PADMINI CHANDRASEKARAN

The series began when I decided to note down everything I touched for an hour, while I went about my day, awaiting my daughter’s waking cries. The data collected is personal, observational and inherently flawed. It is not only organized into object categories, but further dissected by recording the reasoning for the touch. The record-taking process was a strange balance between going forward with intended, touch-necessary actions, becoming acutely aware of touching certain things, involuntary or unavoidable touch, and later while painstakingly organizing the list into categories, remembering things that had been touched after the fact.

For my own data portrait, I fell back on tried and true graphic forms — simple shapes and patterns with a kind of Bauhaus, “designy” palette. It seemed essential to incorporate a physicality to the forms with texture, so I co-opted the visual language of risograph printing methods with digital brushes that allowed me to showcase intentional layering and offsets.

For my toddler’s portrait, I couldn’t get away from the distinct forms of her wooden blocks which were regularly scattered around the room for us to trip over. Her symbols are much more rudimentary — reflective of her instinctual, involuntary touches, simple discovery and short attention span. Despite only being awake for 40 minutes of the hour I recorded data for, she actually touched as many things as I did, and I was able to discover how much of her world revolved around play, learning her body, pushing things out of her way, and me.

The next in the series recorded the routine of our elderly family dog, nearing the end of his life. If the data collection had not started from the moment he barked to request help getting up, the piece might have been totally blank. Instead, it covers a thrilling 8-minute quest of him in search of my husband, and then 52 minutes sleeping in the kitchen, with a few pats when my husband emerged from working upstairs. For his symbol system, I utilized wireframe-like forms in black and white, because what goes on inside his head feels both really simple and also a mystery.

The last in the series is the strangest to me, because my husband essentially has two modes of operation: 1. full ADHD-fueled bouncing from task to task or 2. End of the month recovery where he essentially sleeps the same amount as the dog. I happened to record his data in mode 2, which was predictable only because during mode 1, he’s busy in some other part of the house where I can’t see him. Creating his symbol system was interesting to end with because it’s the only visualization that includes all members of our family. I could utilize symbols seen in previous pieces and center his piece as the glue of it all, much like I see the role of our partnership in our family.