MyPocket

A financial self-portrait turned predictive system — MyPocket makes private spending public and reveals the artist’s future financial forecasts.

MyPocket traces a personal history of expenditures and universal financial forecast. Over two years, the artist meticulously retained both physical and digital evidence of his transactions, creating a database and a custom algorithm that predicts the likelihood of each expense recurring.

The system forms a feedback loop: predictions sometimes influenced the artist’s actual spending, while each new transaction reshaped the model — a mutual adaptation between human and algorithm. The Transactions Graph is not only a visual representation but the predictive model itself, mapping the temporal and relational dimensions of the artist’s financial life.

The Transactions Feed archives all economic activity — making the artist’s finances public — and publishes predictions. Each physical receipt is rubber-stamped with its prediction probability, transforming it into a “predicted object,” a readymade from the future. Together, these elements create a hybrid physical/digital process, a living system in which analysis and life continually inform each other.

Inspired by a clause in the Bank of America Privacy Policy, MyPocket made the artist’s bank transactions public through an RSS feed from 2008 to 2010, becoming an experiment in radical financial transparency and algorithmic self-portraiture.

Commissioned in 2007 by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for Turbulence.org, with funding from the Jerome Foundation. https://turbulence-org.eliterature.org/Works/mypocket/