you, me and everywhere we go
an exhibition of our GPS tracks at peacock visual arts, aberdeen
24 April - 31 May, Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen UK. you, me and everywhere we go – an exhibition of our GPS traces from 2007. Co-inciding with the conference 'Recoded: Landscapes and Politics of New Media' at the Centre for Modern Thought.
beginnings: Dan began in 2003 obsessively mapping everywhere he's been with a GPS in an attempt to see the 'drawing of his life' and how he was getting to know a new city – Berlin. In 2007, the year our daughter, Ruby, began to walk, we said we'd map the distance between us when we are apart and the proximity when together. Soph began to record all of her movements too.
The ordinary practitioners of the city live "down below," below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it.
Michel de Certeau, (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. (Steven Rendall. Trans.) p.93
birdseye view: looking down like a dizzy god on all those ignorant ants is not a perspective that everyone can have since what kept de Certeau aloft (seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre) was destroyed in front of our (square) eyes on that September 11th. Perhaps it's an attempt to shake a fist at that omnipotent eye that we began to try and make sense of our own illiterate wanderings across an (increasingly Google) earth that can now be rolled under our cursors like a blue marble. To be the readers of our own urban text.
down on the ground: what happens when you do this for a while is realise that this is not like a text at all. Your 'handwriting' is constrained by the cities' streets, you can't write what you want. We've come to think of this now as a rubbing. In the same way as rubbing a tombstone is a record of time and proximity to the stone, our marks recorded across a city and across thousands of hours of time ultimately reveal the shape of those streets and reveal a recognisable city layout. A rough rubbing that is affected by the shadows of buildings and GPS inaccuracies (at best 5 meters) – we are in the lap of the satellites now.
shifting position: many people want to know if we go somewhere on purpose because we're recording everything. If we see a blank space on the drawings and think 'I must go there'. This reveals an underlying question that is a lot more difficult to deny – does the knowledge of recording your movements affect your journeys? The initial intention is to record our everyday movements and so not make special journeys just to draw lines. However, having to remember a GPS every time you leave the house, having to have a pocket full of batteries on longer excursions and remember to download tracks every two weeks of so. No, we can't forget about this practice. But then why would we want to? It's taken a long time to develop a feeling for the shape of our lives but I'm not about to draw a shape on an open space.
reflections: I think the hardest part for me was the trip I made to Japan. Not only was I seeing something extraordinary without you and missing you both like an amputated limb, the jet lag had made me extremely emotional. Remember the tearful phone call when I finally got through in the middle of my unfamiliar night and your workaday morning? [Dan]
that's why those text messages became so relevant: the link and communication of the distance between us. journeys together are marked by an absence of text.
I was very aware of the lines I was making on the first walks with, Ruby, as she led me every so slowly on a twisty turny journey by the canal in Kreuzberg. She was not going from A to B but exploring the world from moment to moment, side tracked by small stones, acorns, bottle tops and dogs. My GPS made a lot of points that day and distance was condensed into a dance of back and forth rather than from here to there. [Soph]