Chloe’s Work

Weeks 10 & 11

Final Piece – 32, 873 minutes

A Conceptual Portrait of my Boyfriend and I

The piece is a collection of all of our phone calls over a period of 7 months (May 10- November 24).

For my final piece, I took the data I collected of all the phone calls between my boyfriend and I and created a video piece. Each time and the amount of minutes we spent on the phone are flashed on the screen for 0.2 seconds while the sound of a phone dial tone plays monotonously in the background.

Overall, I am very happy with how this project turned out! Most of it was spent on the process of collecting the data, and then entering it into a format that could be received by the viewer.

In total, it took me about 3 hours to create the excel spreadsheet of all the times spent on the phone, and I found it to be a very tedious task. However, it was also interesting to take a big part of my relationship and make into a very analytical, not very romantic, set of data. It definitely made me think about how we define our relationships with people, and what it means to quantify a relationship.

Entering the data into the video format took another 3 hours and was yet another tedious task.

This project also made me think about how else people could quantify and represent their relationship with another person. Perhaps letters sent, number of texts received, number of meals shared together, belongings left behind at each other’s houses, number of miles spent driving to see each other, etc.

Proposal – Conceptual Portrait

For my conceptual portrait I am going to create a portrait of my boyfriend and I through our call logs.

My boyfriend and I live an hour and a half a way from each other, and so we spend a lot of time calling. Thus, I was curious to see just how long we spend on the phone with each other.

My phone bills come with a history of all the incoming and outgoing calls for that period, along with how long they were and at what time they were initiated. So I decided to record every time my boyfriend and I called each other. I only had access to my past 6 billing periods, and so I ended up collecting data from May 10th to Nov 24th.

How Long We Spent on the Phone – Over a Period of about 7 months

Minutes – 32, 873

Hours – 547.9

Days – 22.8

Weeks – 3.25

The Project

On Kawara

I was really inspired by On Kawara, and his interest in the subjectivity of time. I love how he takes something really mundane, like a date or time, and makes it into a procedure and process that he repeats every day without fail. The end product of much of his work is an extensive collection of something we take for granted, like the date, that feels so powerful and almost overwhelming when displayed together.

I really like his piece, One Million Years, in which he lists the years 998,031BC to 1969AD in the first book and 1993AD to 1,001,992AD in the second one.

I am definitely inspired by this piece in particular, as he gave himself such a monotonous task of writing out every year.

I am thinking of doing something similar with the dates and times I collected from my call logs.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

I was also inspired by Gonzalez-Torres piece, Perfect Lovers, in which he places two clocks side by side each showing the same time. However, they slowly become more and more out of sync, as clocks sometimes do.

I really like this piece because it is incredibly simple, yet conveys meaning about what it means to be in love with someone, and how sometimes you can become out of sync.

Just as my proposed idea relates to the idea of passing time and romance, I find this piece incredibly inspirational.

Audio Piece

There are just under 400 different times recorded in my excel spreadsheet, and so I am thinking of creating an audio piece in which I read each time.

Thus, I am creating both a record of time, and a portrait of my relationship.

Written Piece

I could record the data I have collected in some way.

I could write out the call times and minutes spent on the phone over and over again to create a text piece, as inspired by John Baldessari’s I will not make anymore boring art.

The repetitive nature of a text piece like this would be a reflective exercise on the sheer amount of time I have spent talking on the phone with my boyfriend.

Video Piece

Create a video in which the data I have collected flashes on the screen quickly, creating the illusion of passing time.