Andrew Kuo

What I Fear About Traveling

You pay $18.50 to see a live gig. You grab a beer at the bar, the lights go low, conversation breaks off and you take in the first chords of the guitar amplified throughout the hall. You are here for an experience.

But once the lights go back on and the crowds have headed home, how do you quantify that experience or share it with someone who couldn’t make the trip to Brooklyn on a Tuesday night?

My Life Until November 2007

Andrew Kuo has come up with a solution. About two years ago in the run-up to the annual CMJ Music Marathon, the New York-based artist began charting the vagaries of his mental state while listening to music. “Like most things in my life,” says Kuo, “it started as a joke. I think I sent the first chart to a friend as a thank-you note. Then I kept making them. I feel like if I can make things that tell any kind of story, it’s worth making more of them.” The resulting emotional statistics were posted to his blog—earlboykins.blogspot.com—and yielded graphically pleasing, yet cognitively left-field data sets like a 16-grade ranking of not only every track from My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade, but also of the teens and parents attending the MCR record release show.

Portrait by Edwin Tse

Kuo’s peculiar topographies and on-point wit quickly caught the eye of a New York Times music critic, who invited him to produce a weekly visualization of his music-related experiences for the newspaper. The enlarged platform inspired a reciprocal expansion of Kuo’s diagrammatic ambitions, the apogee of which came through in last summer’s “No Lifeguard on Duty,” a baroque series of charts and graphs examining all 18 scheduled shows at the McCarren Park Pool in Williamsburg. In the piece, Kuo makes no attempt to offer an unbiased critique of the performances. Instead of dishing out standard music-review fodder, he assesses the quality of live sets against his own expectations for those performances, breaks down the amount of time he spends thinking about “Law & Order” reruns, calculates the number of sponsored logos on display during a show, and charts his own summer mood swings. By combining personal minutiae and the public spectacle of live music in accessible, candy-colored graphs, Kuo preserves a bit of the ephemeral rush of participating in the event itself. If he keeps it up, you may want to stay home more often.