FEEL DATA

I asked myself: how can I get better in touch with how I feel? How can I develop a better relationship with my body and my feelings? How can I practice being more present in a way that fits into my daily life?

Being a data artist at heart, I love to combine different disciplines and artistic cultures. I see data everywhere. To me, our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our nervous system, even our breath is data too. It is soft data, warm data, with a certain quality that can be recorded and tracked and visualized. If we think of the system HUMAN as an entity that produces data (information at least), then we can apply similar mechanics to make sense of it, like we do with company data within Business Intelligence. I’m not claiming that it would make sense to define KPIs, but I wonder if there is not great value in becoming aware, collecting and analysing the dynamics of one’s inner world.

We could go ahead and be funny and call it Personal Intelligence or Inner States of Being Intelligence or maybe this is the actual psychoanalysis?? 😉 I like to call it simply Feel Data – as in I think that nowadays we understand data (more or less) and we, to an extent, Speak Data (thank you Giorgia Lupi) and what I advocate for is that we start becoming aware of how internal systems work and record what we feel as data.

The beauty of Feel Data is that it is in no way intended to be objectively assessible. Such an endeavor as giving a feeling or a nervous system state an expression, be it by recording it as a datum in Excel or drawing or painting a mark, can only be subjective in nature and that is absolutely fine. It is more about the awareness of one’s state or emotions than a quantifiable measurement that is statistically relevant. It is about understanding the system HUMAN or MYSELF better.

We spend our waking time understanding business better (in the form of our jobs), but from what I observe, we don’t apply the same interest in our inner workings. And if we do, our insights can be very abstract, scattered in time and hard to make sense of as a pattern. But if we not only take the time to feel our feelings, but also collect it, we help ourselves to see the pattern better.

So I would like to inspire you to give it a try and have fun and be creative with a personal challenge you have and find a creative expression for it, be it drawing, painting (Point Zero from Michele Cassou is brilliant), be it giving it an expression through your body, be it saying it out loud.

This is the form I came up with: 4 times daily I would pause and take a moment to notice how I feel and then paint a mark with watercolors based on a color scale that I have derived from the good old mood rings from the 90s. After drying, I would go ahead and express what I feel as a squiggle on top just because I find it beautiful.

Whilst it is possible to visually assess and even analyse the ebb and flow of my emotional state, to me two things are more important: first, it has become a habit for me to notice how I feel. And second, it’s simply beautiful. It adds beauty to my life and allows me to express myself creatively.

How to read

Each block of 4 marks represents a day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in the first row; Thursday, Friday, Saturday in the second row. Sunday was a day off from the practice 😉 And whenever a field is empty, it simply means that no mark was made (blank data) – either forgotten or life got too busy.

The colour scale is inspired by the good old mood rings of the 90s with each colour corresponding to a different emotional state as shown in the legend below.