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Margot Bowman Changing How We Express Ourselves When We Use Technology

Multi-media artist Margot Bowman is working on a concept that aims to change how we express ourselves with technology and make innovations in mobility truly expressive.

Part of The Future Shapers Project

It's been 100 years since the first BMW model went into production. In the century that has followed, the BMW Group has created iconic vehicles and pioneered new technology. With MINI, it has always been about how design and technology is changing our ability to express our individuality – through personalisation and more choice. As part of an exploration into the future of personalisation, and as part of BMW Group's centenary celebrations, MINI is working with three cutting-edge designers who are pioneering new concepts in fashion, art, music and motoring.

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Margot Bowman is one of these pioneers, a 'Future Shaper'. As a multi-media artist, she is working on a concept that aims to change how we express ourselves with technology and make innovations in mobility truly expressive..

I visited Margot at her Dalston studio to see how her "Data Portraits" project is stepping up the possibilities for personalisation. For Bowman, selfies and Snapchat aren't the right digital tools to capture our personalities – Instagram filters just filter-out all of the things that make us unique. So Margot has set out to make a series of portraits that collect "data" about the deepest memories, thoughts, feelings and emotions of two sets of twins. Margot has been filming the twins in her studio and asking them a set of questions. Then, based on their answers, she is using her vibrant and distinctive illustrations as visual effects that are overlaid on the films. The results? Incredible GIF portraits that evolve and change; stitching together the digital and physical worlds. One twin has ghosts flying into his jacket represent the people he says he loves, another has branches growing out of her, representing her favourite way to "disappear", and another features wings, which represent, worryingly, the way one twin expects to die.

The project ponders what a future might look like when our phones, computers and cars know the truth of our inner-lives and can better help us express our intricate and unique personalities. What if a car could detect my phobia of tunnels and calm me down with cool air and a bright interior? What if it could tell I was a dirty stop out, sleep-deprived and needed energising on a drive home? What if it knew I was headed in the direction of an ex and automatically diverted me on an alternative route? Margot's concept displays an amazing potential for sensitive, empathetic and emotionally-geared technology. I caught up with her for a chat about her the project.

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Can you explain the concept behind your new "data portraits"?

So the idea is that, at the moment, we are engaging with technology that's got a low sensitivity; it doesn't have empathy. But at the same time, we're in this culture where we're photographing ourselves all the time. What we're trying to do is insert ourselves and our personalities into the digital space using pre-made tropes – tropes like "pouty fish face" or Snapchat's dog filter effect. To express your feelings you've just got Emoji and shit. You're basically giving people five boxes to put themselves into in order to express themselves, and it doesn't feel like there's any sensitivity. Most technology is developed by groups of well-educated, white men in Palo Alto who speak English, and they aren't necessarily going to give a fully-representative perspective on the whole of human experience.

With this project it's about imagining, creating a software that has art in its code! These data portraits will mean we are able to express ourselves in personal and unique ways using technology. The project imagines what technology might be like in 20, 15, maybe even 10 years time if technology is reclaimed by a wider group of people and in a more sensitive way.

How are you making the portraits?

We filmed two sets of twins sitting down in a room, in a very simple way. They answer a series of quite deep questions and the answers create visual representations that overlay onto the films, which are then going to be GIFs. The graphic elements that accompany their answers are in the style of my artwork: drawing with pencil, pen and then colouring them digitally. I really like to use collage and I'm trying to bring as much texture, vibrancy and energy to the project as possible. The twins respond to questions and make artwork that feels really, really alive – the antithesis of doggy-face on Snapchat.

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Can you explain the twin thing?

So the twin thing is because I see a parallel with twins and data. In terms of data and the way data collection works, if you have or you run a website, you see your audience as a set of data fields, but you don't know any specifics about them. You know that they are a female, who lives in this area, who spends this much online each month. But you don't actually know about the person and with twins it's a similar experience; because, someone sees the twin of the person they know and they think they know them but actually inside it's a completely different person.

