[Music] I'm Georgia I am Italian but I live in New York I'm Stephanie I was born in Denver Colorado but I've lived in London for the past 13 years we at hly met each other in person twice when in September 2014 we decided to collaborate on a year-long project to get to know each other through our data their data was conceived as a new type of Correspondence through creating and sending handdrawn data postcards across the ocean to each other we collected personal data around a shared Topic in order to investigate and reveal aspects of ourselves
and our days to share with the other person by counting and reducing in a way to data even the most shameful personal Revelations they somehow felt not so shameful anymore they data as we gathered our weekly data the process was much more labor intensive than just deriving stand metrics through using technological devices the very first week of dear data we chose a pretty cold and impersonal topic how many time do we check the time in a week we discover something about the other person's days through the protext of my data collection why was I checking
the time what was I doing was I bored was I hungry was I late I finally realized during our week of gathering data on the urban Wildlife we saw around us each week isn't a scientific comprehensive survey of every single animal I passed by or every emotion I felt and so on but a record of Georgia and I noticing and US marking our awareness some weeks we notice more and some weeks we notice less and that's an indication of our personalities and our lives as well drawing with data when the drawing is the final output
can be painful it's laborious demanding it's frustrating my week 24 is a perfect example a week of doors uh to give the other person the idea of the pace of our days through the internal and external environments we entered in often during the project the act of counting became something that was emotionally charged in week 29 Georgia and I ended up tracking moments when our partners inspired love or inspired annoyance this card became like a love letter to my husband I like how instead of giving someone flowers now you can give a data set once
the visualization was complete each week we would drop the postcard in our post box and wait with our fingers crossed we learned to pay attention to live in the present much more to be more aware of our surroundings and of our behaviors with new lenses finally we both realize that data is the beginning of the story not the end and should be seen as a starting point for questioning and understanding the world around us instead of seeing it as the definitive answer to all of our questions [Music]
