This textile was made with 88 pieces of canvas, 41 hours of laser engraving, 10 hours of sewing, and two years of my internet browsing history as collected by Facebook. My “off-facebook activity” includes timestamped page views and purchase history from every website and app I visited from approximately September 2019 to September 2021.

We often hear that social media companies, armed with this type of personal information, can know us better than we know ourselves, but when I looked through this data I felt that my identity was completely absent. I saw quilting as a way to interface with this data using my body, thereby emphasizing its materiality and fostering intimacy and self-knowledge.

laser-engraved canvas, thread, 3 video channels and sound
85” x 135”

This exercise served as a meditation on the labor, both human and machine, that goes into the creation of online personhood and digital identities. While online platforms belie the harvesting of data behind user interfaces, this work invites viewers to participate in close reading of another’s personal information. The computer-native .json format is juxtaposed with a large-scale reconstruction of these patterns on canvas. The aim is to shift power away from algorithmic systems of content curation and targeted advertising towards an assertion that individuals are more than the sum of their data.