No Good, Know How "Screen 4", laser-cut stencils, mono-print, trace-monotype, 23in. x 13in. 2018
No Good, Know How "Gaze Plot" video still, 2018
“No Good, Know How” is a multi-part installation that mimics gamified data collection systems. There are five separate groups of artwork in the exhibition space. As a system of interconnected artworks, the five groups each represent a step within a data collection system: ideation, design, collection, presentation, and sale. As the artist and creator of the system I play a role as game-maker, or interface designer; the viewer plays a role as game-player, or user; and other viewers have the potential to be the buyer.

The overall installation challenges the viewer to find an understanding of the codified system and to grapple with circular questions surrounding privacy, digital technologies, data collection, art, science, and perception. Though incredibly curiosity provoking, to what end do we use technologies such as eye-trackers? Who is the maker of the digital experience? What control does the maker have, what control does the viewer have? How is personal action and identity translated, commodified, and sold? Why would we as a society choose to value the monetary incentives for translating personal identity and action into commodity over protecting personal privacy? Do complex systems alienate us from each-other by excessively abstracting experience through multiple layers of translation? Do we trust the insights of a machine more than we trust each other?
No Good, Know How "Screens 1-6" various forms of monoprinting, 2018
No Good, Know How "Eye Data" xerox copies, 17in x 11in, 2018
No Good, Know How, video compilations, 2018

1. Ideation

No Good, Know How "Ideation" laser-cut monoprints, 2018
No Good, Know How, laser-cut chipboard, 2018
This group of printed and cut materials are sketches and ephemera from the "design" process in making the "I Spy" layouts. The layouts are made from drawing and printing based processes. Silhouette drawings of similarly-sized, small household objects (reminiscent of the traditional I Spy books) are duplicated and cut-out using a laser-cutter. Hundreds of tiny laser-cut paper clips, bobby pins, nuts and bolts, sewing needles, tacks, etc. are arranged into compositions and printed as ass-residue embossments, mono-prints, or trace-monotypes.

The prints and materials in this section are a sort of index of use-cases for the creation of the final I Spy layout. The objects chosen and their placement indicate the influence of the maker in the work. The decisions of the artist, the puzzle-maker, constructed the image-layout and design of the entire experience.

As the puzzle-maker I chose everyday objects, because the manufacturing of physical tools is no longer a part of most people’s daily work, training, or learning. The object is accepted as a means to an end without an understanding of its beginning. The objects as silhouettes are also in reference to the iconography used in software, websites, and interfaces. To navigate or touch the digital space, we search using an icon which references a magnifying glass (a tool which many of us have probably never used in practice but experience daily as an abstract idea of a physical action). I created my own set of icons for my I Spy game to explore the translation and mistranslation of tools and their uses as we become ever more alienated from analog processes of making.
"Coherent Shadows - Collection 1" laser-cut ash residue embossment, 22in x 17.5in 2018
"Coherent Shadows - Collection 2" laser-cut ash residue embossment, 29in x 17.5in 2018
"Cut, Trace" laser-cut trace-monotype, 22in x 17.5in 2018
"Relic" monoprint, 12in x 9in 2018
"Rubbish Drawer 1" laser-cut ash residue embossment, 17in x 13in 2018
"Rubbish Drawer 2" laser-cut ash residue embossment and monoprint, 17in x 13in 2018

2. Design

No Good, Know How "Screen 1", laser-cut ash residue embossment, 23in. x 13in. 2018
This sections shows six hand-made prints referred to as layouts or screens. The first two prints, or screens, are burnt residue embossing from the laser-cut stencils. The second two prints are primarily ghosts of monoprint stencils. The last two prints are primarily trace-monotypes using the larger chipboard stencils.

These artworks represent a pivotal point in the lineage of translation from analog to digital among the pieces in the exhibition. Loaded with a history of translation in their creation, the print are also a marker of loss. Viewing the same print on the digital screen and then again as the background of a video, visual quality and visual experience is lost in translation. Line-based drawing as translating is the foundation for both the visual and conceptual framework of the exhibition. Drawing the outline of a thing from space is touching something with my eyes. Drawing line through an eye-tracker is touching cognitive activity with a machine.
No Good, Know How, "Screen 3", monoprint, 23in. x 13in. 2018
No Good, Know How, "Screen 3", collage, monoprint, trace-monotype, 23in. x 13in. 2018
No Good, Know How, "Screen 3", collage, monoprint, trace-monotype, 23in. x 13in. 2018

