2008 copyright by .horhizon
.Scape or no one - doing nothing - nowhere
Author: Eva Sommeregger
Actual places, specific locations, geography have lost quite much of their sovereignty. Space is neither defined nor restricted by its local horizons. Traveling huge distances has never been that easily accessible, popular or affordable. The so called globalized world consists of generic, interchangeable spaces, distances are measured in time. Current discourse treats space as an entity detached from geography.
Is geography lost?
Geography is not seen (anymore) as fully capable of representing the qualities one would refer to as space. Space’s inherent characteristics exceed what a local geography describes. This piece of work treats of an individual’s continuous movement making up its own space - a space that is defined by a perpetually changing locality.
How do we trace movement, how does the individual locate themselves within the bigger picture, being in constant movement? How does movement create its own, nomadic space? We do act as mobile carriers of references and coordinates, interacting with both virtual and physical landscapes. Individuals’ positions within a bigger picture are multiple and in constant flux - to be renegotiated over and over again.
What does a derive look like in a space informed by the loss of a particular sole locality?
The animation deals with a person’s nomadic movement: an individual’s shifting between various interchangeable territories, occupying and navigating a mediascape.
In this animation, space is being depicted by a so called subjective camera, from a first person view.
Instead of looking at something, the spectator is the camera and fi nds themselves literally in the centre of what is happening. The animation consists of a linked up sequence of several interchangeable landscapes, so that space becomes detached from singular, specific geographies.
An embodied camera occupies disembodied realities - being in constant movement:
The camera is positioned in the middle of a layered up, spherical projection that contains everything perceivable from a specific point (a 360 ° x 360 ° projection) - a nomocentric viewpoint within a spherical projection.
Rather than looking at things from outside this animation creates an ambience from being within.
The spatial set-up is inspired by [google street view], which cartographs cities by an almost infinite number of spherical photographs. Alluding to google, one might ask: How relevant are these endless numbers of pictures to us, first captured and then stored in the collective memory of the www?
Rather than recording the actual, the animation generates fake landscapes – imagined scapes, entirely made up. Seductive, poetic, exotic and uncanny, the landscapes are completely interchangeable.
It is the manipulated moving image which is capable to visualize this notion. It produces a more plastic reality than the one which is lets say captured by a camera. And that this form of representation relates much more to the way we actually do perceive the world. Occupying and watching space is not static, it is dynamic.
How do we position ourselves in the bigger picture, while being in constant movement?
Many of us individuals occupying the so called fi rst world have either committed themselves to a rather nomadic lifestyle or spend most of their everyday in actualized virtualities. Plus - any tiniest bit of our globe has been explored, even by means of media:
What is actual space to us?