Quotidian Record is a limited edition vinyl recording. It interprets a continuous year of my location-tracking data as captured via GPS on my mobile phone. Each place I visited, from home to work, from a friend’s apartment to a foreign city, is mapped to a harmonic relationship. 1 day is 1 revolution ... 365 days is ~11 minutes.

As the record turns, the markings on the surface indicate both the time as it rotates through every 24 hours and the names of the cities to which I travel. The sound suggests that our habitual patterns have inherent musical qualities and that daily rhythms might form an emergent portrait of an individual.

As physical vinyl, Quotidian Record may be collected and fetishized, reframing the value of data today in terms of music culture. It provides an expressive, embodied, and even nostalgic alternative to the narratives of classification and control typical of state and corporate data infrastructure.

For more information, see “Quotidian Record: The Musical Interpretation of Mobile Phone Location Data” in The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art, 2020 (publisher, pdf)