3. Collection

This section welcomes visitors to play a technologically enhanced version of the classic children’s game “I Spy”. I Spy is played by reviewing a handmade guide-book indicating a certain number and kind of object to find within a composed image presented on a computer screen. Each screen of the test shows a digital copy of a handmade print. To begin play, the viewer must allow the computer to track their eye movements. The computer’s eye-tracking software records data about where the viewer looked and for how long. The data is output as a visualization, printed, and offered for sale.
No Good, Know How, "Eye Tracking Station", computers, cameras, xerox printer, 2018
“I Spy” becomes a metaphor for ignorance. The viewer is invited to complete the game or following the game as spectator which serves as a distraction from awareness, mindfulness, and slowness. The prompt sets me up as the game-master and the viewer as player, not unlike the marketer and the user. Both the test and the game use a standardized, predictable format for completing a task. Whether it be I Spy or an interface, both the puzzle-maker and the puzzle-player are ultimately subservient to the omniscient machine, the eye-tracker.

Complex, often very expensive, eye-trackers are excessively abstract in the line they walk from one point to another. The visual result of eye-tracking and the language we used to understand its function is equally excessively abstract and has the potential to produce just as much useless data as useful. Not every dot in a cloud of data is used to prove a point, but it exists. If human will is free, there are physical events with no causes, spots where someone looked for no reason at all. The investigation of knowing how something came into being produces just as much random, useless, or no good information as it does useful. The desire to control the mind in order to predict these unpredictable actions can but just as futile as fruitful.

4. Presentation

On display are three iPads on a table below a large TV. They display videos from a past eye-tracking event. In the same format as in the gallery, one at a time participants played the I Spy game in front of the eye-tracker. A web-cam records their face as they sit at the computer and the eye-tracking device creates documentations of where the participant looks in the form of video data visualizations. The video data visualizations output each person's eye movements in three ways: dot-and-line visualizations, heat-maps, and opacity-maps. Each video shows the same 4-6 minutes in different ways.
No Good, Know How, "Surveillance", video 2018
The TV shows two overlapping video-recordings of the same moment, Surveillance. The first video is about 1/6th the screen-size and positioned in the center; it shows a webcam recording of the player's face. The second video is behind it and full-screen; it shows the I Spy screen they look at and a serious of coming and going red-dots. The red dots travel in time with and in the direction commanded by the participant's eyes.
No Good, Know How, "Gaze Plot", video 2018
No Good, Know How, "Gaze Opacity", video 2018
No Good, Know How, "Heatmap", video 2018
The three iPads don't show the faces of the participants and only show video data visualizations. Each iPad shows a compilation of eight participants in three different data visualization types. The left-most iPad shows data as a Gaze Plot, that shows a dot-to-dot pattern (Gaze Plot) and each participant’s data is a different color (four blue and four red). The middle iPad shows that data as a Gaze Opacity, that shows a black screen slowing wiping away to reveal the background. The right-most iPad shows the data as a Heat-map, that shows black and white gradient blobs. In the Gaze Opacity and Heatmap visualizations it is impossible to distinguish one participant from the other.

The eye-tracker is a machine which spans the unseen gap, drawing a line from the eye to its subject and conjuring evidence of an unseen link. Entanglement theory conditions that one point in the universe links with another point without the requirement of spanning the distance between them. Both artists and scientists, driven by curiosity and questions, attempt to span the invisible line between points in space and ideas by making tangible pathways which were otherwise intangible.

5. Sale

No Good, Know How, "Eye Data", xerox copies, 17in x 11in 2018
This area shows black and white xerox copies of the data visualizations produced from these eye-tracking studies. Each copy lists the participant’s name, the type of data visualization, and the screen-number they were looking at. An overwhelming amount of data is produced from this experiment. With just eight initial participants viewing six screens yielding three types of visualizations, the xeroxs totaled 144 visuals. These could potentially be combined/compared in an exponential number of ways, and do not include charts comparing correlated data like time.

Conclusion

Looking into someone’s eyes is one of the most intimate person-to-person experiences, making eye-tracking a particularly intimate, mediated data-collection process. When participating in digital experiences we often lose control of our personal information. This can be through a social stigma, fear of missing out on the game, or a lack of awareness of when exactly we gave permission. Eye-tracking machines are most commonly used by marketers and advertisers. They use eye-tracking to test the efficiency and predictability of interface layouts and website designs. Efficient predictability proven by data is currency, both in its perceived authority and its value in a monetary system. As a direct commentary on the way personal data is invisibly bought and sold through internet connected devices, this system uses physical materials to show how the intimate motion of looking is collected, packaged, and sold. It brings of questions of digital surveillance. Who is watching when we think no one is watching? Do we have free will to look, to experience, without being watched, analyzed, quantified?