Quantifying the Emotional Self

Erdem Taşdelen, “The Quantified Self Poems,” 2016

Erdem Taşdelen, “The Quantified Self Poems,” 2016

Erdem Taşdelen’s fascinating conceptual project, The Quantified Self Poems, at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery until March 19, turns a critical eye to the way we use digital gadgetry to track the state of our bodies. Devices like Fitbit can count our steps, while other technology can be used to monitor blood pressure or sleep quality. Taşdelen, a Turkish-born artist now based in Toronto, became fascinated by this notion of the “quantified self” and its brave new promise of developing “better” human beings. “It’s almost like seeing the self, the body as a device that can be upgraded,” he says.

When Taşdelen heard about apps to measure emotional states, he found it baffling that something so ephemeral could be turned into data, in effect quantifying the unquantifiable. He began to use Emotion Sense, a British smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, reporting his moods three times a day for three months.

He worked with programmer Ali Bilgin Arslan to develop an algorithm that matched his emotional data with words from a 2,000-word dictionary developed by another collaborator, Daniel Zomparelli, a Vancouver poet. Zomparelli chose words he thought would work well in poems and gave each word a numeric value based on how active or passive he deemed it and also how negative or positive. He also developed skeletons for the poems, identifying spots for the nouns, verbs and other parts of speech that would populate the poems.

The collaboration yielded six poems, each covering a two-week period. Each word represents one interaction with the app. “It turned out to be a lot more complicated than I imagined,” says Taşdelen, who originally thought he would have enough poems for a book.

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Erdem Taşdelen, “The Quantified Self Poems,” 2016

silkscreen print, Courtesy the artist

Only Taşdelen can judge how well the poems reflect what was going on his life at the time. His first reaction: “Oh, wow, these actually make sense.” But, of course, the words are winnowed through Zomparelli’s sensibility and aesthetics.

The poems are original with some good turns of phrase that suggest meaning. But other passages are opaque. “I don’t think they look like poems that anyone would actually have written,” says Taşdelen. “They look quite strange. But it’s that aspect that I like, the strangeness of it.”

For example, one passage reads: “Hammer a bloody gutter until infamous babies disintegrate.” It’s a dark sentiment but Taşdelen says he knows the life situation that prompted it. “I’m looking at myself in a way where I’m almost estranged from myself,” he says. “I didn’t use those words. I would never use those words. And it’s supposed to be a representation of how I was feeling. But it just happened in this robotic way.”

Another surprise was the sexual undertone. “They’re very erotically suggestive,” he says. “That was never intended to be so. It’s partly coincidental, but also because there might have been a lot of words the poet decided to put into the dictionary that were suggestive.” When Taşdelen premiered the work in Toronto with a reading at the Art Gallery of Ontario, people began to snicker at the innuendo. “I had to stop and say I didn’t plan for it to be this way, it just happened.”

For his Vancouver show, Taşdelen produced the six poems as silkscreen prints. He also made prints of six images from the app’s user interface to help people understand the technology.

The work is interesting on many levels: it subverts notions of confessional poetry, complicates authorship, challenges the boundaries between text and visual art, and explores the limits of technology. “In some ways, I think of it as some sort of skepticism of digital technologies,” says Taşdelen. “But at the same time it is also a bit of skepticism about how words can convey emotions themselves. So it’s a skepticism of language too.”

Taşdelen, who has exhibited across Canada and internationally, is also showing a second work, Wild Child, a two-part video installation based on the story of a feral boy found in France in 1798. Taşdelen adapts this story, setting it in contemporary British Columbia. One video depicts preparations for an imagined documentary film, showing 12 actors as they audition. A second piece acts as a counterpoint, depicting a forest without human activity.