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2026
DAE Graduation Show, Dutch Design Week, 2026
Graduation project, Bachelor in Arts
digital philosophy
interactive
robotics
python
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Data Graphology is an interactive installation where audience swipes on a phone are translated into data points, analysed, and drawn live by two pen plotters onto a textile conveyor belt. As lines are written repeatedly over one another, they create a record of interaction, a contentious timeline of data collection.
Keyboards, cameras, and touchscreens guide the way the body interacts with the digital. As they encode the body’s movements into the language of the computer, they become instruments of capture, systematically siphoning gestures into data points. Like handwriting, these swipes are unique. By applying the logic of graphology (the pseudoscientific analysis of handwriting to reveal personality traits) these lines reveal complex user profiles.
When online privacy erodes, the ability to infer and manipulate our future behaviour through feedforward (using gathered data to predict and pre-emptively shape a user’s future actions or identity), turns personal identity into a tool of control. Thus, the information inferred about us, can shape what we are shown, and ultimately who we become.
In this installation, the invisible process of capture is made physical. The conveyor belt acts as a timeline where one robot writes the graphological analyses based on previous interactions, while the second layers new swipes on top. Over time, the data multiplies, becoming as abstract and hard to decipher as the digital realms we cannot see.This way, the fabric becomes an archive of interactions and inferred data, that when pressed against the skin becomes imprinted, completing the loop back to the body that produced the data.
This installation explores the translation from body to data and back again, questioning what this process means for the formation of identity and the implications of these definitions, both within and, by extension, beyond the online realm.