Money. Time. Love. Life. Friendship. We spend our entire lives pursuing these five things, giving them names, attaching meaning to them — yet rarely stopping to ask what they actually are.

Personal Data is a series of five visual works made in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2011. Each piece takes one concept we believe we understand and strips it back to raw data: numbers, lists, symbols, repetition. What remains raises a question. All five works are designed to loop — no beginning, no end — mirroring the nature of the questions themselves.

ROMANCE — What is love?

Every dot is a person. Proximity is intimacy; distance is its dissolution. Some dots enter the frame, shift the entire rhythm of the composition, and leave. Red marks linger where they passed. The pattern keeps changing. In the end, there is one.

SCHEDULE — What is time?

Two columns: GMT+0 and GMT+8. Two people, two cities, the same day. Sleep. Wake. Work. Eat. Sleep. The activities are nearly identical; the hours never align. If two people eight time zones apart are doing exactly the same thing, what is time, really?

BANK STATEMENT — What is money?

Savings: £0. The list of credit cards runs for pages — each with a limit ranging from tens of thousands to infinity. The numbers say you are wealthy. The balance says otherwise. Credit is a promise against the future, not possession. What we chase may not be money itself, but its appearance.

FRIENDLIST — What is friendship?

Hundreds of names. Everyone labelled Acquaintance. Deep in the list, one Friend. Just one. We fill our contact lists and call it a connection. But how many of those people do we actually know?

AUTOBIOGRAPHY — What is life?

X and Y. Pink and blue. Chromosomes arranged into the shape of a person — forming, dissolving, forming again. We each believe our lives are singular stories. But viewed from the level of genetics, our arrival was an accident of combination, and our departure will be no different. This autobiography has no name, no narrative. Only two letters, repeating.