Artist duo plan b (Daniel Belasco Rogers and Sophia New) have several pieces which revolve around using tracking devices to map their movements. An archive of the resulting drawings can be found here.
As opposed to Ellie Harrison’s work, plan b exhibit the GPS traces as drawings rather than photographic imagery of the day-to-day. The way the work is layered, building up with time like pencil marks, is effective in conveying a sense of a repetitive movement and of time spent in a certain place. This is something I need to consider with my rock tracking piece – all my attempts at drawing the path it travelled previously haven’t work overly well as the path is quite linear and, the time time spent in certain locations is perhaps more of note than the overall journey. It’s also hard to contend with the scale-disparity in movement; as a whole, the rock has made three large movements across the beach, but most of the time the rock is only making small movements in individual locations. Perhaps I could have a series of smaller pieces within each location and then they are joined through one larger drawing, or even how they are displayed relative to one another.
I could also explore an option that is somewhere between Harrison and plan b – taking a more photographic approach (which then captures the movement of other materials on the beach, not just highlighting the lone heroic rock), but layering them in a way reminiscent of plan b. Drawings or printing the photos on tracing paper could be a good place to start with this?
Other ways the duo have displayed their data:
- sewn into rugs – Knotted Time
- engraved on acrylic – All Our Traces in Berlin 2011
- a list of locations visited – Everywhere We’ve Been 2007-2011
- a close up of a particular location – Five Years of Coming Home
- narrating the data, video – Narrating Our Lines
In Drawing Machine II the duo created a machine that draws with the movement of the body, an entirely different way of collecting data from journeys made. The resulting data is less easily readable/decipherable – it seems more of a felt, haptic method of data collection than the careful, measured GPS tracking. Perhaps in this way I could lean into a different type of data collection, taking markings from the rock’s surface and drawing/mapping these etc.
Anna Harris 