Grey Area is an artwork created by Friedrike Paetzold, an artist who in 2002 minutely documented feelings of want, consumption and fulfillment over 24 days. She then used this data to make graphs, which present hourly rates for these three categories. By clicking through the collection of graphs the viewer is led to a pixelated portraits Paetzold developed by using grid system based on the data sets. The final portrait is an overlay of these grids accompanied by a 3-track soundpiece made out of the same data. In other words she made an attempt to make data create a self-portrait; to visualize data to create an interactive history. The viewer has to click through it to go further and to make it to the end, the final piece of the self-portrait.
This artwork is a take on human feelings of everyday life that most of us should be able to relate to. It evokes for example the question of what a big part of our lives consumption is. As Paetzold says herself, “We are defined by what we desire, and how we get what we want and how happy we are with what we have.”
Here is a link to the work: http://turbulence.org/Works/greyarea/
