Soft Data and Feedback as Nourishment - Reflecting with Resident Artist Yo-Yo Lin
Soft Data and Feedback as Nourishment – Reflecting with Resident Artist Yo-Yo Lin
June 8, 2021
When I meet with Yo-Yo Lin, we’re on the cusp of winter. It’s late 2020 and Lin is in New York, I’m in Boston, and we’re both in sweatshirts and scarves and cradling a cup of tea. Lin is interested in glitch as a disability aesthetic and asks how latency and lag in online spaces are or are not a failing of technology – but the pandemic has made the virtual more permanent. The urgency of these ideas have faded away. Perhaps urgency in general is fading.
Coming from a Buddhist upbringing, Lin has always felt time is cyclical. In disability circles, time is viewed much more like a fluid than a straight-shot arrow. Time will meet your body where it’s at. In her Resilience Journal, Lin carefully documents her illness in a way that isn’t medical. She is interested in soft data, data tracked by hand, data of words and feelings, data in colored pencil and gel ink.
Soft data lets her body exist as it is, rather than critique it as falling short. Lin would ask herself if this witnessing was enough – should she not also use this information to draw certain conclusions? Should she feed it back into herself?
But this is where feedback can become fuzzy. If it seems like in electronics feedback is clear – simply take your signal and loop it around back into itself – then we’re missing the beauty of self-reflection. The question has always been which signal to feed back, and which part, and where. The elegance of soft data is, in fact, its softness. You can hold it in many different ways. Lin’s Resilience Journal does get fed back into herself. The process of documentation alone is a kind of feedback, a re-experiencing that changes our sense of self.
Lin wants to take the Resilience Journal, currently a physical notebook, to the web. She is doing this slowly, in the midst of a global pandemic. She’s unsure what exactly the web holds for this project. How can soft data play out with an audience? How can her journal become a performative tool? How can we nourish ourselves with feedback?
Katy Ilonka Gero is a poet, essayist, and scientist, and is a CultureHub Resident Contributing Writer (2020–2021). Read more about their work.