Art Inspired by Tattoo Data

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Art Inspired by Tattoo Data

Artist Amanda Wachob tattoos people and then makes art out of her needle's movements.

For artist Amanda Wachob, some of the most fascinating aspects of a tattoo are the parts of it that are not permanent: the voltage, the rate of the pulsation of her needle, and the number of times she presses down on the pedal to make the tattoo happen.

"I just feel like there is all of this ephemeral information kind of swirling around a tattoo that's never really been captured before," she said.

Advertisement

As part of a project called "Skin Data," Wachob—who has worked as a tattoo artist for more than a decade—has been capturing these unseen components of tattooing and converting them into art.

For the project Wachob tattooed 12 guests at the New Museum in New York for $500 each. She used an oscilloscope, which is an electrical testing device, to measure the voltage of the machine used to create the tattoo. She collaborated with Maxwell Bertolero, a neuroscientist and friend she has tattooed in the past, on the visualizations.

"I've been wanting to do something that explores the technology behind tattooing for almost six years, and one day my friend Max said, 'you know I think I might be able to help you out with that,'" she said. "We are using a lot of the programs that he uses in his own work, which is to map and analyze brain data, basically. He tweaked the code for it a little bit, and we are using it for this."

Wachob collects data from the duration of the pulsations of the needle of her tattoo machine and the voltage of the electricity used over the course of a tattoo session, and translates them into visual representations.

The colors within the designs are based on a spectral scale and determined by the tattoo's voltage, which ranges from 6.2 to 11.7 on her machines. The length of each line is determined by the duration of the tattoo machine's pulse. The final image is plotted by 1:1 mapping and presented the way it would be in a scientific journal.

Advertisement

Wachob created twelve exclusive drawings just for her stint at the New Museum, tattooed clients in the New Museum store, and mapped data from each session for her project.

"I really want to gather up as much information as possible, all the numbers and information that happens around a tattoo and just capture it and map it and see what it looks like, because it winds up being almost a fingerprint of the experience," she said.​

She said she is always surprised at the variation between her designs.

"From the tattoos I've done here, when you take a look at all of the prints, it's kind of crazy to see how, even though I am just basically using three different tattoo machines, all of the different information is just so varied," she said. "It's kind of wild."

Wachob's Skin Data project wrapped up this week, but she says this is just the beginning of her exploration of the hidden technology behind the art of tattooing.

"This is kind of just testing the waters of it, but I'd like to gather as much information around the experience of getting a tattoo as possible—everything from how many times I step on my foot switch, and what the duty cycles of my machines are," she said. (A duty cycle is how accurately the spring connects with the contact screw on a tattoo machine.) "I like how tech and art intermingle, and this is sort of the beginning of an exploration of those two things."

Wachob's next step in the project is to make the prints generated from her sessions into "enormous" prints.

"The idea is that the tattoo I would do would be fairly small, maybe take about an hour, then I would collect all this information from it and maybe make a huge piece of art," she said. "There is just so much information around something so small that happens within an hour, so I really want to keep on collecting more information about everything and eventually make huge pieces of art."

Photos: Kari Paul