| Comparative walks (incl. details) |
Personal Geographies is an installation and performance that explores the personal geography of tangible distances and resistances in our immediate surroundings. Digital technologies are bringing the world to us at arm’s length, and we experience our surroundings as mediated through the screens of various devices. We perceive the space around us in its media representation of GPS navigation and overlaid augmented reality displays. Behind these increasingly dominant technological mediations of reality, the tangible world surrounding us is fading into the distance and our feeling for it diminishes.
Personal Geographies directs the attention to our immediate surroudings, the space that unfolds between the extreme proximity of our very intimate sphere and the range of social distances extending out from there. The project consists of a wearable personal device that measures and calculates a personal geography of our encounters within this zone of immediate surroundings. The individual wearing the device is the center and origin of this map. The idiosyncratic maps drawn during the course of a series of site-specific walks invite us to reflect on aspects of subjectivity and presence and our social embeddedness as we exist in real space. At the same time, the maps reveal a "fingerprint" of types of social encounters specific to the various spaces.