Xiaoyu Kang – Looking Outward – 08

The artist Rachel Binx introduces herself as an only child who grew up in Mexico. And her work started with her dream of becoming a world traveler by herself when she was younger. She would handwritten the location CSV of every city she travels to and tracted that information for years. What she did with the data was that she generated an image from all the places that she has been to through programming. She started collaborating with a jewelry company that use shapes that are generated from places to make jewelry, and the idea of the whole project is to take people’s experiences as data points and visualize them, thus summarizing someone’s life through the medium of a map. 

As the first project became successful, she started to create more products. For the people who didn’t move as much in their lives, she connects the streets that people walk every single day to generate patterns and creates them into jewelry. She also incorporated maps into other items such as skirts and pillows. 

In addition, she also did projects that used programming to document her life. For example she programmed her laptop to take pictures whenever she uses her laptop in a new environment. All of her works focused on data journaling, either through automated data or memory. What she was trying to do is to take the data points that are important and personal to people and turn the data points into something visual and physical.

The speaker talks about her project by connecting her work to her own stories and experiences. In this way, she made the lecture much easier to understand and much more relatable since a lot of her experiences are commonly shared among many people.

https://rachelbinx.com