Materializing the Interface: Personal Data feeds Generative Art

Author

• Erin Livingston, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Master's Capstone Project

Degree Name

Master of Science

Program

Data Analysis & Visualization

Advisor

Ellie Frymire

Subject Categories

Art Practice | Creative Writing | Digital Humanities | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Interactive Arts | Interdisciplinary Arts and Media | Visual Studies

Keywords

data visualization, generative art, interface design, platform capitalism, personal data, data feminism, vibe coding, critical data studies, creative computing, media studies

Abstract

Materializing the Interface: Personal Data Feeds Generative Art is a data-studio capstone project that reconstructs elements of desktop and mobile interfaces as handmade mixed-media artifacts, then digitizes them as an interactive website where generative text and images are fed by personal data flows. Twenty-one paper collage windows — built from cardstock, risograph-printed paper, and mixed media — were photographed, digitized, and activated using code to become the interactive surface of a desktop view driven by browser history. A corresponding mobile view renders a corpus of 500 Instagram advertisement screenshots through a risograph print aesthetic, fed by a hand-tagged emotion and sense taxonomy. Together the two views argue that the desktop and the feed are not separate experiences but two surfaces of the same extraction, one representing output labor, the other input consumption.

The project was built using Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor, treating that collaboration as methodology and documenting planning transcripts as part of the project record. Theoretical grounding draws from Data Feminism, Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism, Lisa Gitelman's critique of raw data, Toby Miller's concept of the cognitariat, and Safiya Noble's work on algorithmic power. Browser history data was collected as a CSV export from Google Chrome over a ten-day period in March 2026; advertisement data was collected as screenshots from Instagram over the same period and structured into a JSON dataset with hand-assigned emotion and sensory tags.

This project contributes to data visualization practice by treating the interface itself — not only the data flowing through it — as the subject of transformation, and by proposing studio making as a legitimate epistemological method within critical data work.

The project is hosted at https://erinlivingston.github.io/materializing-interfaces/ and the codebase is available at https://github.com/erinlivingston/materializing-interfaces/tree/main.

Recommended Citation

Livingston, Erin, "Materializing the Interface: Personal Data feeds Generative Art" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6765