And that's what the whole project is about; your inside is personal to you and what we need to fight for is more individual and more personalised tools to express what's inside us.

What are some of the questions that you ask?

How many times have you said "I love you"? How do you want to die? How do you deal with shame? Where on your body do you hold your identity? What's your favourite way to disappear?

Good questions! You've used interviews before in your W.E.T project and again now with the twins – it's almost like you interrogate your subjects.

I'm so curious, I could ask questions forever. And the premise with this data portrait project is that it plays on traditional portraiture. In traditional portraiture, a good portrait presents someone as a likeness but also with a sensitivity of who the person is, who they have been, or who the artist reads them as. In real life, you are able to read a person and what their energy is like. So I think that the questions that are on the list – questions like "how do you deal with shame?" – relate to things that define our personalities. For example. shame is huge, it runs people's lives.

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Are you hoping that this project will make people think more about how they express themselves?

I think that we live in a very expressive time but I also think that everyone's saying a lot and not really saying very much… So it feels like: "I'm shouting so loud but none of the words actually say anything I want to say" or, "I'm taking loads of selfies but why doesn't anyone understand me?" I think that fashion in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s used to be such a powerful means of expression because the only thing you had to express yourself, non-verbally, was how you dressed. But fashion just doesn't have the same power now – it's lost its purpose because we're expressing so much of ourselves digitally. However, the way we express ourselves digitally doesn't have the same fluidity and variation or poetry as the whole of the fashion industry, because the tools are made by tech people in California and not by crazy people in Paris or Milan!

Do you think that we will be able to express ourselves better if the tools for personalisation are more beautiful? How does beauty figure in your work? I think that we need beauty, it's part of the lightness and poetry of being a human being. On a personal note, as a woman, I didn't grow up thinking "I'm really beautiful", so making work has always been about making beautiful things that concentrate that idea. Also, because beauty doesn't have a direct function, it's so often walked away from. And I studied graphic design which is not about beauty, it's about functionality. I found it alienating the way that everyone was asking "does it work? Is it balanced?" and no one wanted to talk about whether something was beautiful. In terms of technology, I don't think the language has incorporated beauty yet and that's what I'm really passionate about doing with my life. Unlike lots of other artists who just dabble in technology, you really started working with it from the beginning. GIFs are one of your main materials, and always have been, so what's the attraction?

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The first time I made GIFs was while I was at [Central] St Martins. I started making them because I was really obsessed by digital culture but I couldn't code or anything. However, I could make images and it was a way of translating the visual into a digital language. What is so magical about GIFs is that they only play on a web browser, they only work in a digital space.

So GIFs are something that I've done for a really long time, and I think with this new project they are a way of bridging the gap between the complexity of the language we speak in and the networked world.

It seems like this project sort of moves away from this idea that data collection or personalisation technology is inherently evil or a bad thing, it moves away from the discourse around privacy and filter bubbles. You're making data into something expressive or creative.

I've realised that in the right way, data can be this amazing lifeblood in a project. What's cool about data is that because it's a set of numbers you can manipulate it with rules. For example you might use the number of Facebook friends a person has, multiplied by the number of events that they attend and that figure will define a value in an RGB colour mix which will, in turn animate a colour overlay on an image or film that I've made.

In future do you think the software will actually exist to make these data portraits?

It would be such a good app! I think in the next eight or 10 years that whatever comes next after Google glasses will be some sort of augmented fashion with live feedback – that will be really interesting. I think we need to be in control of what people see of us and we need to be given a good, more expressive language to do that with.

I want people to look at the data portraits and understand that even if your uniqueness is something that isn't always visible, it is really special. You don't have to form your identity out of the average data building blocks that you're given – like your most recently suggested purchases on Amazon. You're just better than that! And you're more complicated than that!

Thanks for talking with me Margot.

The BMW Group Future Experience Exhibition showcasing MINI's vision of the NEXT 100 years will take place at the Roundhouse, London, from the 18th to the 26th of June. If you want to win two VIP tickets to MINI's invite-only event on June 20th, enter your details here.

See the rest of The Future Shapers Project here