My Little Big Data is a DIY investigation into personal data analysis to create the artists’ “portrait”. It’s the result of a year-long collaboration with data investigator Vladan Joler, to whom the Mattes gave 13 years of their private email metadata and several months of browsing history. The installation includes a 24 mins video essay and a modular carpet.

The carpet is a “physical” manifestation of one of the graphs that appears in the video essay. Composed of office carpet tiles of 12 different shades of gray, it shows the intensity of the Mattes’ email communication over an entire year, with dark squares representing more activity, lighter squares representing less email exchanges, and holes representing time “off the grid”.

Online, our every action leaves an invisible trace buried in data. Analyzed together, these traces can reveal very intimate details about us. Like the famous portal in Spike Jonze’s movie that led to John Malkovich’s head, this video is a portal into the artists’ minds.

Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Melania Dalle Grave for DSL Studio.

Authors: Eva & Franco Mattes

Eva & Franco Mattes (Italy, 1976) are an Italian artist duo living in New York. They were among the first artists to use the internet as a medium to create art. Through videos, installations and websites, their work responds to and dissects our contemporary networked condition, always approaching the ethics and politics of life online with a darkly humorous edge. Their works can be found in the collections of the SFMOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fotomuseum Winterthur, X Museum and the Walker Art Center. Links to many of Mattes' projects can be found at their website: https://0100101110101101.org

My Little Big Data (2019, 24')