In order to create a
self-portrait of myself as an emotional organism within an ecosystem, I decided
to record all of my emotions and their causes for a 24-hour period. I wanted
to discover my own predispositions and neuroses, and how my environment shapes
my emotions. Does one particular emotional state dominate my day? Or one particular
emotional trigger? Am I petty? Judgmental? Do I obsess? How does London impinge
on my existence? The form the project takes – charts and diagrams –
extends my practice as it quantifies and analyses inherently nebulous data
and somewhat absurdly applies objective tools to the subjective.
To collect the data, I kept a notebook with me all day. I intentionally chose
a day when I’d be going into the centre of London. As I felt something,
I wrote it down along with what triggered it. Sometimes I had to catch up
a bit later. The data was intentionally quite raw, and I made sure I didn’t
edit myself to appear more attractive. Gaps in the day represent emotional
drift. Later I tried to impose a rigour on it, transferring it to a spreadsheet
to quantify and analyse it. In order to present the data I found I needed
to generalise, to flatten the specificity and texture of an emotional response,
e.g. pleasure from a short checkout line at the grocery store becomes equal
to the pleasure of a phone call from a close friend. The resulting pie charts
and bar graph have an opacity and factuality that hide the messiness of me
in my world. The diagram presents me as the centre of that world and reveals
a bit more, particularly as the raw data sits in the background.
Therese Stowell
April 2005
www.theresestowell.com
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