Exhibition by Kirsten Millar
with a written and a collabortive response by PhD researcher Ross Cameron.
Digital Travels explores how
we traverse the digital sphere and engage with physical sites on the Internet,
creating new and disjointed spatial understandings. This exhibition seeks to
explore concepts of spatiality, time and embededness within the Internet and
landscape by responding to Wolfgang Schivelbusch The Railway Journey (1977).
Like with the coming of the railways in the 19th century, the spatiality of the traversed environment is once again being distorted through the Internet. When rambling the Internet there is no sense of distance travelled and perceptions of spatiality and time are blurred, floating in our imaginations.
When using the Internet to navigate place, we are disconnected from the physical landscape and constructions of physical sites are dictated by browser history, cookies and algorithms, much in the same way as early rail passengers perceived the travelled environment annihilated by speed.
Using the Internet as a method of travel we are no longer embedded within the physical landscape, instead we wander through digital terrains creating ambiguous, mutable spatial identities for physical sites. Journeys are no longer dictated by the physical terrain or by conventional time.
As with the Victorians and rail travel, we too experience the distortion and disruption of the space-time continuum as digital travel creates multidimensional temporalities and specialties.
On the Internet we do not need to navigate physical sites in logical order: miles can be skipped, notions of time are skewed and histories of physical sites can be rearranged. - KM
Like with the coming of the railways in the 19th century, the spatiality of the traversed environment is once again being distorted through the Internet. When rambling the Internet there is no sense of distance travelled and perceptions of spatiality and time are blurred, floating in our imaginations.
When using the Internet to navigate place, we are disconnected from the physical landscape and constructions of physical sites are dictated by browser history, cookies and algorithms, much in the same way as early rail passengers perceived the travelled environment annihilated by speed.
Using the Internet as a method of travel we are no longer embedded within the physical landscape, instead we wander through digital terrains creating ambiguous, mutable spatial identities for physical sites. Journeys are no longer dictated by the physical terrain or by conventional time.
As with the Victorians and rail travel, we too experience the distortion and disruption of the space-time continuum as digital travel creates multidimensional temporalities and specialties.
On the Internet we do not need to navigate physical sites in logical order: miles can be skipped, notions of time are skewed and histories of physical sites can be rearranged. - KM
BACKGROUND, WHY TRAVERS SITES DIGITALLY?
Covid-19 has changed how I engage and access sites, feeding itself into my practice. My work has always been orientated around how bodies navigate, engage with and are affected by sites both urban and rural. Without the ability to travel for research, I have had to adapt to new ways of working. I can no longer access the physical sites I had planned on working with and have instead begun to traverse digital spaces utilising what sources I can access from my couch. The idea of remotely exploring sites and creating imaginary travel on the Internet has crept slowly into my work as quarantine restrictions have re-emerged limiting the capacity to travel. My engagement with digital travel has come about through a lot of late night playing of Geo-Guesser and Google Maps. By rambling through the Internet I was connected to different ways of engaging with sites and place. My work has begun to look at ways technologies construct our identity of place as the digital exploration of sites is dictated by individual browser histories, cookies and algorithms.
This move towards digital travel is not a complete surprise. I have always been a traveller in spaces that were imaginary due to my interest in sci-fi and fantasy worlds, especially those created though music and animation. These worlds have always been important to me as someone that struggled to engage with educational structures when I was a child due to dyslexia and they have helped me understand and navigate the world as a pansexual female. The genres of sci-fi and fantasy are often discredited. Their validity as ways of interrogating our current social functions, as works of satire or as ways of forecasting future political/ecological challenges, are delegitimized as too “fictional” and too “childish”, erasing them as important sources that can contribute to the way we navigate the world. - KM
