The GA4 Landscape

The GA4 Landscape

Work created in 2025/10/4

This work is an internet art piece that transforms the continuous data streams of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) event tracking, which flow ceaselessly behind the web’s surface, into a visual and auditory ecosystem. Actions such as visitors’ clicks, scrolls, and page transitions, which are normally represented as numbers and graphs, are here embodied as the birth and growth of organic forms.
Blue and beige amorphous regions spreading across the center of the screen resemble lakes or rivers seen from above, yet on closer inspection, particles drift and their outlines tremble subtly. These shapes are not static images but living entities calculated and rendered in real time. Each form corresponds to a GA4 event, with parameters such as engagement time, session duration, and event value reflected in its size, color, and texture.
What makes this work compelling is how it transfigures web analytics—essentially a monitoring and managerial technology—into an aesthetic experience. GA4 is originally a tool for marketing optimization and user behavior analysis, recording and quantifying every user action to convert it into business intelligence. This process contains a cold precision, reducing human behavior into measurable ‘data points.’
However, *The GA4 Landscape* gives a different meaning to that cold stream of data. Numbers become signs of life; clicks signal the birth of new ecosystems. Engagement time is expressed as the maturity of a form, session duration as its persistence. Data shifts from abstract symbols to phenomena that can be visually and sonically experienced.
The event log panel in the upper left corner functions as a window into this conversion process. Technical event names such as ‘page_view’ and ‘click,’ along with timestamps and custom parameters, are displayed vividly, revealing the mechanisms behind the scenes. This transparency is crucial—it offers an almost magical experience while simultaneously emphasizing that this magic is powered by algorithms and data.
The title’s word ‘landscape’ carries a dual meaning. One is visual—the topographical imagery woven by organic shapes. The other is metaphorical—the data landscape continuously generated by our online activities.
The forms evolve over time. As the ‘shape update’ messages recorded in the console log indicate, parameters such as Age, Energy, Size, and Color are constantly recalculated. This is not a static painting but a performance, a process. When a visitor leaves, a form withers; when a new visitor arrives, fresh life emerges.
The use of the Tone.js library suggests an auditory dimension. If sounds are generated in response to visual changes, the piece becomes a *sonification* of data, expanding into an immersive audiovisual space.
This work can also be read as a poetic, though not direct, response to the system Shoshana Zuboff called ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Tracking technologies like GA4 underpin infrastructures that commodify our behaviors. Yet by using the same technology to create an aesthetic experience, the work suggests an alternative potential for data.
Data does not exist solely for exploitation or control—it can also serve as material for expression. Numbers can become poetry; logs can become narrative; tracking can become art. In this act of appropriation lies a quiet critique of technology’s dominant uses.
*The GA4 Landscape* transforms the invisible flows of data running behind the web into a form that can be sensorially experienced. It is at once a technical experiment and a poetic practice. Visitors, seeing their actions reflected instantly as visual and auditory phenomena, become aware of the digital traces they usually overlook.
This work poses questions: What is the data we generate every day? Is it merely a collection of information, or can it become something else? And is it possible to critically repurpose surveillance and tracking technologies into aesthetic experiences?
*The GA4 Landscape* offers one possible answer. Data, no longer cold numbers, becomes a living landscape that speaks to us—a contemporary form of internet art standing between technology and art, control and expression, the invisible and the visible.