Year End Project '(YEP)
The Year End Project is a locative art series that captures and visualizes the artist's daily movements over a year in 2015. Through the use of GPS technology, the project transforms everyday patterns of mobility into a digital art form, showcasing twelve GPS drawings—one for each month of the year. The evident geographic latitude longitude coordinated point on earth when elevated beyond its instrumental status can be understood as an existential proof – a beautiful evidence of one’s existence. The philosophy of existentialism has always been an influential undercurrent in art and human existential anxiety often becomes a recurring subject in art. Through arts artists question and express the meaning, purpose or value of existence. Subjective existence purported by Rene Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ has dominated our understanding of consciousness for nearly four centuries. However, in this digital era, the omnipresent GPS-based technologies and Internet connectivity in support of the constant communication of location is increasing the fluidity between physical world and virtual world. The result is a seamless experience that requires us to merge the body and mind as one. This extends the linear narratives of individual subject to include the possibility of multidimensional understanding of self and consciousness. This phenomenon presents to the artist an emerging potential to rethink the mind-body problems and the legacies of earlier existentialists’ approaches to mind, body and phenomenon. This series of GPS drawings (NTROs) presents an understanding of properties and attributes of presence and how it may be manifested through locative media.