Throughout 2003 Ellie collected data about 14 elements of her daily life onto Daily Quantification Records. One of the things that she monitored during this time was her daily gaseous emission output. Statistics Are Hot Air is a large colour-coded bar chart which visualise this element of the data - each bar of the chart represents a day in 2003 and each day of the week is represented a different colour.
Statistics Are Hot Air has been installed on two occasions. Most recently, as a large vinyl on glass installation at Moor Street Station in Birmingham, where it formed part of the exhibition Ariston in March 2007. It now remains in the station as a semi-permanent installation.
The piece was originally created in 2003 as a studio based wall chart exploring the notion of ‘artistic output’. Every day that Ellie visited her studio she added one more bar to the chart to indicate and celebrate her output from the previous day. The bar chart grew gradually across her studio wall over the course of January to June 2003.
There is also an online version of Statistics Are Hot Air, which was again added to daily over the course of 2003. Each day of the week is represented by a different colour and each gaseous emission is represented by the addition of 15 pixels in height to each bar. The completed chart showing the whole year’s output is still viewable online. Please click on the link to the right under ‘Further Reference’ to view it.
