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Symposium
Andrea
Wollensak
Visualizing
Place with GPS; Tracking Nuances of the Everyday
Presented
Friday May 10th at 4 pm
The
visible language of place is a complex and interrelated communication
of the civic and the personal, the contemporary and the historical.
Place is understood in a very individual way as socio-geographical
perceptions become internalized as memory. Place is apprehended
dualistically-with cognizance of distinct cartographic and
topographic realities. In the naming and defining of territory,
place articulates our demographic reality, giving us a sense
of belonging to our original place, and helping us to reify
the otherness of elsewhere.
The
relationship of individual expression to place belies our
cultural needs to name, to identify, and to own. But within
this relationship lies decidedly more profound opportunities
to develop modes of expression beyond claiming territory or
documenting our passage through the places of the world. Global
Positioning System (GPS), a technology that increasingly helps
us to define with precision where we are going and to orient
and refine our bearings, has a unique capacity to record our
passage within an absolute terrestrial grid. This permits
a mode of expression quite different from prior filmic technologies,
which necessitate the privileged and obfuscatory vantage-point
of a camera's location. GPS is the terrestrial panopticon
of place, position, and movement-an invisible virtual space
of concrete data. In contrast to the optic representation
of landscape through the naked and surveilling topography
of photographic satellites, GPS is most concerned with the
numerical relationship of one subject moving towards a destination.
My
recent artwork focuses on the relationship of gesture, memory
and notational traces of place within the context of GPS technology.
The gesture of movement within the absolute lattice of GPS
coordinates is explored to reveal the powerful and expressive
visuality of place in the context of exact individual locality.
The literal recording of the individual's place is re-constructed
through my art as visible gestural communication. As such,
the user/technology relationship is redefined with relevance
quite different than the standard GPS goal-directed quantification
of bearing, heading, and correctable margin of error. Instead
of constricting language to a narrow navigational-numerical
space, the user/technology relationship becomes a starting
point for aesthetic and semantic creativity.
The
projects I describe here include a site project in Bellagio,
Italy, a GPS-based flight drawing over the Mexican desert
and a computer animation based on a series of walks at the
Banff Center for the Arts. The Mexican project connects art
inspired by local landforms and petroglyphs with a real-time
realization (and historiographic visualization) by the artists
in flight. The Bellagio project focuses on wanderings and
recording site-specific sound-the recorded visualizations
of these paths then provide the basis for an organized sound/visual
work. The Banff project translates the nuances of a walk into
a surreal visual analysis. These projects record the gestures
of movements inspired by memory, and use this primary articulation
of a visible language of place as a secondary creative lexicon.
Andrea
Wollensak - Biography
Andrea Wollensak, William Meredith Associate Professor of
Art
Associate Director Center for Arts & Technology, Connecticut
College.
Her work, which explores the intersections of culture and
technology, has been presented internationally and includes
site/installations using GPS and interactive design. She recently
completed a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation, in Bellagio,
Italy.
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