Michael Mandiberg: Quantified Self Portrait

LACMA

A two-column, six-row image; one column showcases evolving work screenshots, the other tracks a person's hair and beard growth.

Courtesy Michael Mandiberg and Denny Gallery NYC

About the Exhibition

Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Michael Mandiberg exhibited Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms), a sound installation in the Pritzker Parking Garage elevators which combined recordings of the artist’s heartbeat and digital media alerts. Quantified Self Portrait (1 Year Performance) is a video composite of a year’s worth of self-surveillance that creates an impression of an artist's daily work. The work which originated from his proposal for the Art + Technology Lab in 2016, is a year-long performance where he self-tracks his labor through means of pervasive custom surveillance software, and showed the results as a multiple-part multimedia installation. He used himself as a proxy to hold a mirror to a pathologically overworked and increasingly quantified society, revealing a personal political economy of data. Quantified Self is a social movement in which technology is used to self-track personal data in order to gain a fuller, unbiased understanding of oneself. This self-portrait is also a symbol of the artist today not as an individual laborer, but as someone who is part of a larger network of workers, agents, and organizations. He addressed that despite a long history of the self-portrait, people have few representations of the daily life of contemporary artists.

About the Program

LACMA Art + Technology Lab

The LACMA Art + Technology Lab supports experiments in design, creative entrepreneurship, adventures in art and industry, collaboration, and interdisciplinary dialogue. Inspired by LACMA’s seminal Art and Technology Program (1967–1971), which paired prominent artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol with the resources of major corporations, the program was revived in 2015 as part of The Hyundai Project at LACMA, our ten-year partnership with the museum. The Lab provides grants, in-kind support, and facilities at the museum to support the progress of artist projects that take purposeful risks, and to foster innovation and collaboration across disciplines.

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