UPDATE: Dear Data is now a book, for which I had the pleasure of writing the foreword.

We live, they say, in the age of Big Data — algorithms trawl through vast databases of our digital trails seeking to extract insight on the human experience, from how we fall in love to what we read. But aggregating individual human lives into massive data sets and trying to extrapolate insight from the aggregate data that is valid for individual human lives is somewhat like taking an exquisite poem in English and running it through Google Translate to render into Japanese and then back into English. The result may have the vague contours of the original poem’s meaning, but none of its subtle magic and vibrant granular beauty.

But what if we could claim that beautiful granular humanity back from the homogenizing aggregate-grip of Big Data? That’s precisely what Giorgia Lupi, an Italian woman living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American woman living in London, are doing in Dear Data — an extraordinary yearlong correspondence project that puts an imaginative twist on what Virginia Woolf termed “the humane art” through a series of analog self-portraits in data, drawn by hand and mailed on postcards.

Although Lupi and Posavec only met twice in person before the start of the project — both times at the wonderful EyeO Festival — they have a great deal of variables in common: Both are information designers known for working by hand; both have left their respective homeland to move across the Atlantic in pursuit of the creative life; both are only children, and they are the exact same age.

Every week, they each select one aspect of their daily lives — from their complaints to their spending habits to their use of mirrors — and itemize its components in a hand-drawn visualization on the back of a postcard, then mail it to the other. As if composing a Goldberg Variations of data, Lupi and Posavec deliberately use different visual metaphors and visualization techniques for each week’s postcard.

Both the process and the product are intensely human — each postcard takes time to design and time to read; it is simultaneously mundane and magical; it requires, on both ends, the sort of emotional attentiveness invoking Mary Oliver’s memorable assertion that “attention without feeling is merely a report.”

What emerges is a case for the beauty of small data and its deliberate interpretation, analog visualization, and slow transmission. Obliquely reminiscent of A Year of Mornings and Edward Gorey’s illustrated envelopes, yet wholly original, the project is a celebration of the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life.

The result is an immensely pleasurable duet of sensibilities — side by side, Posavec’s signature spatial poetics and Lupi’s mastery of shape and color elevate one another to a higher plane of delight. Amid an the epidemic of infoporn, the project presents a kind of tender data-lovemaking.

New postcards are uploaded to Dear Data every Wednesday in 2015. Publishers, nota bene — this is the kind of project begging to be a beautiful book.

All images courtesy of Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec