Location is Everything
Two years ago, I proudly bought my first Atlas of the World, an act that ignited an unprecedented burst of travel that has not stopped. Forced to skip Geography in high school, I am continually embarrassed by my inability to pinpoint for sure exactly where is Wisconsin, Estonia, Vietnam, or Kenya. Now, like my Dictionary, I consult the Atlas to banish doubt, and in a small sense I feel empowered. I find it reassuring to see a handheld representation of the very oceans and lands that separate my current location from where I am going.
But what is a map without accompanying information about the people who live there, the natural phenomena, the weather of the region, or the economic conditions? Since my own 'Mileshare' performance project in 2003, where I invited local residents in various cities to walk or run a mile of personal significance with me, a stranger, I have been intrigued by the notion of mapped territory as indicator of quotidian and local experience, and the voyeuristic possibilities afforded by shared tracking systems.
The artists in Location is Everything have all mapped personal or collective experiences, some informed by external factors like weather data or pop-culture references, and some allowing the map itself or local residents to inform them. As a painter might pull imagery from the paint, the map as a birds-eye-view is a locative tool, which allows artists to playfully or poetically free information about physical and psychological space.
Locative mapping
Pall Thayer's HLemmer in C maps the paths of Icelandic taxicabs using octave notes that stray with the taxis from their middle C port-of-call. Global Positioning System devices trace lovely and delicate lines as spidery and haunting as the strange tremulous melody produced. Jeremy Woods draws comical sketches in his site-specific GPS Drawings, using software developed to trace foot or aeroplane paths. Literally drawing from the natural terrain he invents the path in order to construct line drawings--most notably those which are linked provocatively to place, such as a dollar drawn on Vegas.
Sonic mapping
In Atmospherics, Andrea Polli uses weather phenomena--scientific data of historic Long Island storms--to map a contained aural concert of electronic sounds to positions along the eastern seaboard. Hidekazu Minami's Intrasonic Soundscape is an interpretation of Manhattan that is unambiguous. Gathered noises excrete a poetry that is of and by the island of Manhattan. Exploring via a submarine-like interface, the viewer excavates an eerily pre-9/11 surface. No humans can be heard but there are the din of crowds, the clamour of trains, and the creak of bridges.
Janet Cardiff's audio walks seek to transform the participant's ordinary walk in a park or garden with the aural strategies of story and site specific sound. Further, these projects frequently take us out of a gallery as starting point and lead us down an alternative version of the garden path, one that is suspended in time but also charged with possibility.
Interactive mapping
Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson, and Marina Zurkow's PDPal incorporates contributions to a Times Square map from passersby who are invited to use their PDA device to beam personal information about public space. The playful morsels augment and personalize the tourist's chart. In murmur, set in various metropolises north of the Canadian border, Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, and Gabe Sawhney harvest stories by residents that can later be discovered by pedestrians via public or mobile telephones. The discovery of accessible listening ports is accidental and delightful.
Based on user-fed data Germaine Koh maps the globe with survey results such as happy/sad quotients in Survey Field. Hovering over the submit button I wonder where are all the happy people? Should I tell the truth? The abstraction confounds and provokes a myriad follow-up questions about economics, war, politics, lifestyle. Does the ratio change following events like the recent U.S. election? Will the ratio change tomorrow?
- Jillian Mcdonald, January 2005
Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian artist living in New York and teaching at Pace University. Her media and performance projects have been shown widely across the Americas and Europe. Me and Billy Bob, 2003, has been exhibited most recently in three solo shows across Canada, and her upcoming sequel, Jealous? will premiere on Valentine's Day 2004. In 2004 Mcdonald received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, and commissions from Soil New Media and Turbulence.org. Her own work deals variously with celebrities, violence and the media, absurd juxtaposition, drama, gift giving, storytelling, participation by strangers, and interactivity. Some of her favourite people are strangers.
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Two years ago, I proudly bought my first Atlas of the World, an act that ignited an unprecedented burst of travel that has not stopped. Forced to skip Geography in high school, I am continually embarrassed by my inability to pinpoint for sure exactly where is Wisconsin, Estonia, Vietnam, or Kenya. Now, like my Dictionary, I consult the Atlas to banish doubt, and in a small sense I feel empowered. I find it reassuring to see a handheld representation of the very oceans and lands that separate my current location from where I am going.
But what is a map without accompanying information about the people who live there, the natural phenomena, the weather of the region, or the economic conditions? Since my own 'Mileshare' performance project in 2003, where I invited local residents in various cities to walk or run a mile of personal significance with me, a stranger, I have been intrigued by the notion of mapped territory as indicator of quotidian and local experience, and the voyeuristic possibilities afforded by shared tracking systems.
The artists in Location is Everything have all mapped personal or collective experiences, some informed by external factors like weather data or pop-culture references, and some allowing the map itself or local residents to inform them. As a painter might pull imagery from the paint, the map as a birds-eye-view is a locative tool, which allows artists to playfully or poetically free information about physical and psychological space.
Locative mapping
Pall Thayer's HLemmer in C maps the paths of Icelandic taxicabs using octave notes that stray with the taxis from their middle C port-of-call. Global Positioning System devices trace lovely and delicate lines as spidery and haunting as the strange tremulous melody produced. Jeremy Woods draws comical sketches in his site-specific GPS Drawings, using software developed to trace foot or aeroplane paths. Literally drawing from the natural terrain he invents the path in order to construct line drawings--most notably those which are linked provocatively to place, such as a dollar drawn on Vegas.
Sonic mapping
In Atmospherics, Andrea Polli uses weather phenomena--scientific data of historic Long Island storms--to map a contained aural concert of electronic sounds to positions along the eastern seaboard. Hidekazu Minami's Intrasonic Soundscape is an interpretation of Manhattan that is unambiguous. Gathered noises excrete a poetry that is of and by the island of Manhattan. Exploring via a submarine-like interface, the viewer excavates an eerily pre-9/11 surface. No humans can be heard but there are the din of crowds, the clamour of trains, and the creak of bridges.
Janet Cardiff's audio walks seek to transform the participant's ordinary walk in a park or garden with the aural strategies of story and site specific sound. Further, these projects frequently take us out of a gallery as starting point and lead us down an alternative version of the garden path, one that is suspended in time but also charged with possibility.
Interactive mapping
Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson, and Marina Zurkow's PDPal incorporates contributions to a Times Square map from passersby who are invited to use their PDA device to beam personal information about public space. The playful morsels augment and personalize the tourist's chart. In murmur, set in various metropolises north of the Canadian border, Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, and Gabe Sawhney harvest stories by residents that can later be discovered by pedestrians via public or mobile telephones. The discovery of accessible listening ports is accidental and delightful.
Based on user-fed data Germaine Koh maps the globe with survey results such as happy/sad quotients in Survey Field. Hovering over the submit button I wonder where are all the happy people? Should I tell the truth? The abstraction confounds and provokes a myriad follow-up questions about economics, war, politics, lifestyle. Does the ratio change following events like the recent U.S. election? Will the ratio change tomorrow?
- Jillian Mcdonald, January 2005
Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian artist living in New York and teaching at Pace University. Her media and performance projects have been shown widely across the Americas and Europe. Me and Billy Bob, 2003, has been exhibited most recently in three solo shows across Canada, and her upcoming sequel, Jealous? will premiere on Valentine's Day 2004. In 2004 Mcdonald received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, and commissions from Soil New Media and Turbulence.org. Her own work deals variously with celebrities, violence and the media, absurd juxtaposition, drama, gift giving, storytelling, participation by strangers, and interactivity. Some of her favourite people are strangers.
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