Connections is my attempt to map out and reflect upon the various relationships that have influenced my life in both big and small ways. To create this piece I first spent several hours planning out which individuals I wanted to include, assigning each person a unique ID, and sorting them into various categories, such as my mom’s extended family, Legacy, or my friends from the BOSP Madrid program. Next I collected all of the raw imagery for the network, which involved searching through Facebook, Instagram, and my own personal photo archives. The final step was simply to place all of my nodes and edges on a single canvas. However, this proved to be much more time-consuming than I imagined; this step alone took about 12-13 hours and led to my first and only all-nighter at Stanford.
For our self-portrait assignment I created 160, which is a visual reflection of the academic work that I completed throughout my four years as an undergrad. The piece’s title comes from the exact number of academic units I had taken leading up to my senior spring.
As a digital hoarder who meticulously archives everything online, I had easy access to all of the coursework I had ever completed, including CS scripts, technical risk assessments, Spanish reading reflections, research papers, and mathematical problem sets. I grabbed random snippets from as many of these assignments as possible in order to create the giant blob of text that serves as the portrait’s body. While I could’ve automated this process with a script, I chose to do this by hand in order to sift through and revisit all of my past work.