Unapologetic work of a data parasite
Unapologetic work of a data parasite
2016
Mineral pigment, gouache, color pencils, and graphite on paper
45”x 216”
This drawing is composed entirely with my traced writings from the whiteboards at the Broad Institute in 2016.
During my first few months of the residency at the Broad, I walked around the Institute a lot trying to get myself familiar with the lab environment, and I found scientists’ writings on the whiteboards interesting and also beautiful. It didn’t take me too long before I got to the whiteboards with vellum papers and markers and began tracing.
These whiteboards got erased once a week, and I felt as if I was “preserving” the data by tracing them. These writings were ephemeral—ideas and thoughts made into visual forms on the whiteboards for a week. I began to regard my activities as data gathering. One evening while I was tracing, a scientist who was watching me at work said, “Are you stealing my data again?” He then explained his diagram to me.
To create this drawing, I re-traced my tracing many times over and composed them in a way that ideas flow.