With this project I was looking at social media as representation of society’s global voice. I wanted content on a platform where content is created and discarded at a rapid pace and to then extend its shelf life and elevate the content by creating permanent body modifying artwork. The idea was to create a  tangible and permanent experience with posts or ideas people share with the world, which are often not thought of again after they are liked or scrolled past despite the idea that the internet is forever and all will therefore be seen forever.

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The outside data source used was a month of my friend’s twitter likes. I got one tattoo per week I analyzed. The parameters determined by the data were then given to an artist, who in turn created artwork to be tattooed on my body.

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Every liked post's subject was categorized into one of the following: political, anime, music, general comedy, informational, animals, sports, and video. Each category was set to dictate a different aspect of the tattoo, such as color, content, and artistic style. The data sets also determined the location of where on my body each would end up. The formal elements of the graphs and charts I used to track the data created the literal boundaries of the shape of composition for the artwork.

 

I gave a lot of freedom of interpretation to the artist, as it was an added element subjective commentary on the intake response of the content. I set a 24 hour window in which I would observe as a day, given that myself and the subject were not in the same times zone. 

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The full process of data collection and further detailed explanation and exploration of the process was all documented on a tumblr blog.