Abstract
The Quantified Self is best described by Gary Wolf as “self-knowledge through numbers.” William
James’ theory of the consciousness of the self and the study of coping inspires drawings that
retell personal narratives at the same time reveal traces of the subtle emotion associated with
intentional forgetting. Codex Endogenous is a project that reveals and visualizes the beauty and
morphology of a “self ” and its environment. Here, “codex” refers to a collection of pages
stitched together, and “endogenous” is a term in cognitive neuroscience used to describe
phenomena that is spontaneously generated from an individual’s internal state. Every day,
quantifiable information about the self is produced; left unrevealed would leave the spirit of a
self undiscovered. In this project, the self information is transformed into self-knowledge.
Data is tracked throughout a day, categorized into implicit and explicit information, visualized
as daily data drawings. Analogous to the practice of keeping a daily journal, Codex Endogenous
is a digital journal in a screen-based format. It is composed of drawings that embody data
representation of the quantified self in the context of environmental habituation including the
intentional redaction of information rather forgotten.