(2020) Messages is a project involving the sending of messages drawn by GPS between members of Strava (running mapping app) The project plays with the idea of ‘community’ generated by a software that allow you to share your walks, runs and realtime locations online.The project offers a ‘tongue in cheek’ critique of the competitivness of this sort of sharing as I invite members to send me, comical shapes, short messages, swearwords, within a gereral framework of responding to the current political sittuation post Jan 31st 2020 and the frustrations that Brexit has brought.
The project also plays with the idea of material incompetence in relation to these new tracking technologies and my own inability as a dyspraxic person to write the words I want ‘properly’ using my body and GPS.
This work was initially instigated by my taking part in Lizzie Philps’s GPS EMBROIDERY project and a residency on Jersey supported by the Arts Council and the Jersey Arts Trust. Lizzie writes:
‘GPS Embroidery is a walking performance practice which appropriates a tool invented in the service of imperialism and puts it into the hands of artists who mother. It is an ongoing political response to the reactionary politics of our times, which aims to broaden ideas about who-gets-to-write-what-where in and about the British landscape’.
The project was begun by Philps after the 2016 referendum result and Jersey specifically chosen due to the high number of people voting for Brexit on the Island. I contributed to the project by writing words on the land (badly). See images below.
The word ‘Horizon’ written badly with a GPS Tracker on the cliffs above Noirmont Point Jersey.
‘Elt’ the colloquial fenland word for damp, written with a GPS Tracker.
Highpoints on Gorey Beach Jersey mapped with a GPS tracker.