

A Form of Extraction

Form of Extraction begins with a question: what does the personal data accumulated within digital systems actually contain?

Online purchase records are typically understood as transactional logs composed of numbers and text. Yet, when viewed over time, they reveal more than records of consumption. They carry traces of everyday routines, recurring behaviours, personal preferences, and memories tied to specific moments in life. If so, could this data be more than a simple record—could it be a fragment extracted from the self? To what extent can data describe an individual, and what does personal data come to represent once it has been extracted, accumulated, and commodified within systems of digital capitalism?

Form of Extraction emerged from an unexpected encounter with my own personal data.

Following a large-scale personal data breach at a South Korean e-commerce platform, I decided to delete my account as a form of protest. Before doing so, I downloaded five years of purchase records that had been stored on the platform. At first glance, the file appeared to be nothing more than a spreadsheet of transactions. Yet, it soon revealed itself to be something closer to a personal archive of memory. It felt as though a record of my everyday life had quietly left my possession and been preserved somewhere else.

As I revisited the data, each purchase record began to reveal more than a product name or a price. Certain entries evoked specific periods of my life, everyday routines, desires, anxieties, and moments I had believed were long forgotten. Although reduced to rows and columns of text and numbers, the data still contained traces of a life that I could unmistakably recognize as my own.

Data Visualization

Rather than adopting the product categories provided by the platform, I reclassified approximately 600 purchase records into three interpretive categories: Body, Expression, and Environment. These categories do not describe the products themselves, but the different ways consumption participates in the construction of the self. Body encompasses purchases related to physical care and maintenance, Expression refers to objects used to communicate identity and engage with others, and Environment includes items that shape everyday living spaces and routines.

The project transforms these records into a series of generative digital sculptures. The statistical patterns embedded within the dataset are first translated into noise maps, where time, category, and purchase value are compressed into a single visual structure. Rather than presenting data as charts or spreadsheets, the noise maps reveal its density, rhythm, and distribution, reflecting the objective logic through which digital platforms organise and profile an individual.

These noise maps then become generative structures for digital sculptural forms. Alongside them emerge another set of forms informed by personal memory, emotional association, and subjective interpretation—dimensions that cannot be fully captured by data alone. Through this parallel transformation, the work places computational representation and lived experience into dialogue.

Gradually, these distinct structures converge into a single sculptural presence. This process is not simply a visualisation of personal data, but an exploration of how extracted digital traces can be materialised, reinterpreted, and reconstructed into a new form of portraiture. The work suggests that while platforms reduce a person to measurable behavioural patterns, those same records continue to carry memories, experiences, and meanings that exceed computation.