Category: Digital Residencies

The past two weeks, I have been continuing my part time job whilst doing a two week summer playscheme for kids. I have done this every year for four years and used to do this as child. This hasn’t given me much free time therefore I decided to monitor how often I got painted as it is very common to get paint three or four times through the ten days. 

This year I got pained five out of ten days. 

• 24th July – Grey and white, over the face.
• 27th July – Blue, pink and purple paint brush lines, across the face and neck.
• 31st July – Dark blue, whole body (hair to toes, including clothes).
• 1st August – Clown facepaint. 
• 4th August – Spiderman facepaint.

I wanted to replicate the style and colours in which I had been painted onto this postcard. Using facepaint, I sponged some of the basic colours down like gray/white, dark blue and red. As I didn’t want to paint a clown, I sponged the colours used all close together. I then used a paint brush to do spider like web’s on top of the red and I created lines similarly to how it appeared on my face.

I really enjoyed playscheme however exhausting it can make me. I hope this postcard shows how fun and playful it can be. 

This week I monitored my phone usage. For five days I recorded how many times I used my phone. In order to keep track I noted these using gates on my arm.

Moreover I wanted to monitor what I was using my phone for. The categories were as follows:

• Checking the time
• Replying to messages
• Social media
• No real reason
• Phone calls
• Work-related
• Camera

After half a day, I realised how difficult it was to keep track of how often I checked the time as it was so frequent. I decided to remove this category and only recorded when I unlocked my phone using its password. 

I did test pieces using different ways I could display this; I began with a ring idea.

After seven circles, I realised this was not going to work as there would be five days with on average 40 checks. I then tried a bar graph style.

This would have worked very well if I had also monitored in which order I used the sections; for example messages, camera call, messages, call, work etc. 

This was the finished postcard. This was the most effective and efficient way of reflecting my data. I was disappointed with how often I go to use my phone and how much of an necessity it is to my life.

To Rachel ~ love Beckie 

The purpose of my fourth postcard was inspired by Radio One’s competition week. Whatever the prize or competition it was always involving ‘words’ usually where you were to listen out for a particular word. I decided to use my conversations via Facebook, text, WhatsApp etc. to see how often I spoke about myself, the other person and referenced time.

Time = 56 times

Myself = 61 times

The other person = 83 times

It concerns me how often time was discussed within seven days. After researching, I discovered that the word ‘time’ appeared in the top 50 most commonly used words in the English language. This encouraged me to monitor how often I used it. Although I had to widened this so it became references to time eg. days, months, years and numbers rather than the word time.

To layout this information, I consisted using coloured lines. 

Each continuous coloured line being the length of the result. This however didn’t fully replicate the purpose of the postcard or the data collected. Instead I drew from a theme I was exploring as part if my final major project within foundation which involved shape outlines. Moreover, after testing this with felt tips I decided to use embroidery silks sewing the shapes in. I used a different technique for each colour to further emphasise the different sections. 

The green (representing time) is a basic running stitch. 

The yellow (representing myself) is a back stitch.

The orange/brown (representing the other person) is a laced running stitch.

Each of these were basic stitches, I felt this as best as the paper was thick and became extremely difficult to see into. 

Dear Rachel ~ love Beckie