-sized murals based on her temperament. For weeks, she manually tracked her feelings, using the online diary Moodjam, which allows users to express their emotions in color patterns. The smaller Moodjam pieces capture only a day’s worth of data, Frick’s ups and downs over a 24-hour period. Larger ones reflect weeks of journal keeping and internal swings. For her upcoming solo exhibition this May, at New York’s Pavel Zoubok Gallery, Frick has made wood, leather, and paper assemblages based on accounts of her daily activities. In several pieces, she used apps like ManicTime on her laptop and Moment on her iPhone to track each click and touch of her screen for almost a month. Frick is adamant that her work is about more than simply visualizing information—that it serves as a metaphor for human experience, and thus belongs firmly in the art world.

The distinction between data presentation and data art is often fuzzy, and the art world still struggles to separate the two. For example, MOMA’s recent show, Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection, included digital prints with images generated from ArcGIS software. The work, Million Dollar Blocks, was designed at Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab and showcased a series of maps based on data from the criminal-justice system. According to the project, of the more than two million incarcerated people in the U.S., a disproportionate number come from a handful of neighborhoods in the largest cities. The maps are meant to pose ethical and political questions about criminal justice reform, and they do that successfully. But Million Dollar Blocks may just be powerfully presented data, rather than conceptual art, which is where the artist’s underlying idea is more important than the execution.

Similarly, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s current show, America is Hard To See, includes a 1971 piece by Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System. The work comprises 146 photographs of Manhattan apartment buildings—mostly tenements—maps of Harlem and the Lower East Side, as well as charts documenting the ownership structures of the buildings. Haacke culled the data from public record, and the art, according to the Whitney’s label, is an “institutional critique” that “chronicles the fraudulent activities of one of New York City’s largest slumlords over the course of two decades.” Yet in a world of enhanced graphics, simply displaying data effectively—with or without photography—won’t constitute compelling art on its own. Nor does every important data pattern raise existential questions.