Laurie Frick: How Data Becomes Art and Why Surveillance Could Be Beautiful

Artist Laurie Frick makes portraits without faces. Instead, she transforms personal data into tactile artworks made from wool felt, leather, and sandblasted glass. A former tech executive who spent 20 years in Silicon Valley, Frick has been tracking herself obsessively—sleep patterns, location data, heart rate—since the early 2000s. In this conversation, she shares her radical vision: that surveillance could become a tool for self-knowledge, what Google executives told her when she pitched them this idea, and why medieval Sienese art holds the key to understanding our data-saturated future.Explore Laurie's work: https://www.lauriefrick.com/Join our free newsletter and become an art insider:⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://mailchi.mp/seen/waitlist⁠⁠⁠If you want to connect with us between episodes, follow us on Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/watchseenart⁠⁠⁠⁠.About the Have You Seen? series:The ⁠Have You Seen? Series⁠ is all about talking to emerging and mid-career artists about their journey to now.Curious about how an artist got to where they are or indeed why they chose art in the first place? Then this series is for you. Join us as we speak to emerging and mid-career artists across the globe. Don’t worry, there’s no hiding behind art speak here, or pretending that being an artist is a bowl of cherries. We’re here to hear it all, straight from the source.