Spreadsheet of You
An interactive art installation that transforms visitors into live Excel spreadsheets. Standing before the work, a person sees themselves rendered as an 80x80 grid of colored cells while real-time data extracted from their appearance fills the cells around them.
Spreadsheet of You is an interactive art installation that transforms visitors into live Excel spreadsheets. Standing before the work, a person sees themselves rendered as an 80x80 grid of colored cells — their body a white silhouette, their face a mosaic of pixels — while real-time data extracted from their appearance fills the cells around them.
The piece runs entirely in a web browser, styled as a pixel-perfect recreation of Microsoft Excel 2003.
How It Works
A camera captures the visitor and downsamples the image to 80x80 pixels — one pixel per spreadsheet cell. Three computer vision systems process the feed simultaneously:
- MediaPipe FaceLandmarker tracks 468 facial landmarks and 52 blendshape scores — eye openness, mouth gape, head rotation, facial symmetry, blink patterns.
- MediaPipe Selfie Segmenter separates the person from the background, producing the white silhouette.
- face-api.js estimates age, gender, and expression (neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, fearful, disgusted).
From the estimated age and gender, the installation looks up official data from Danmarks Statistik to calculate your most likely first name, your estimated monthly income, and your expected remaining years to live — all based on 2024 actuarial and demographic statistics.
The result: you step in front of a screen and within seconds the machine tells you what you're probably called, what you probably earn, and how long you probably have left.
What You See
The grid. 80 columns by 80 rows of colored cells. Where the camera sees background, cells show muted, desaturated colors. Where it sees a person, cells turn white — a blocky silhouette.
The data. Ten cells float on either side of the silhouette. On the left: your most likely name, estimated age, dominant expression, facial symmetry, and smile count. On the right: gender, years left to live, monthly income in DKK, mouth openness, and blink count. The cells reposition dynamically as you move.
The formula bar. Above the grid, the Excel formula bar cycles through active metrics as formulas: =age(33.4), =expression(neutral), =yearsLeft(48.2).
The Question
What does it feel like to see yourself reduced to data? The spreadsheet is the native format of bureaucracy, insurance, HR, and surveillance capitalism. Excel 2003 is the aesthetic of an era when personal data felt mundane — before we understood what it meant to be quantified. The installation places the visitor inside that system: measured, classified, and statistically profiled using the same demographic tables that shape policy, pensions, and insurance premiums.
Try It Yourself
Credits
Built with MediaPipe Vision and face-api.js. Demographic data from Danmarks Statistik.