Wanderings of an old car

In 2004 we bought a used Subaru station-wagon. This is a pretty good approximation of where the car went in the 65,000 miles we put on it over the last 7 years.

Arduino motor control

Pretty basic stuff so far, but I started figuring out how to control motors using Arduinos. So far I have been able to get a servo and a stepper motor to work with basic programming (mostly modified from example sketches). I have a few projects in mind and this is the first step to figuring them out.

Running Landscape

This piece is made from the same data as "Mesh 2" - average running mileage. It was carved on the ShopBot from laminated layers of birch plywood. 15x9x2.5in.

Difference

I finished the carving on this piece but it took a while to polish the edges and get some pictures. It is carved with the CNC from a solid block of clear acrylic 12x24x2in. It shows all the places/elevations I have been in the US since starting the Latitude and Longitude Project. I was pleased with the views through the polished edges and the reflection of the carving on the top surface of the plexiglas.

Hetch Hetchy

I scanned this map from the Map and Geography Library at the University of Illinois with the intent making another reservoir piece from the data. If I remember right this topo map is from the 1940's but still shows the original contours underneath the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Flooding of this valley caused a lot of controversy. The dam was completed in 1923 and the reservoir supplies about 25% of the drinking water to the San Francisco Bay Area (wikipedia). The reservoir is a little more than 100ft deep with the valley walls reaching 2000ft above the lake level. Since it is used for drinking water it cannot be used for boating, but there are trail close to the north shore. Next time I am in Yosemite I will hike that trail and maybe get a better sense of how I feel about the damming of this valley.

Beginning of Year Database Updates

Th beginning of the year is an exciting time for my work. It is when I take the time to update all my databases. It takes several long days of data entry to get them all up to date last week I transcribed 4,419 latitude and longitude entries from my pencil on paper logbook to Excel. The transcriptions involve typing in separate cells for degrees, minutes and seconds of latitude, degrees, minutes and seconds of longitude, and elevation. The formulas I have written over the years compute other information I need from those inputs - decimalized latitude and longitude, a time code, and global coordinates for plotting on a sphere.

Here are all my travels in North America for 2010 (and the first two weeks of 2011):
(Long straight lines are flights)


The view below includes all movements I have recorded in North America since I started the project in 1999 (and including a separate year 1996-1997). This view does not include air travel. 2010 is represented by orange lines.

The view below starts to zooms in on the midwest:

Finally a detail of Champaign-Urbana Illinois:
Click on any image for a larger view

The Nameless Hour Catalog

For the VCU Anderson Gallery show in Richmond, curators Ashley Kistler and Dinah Ryan put together a great catalog. The catalog includes a few pages of images of works in the show from each artist, essays by Ashley, Dinah and Kathleen Dean Moore, and poems by Charles Wright. It also includes an interview with Janine Antoni, and essays by me and Stephen Vitiello. A detail of my piece Fort Peck wraps the front and back cover.

Artists in the show:
Janine Antoni
Stephen Cartwright
Spencer Finch
Sigalit Landau
Paul Pfeiffer
Pipilotti Rist
Stephen Vitiello

Nameless Hour Catalog Essay

Here is my complete essay from the Nameless Hour catalog with some of the images they included:

100,000 Beeps

In 1980, I had a digital watch, the Casio H108. These were early days for this technology, but this Casio was packed with features. It would beep out a version of Happy Birthday on the appropriate day and play Yankee Doodle on the 4th of July. My watch was confiscated several times for inappropriately timed mini-electronic concerts. It would also beep on the hour. The hourly beep from my watch was joined by electronic beeps from the wrists of my elementary school classmates—an un-synchronized cacophony marking the hour. Most people got tired of the constant beeping of watches, but I never did.

The beep is a constant reminder of the passing of time. The metronomic hourly chime forces me to notice what I am doing, where I am, and where I need to be. It brings me back into a system that, although artificial in its divisions, is universal. Since 1999, that beep has reminded me to check my GPS every hour and record the exact latitude, longitude, and elevation of my position on the earth. I then transcribe those recordings from the GPS onto log sheets.

This project has always been about time and our place in it. Before I started it, I was cataloging instances of sighting old ladies—a reference to my own aging grandmothers, women with long memories and experiences stretching back through time. Their perception of time and place had to be fundamentally different from mine. As the map of old-lady sightings grew more detailed, I realized that it was a more accurate record of my own existence. My life and movements in the city were what created the patterns emerging on the maps. The old ladies were chance indicators that marked my place in time.

Since I began this project, I have traveled more than 25,000 miles by bicycle through the United States, Europe, and Asia. I inch across the land and, hour by hour, leave an invisible, virtual track. These journeys are an attempt to comprehend what I see around me, but they also reinforce the vastness of the world and the inconsequentiality of a lone person amid the multitudes that exist past, present, and future. My track through real and virtual space may be insignificant, but the negligible details of my trajectory compound to reveal patterns and irregularities that start to define a life. A surprising amount of information can be inferred by placing myself at a specific place at a specific time. Looking at a recorded point awakens my memory. Where was I? Where was I going and where was I coming from? Have I been there before? These questions lead to other memories: What I was doing, who I was with, the landscape, the weather…

The Latitude and Longitude Project is an attempt to make an unbiased recording of my life. Recording every hour on the hour means my choices are reduced so that each hour becomes a data point of equal value. Some movements are lost, and some final destinations are never recorded, but the regular accretion of data paints a more accurate picture of my life than the one I perceive. Life flows on constantly, and incremental changes may pass unnoticed; the aberrations form focal points in my memory.

While executing this project, I try to simply live life and not allow myself to make a move to consciously alter my data. However, I am compelled to see what is over the next hill or around the corner in order to form a more accurate picture of the world. I want to see what lies in the blank areas of my maps. Geography dictates: I move quickly across the plains, linger in the mountains, and seek the edges of land. Memorable landscapes are unfortunately atypical settings for my hourly recordings. Out of the 8760 hours in a year, I may have recorded my hourly position in less than 1000 different places. In 2009, for example, home, work, and the studio accounted for a total of 6417 recordings.

After 12 years of recording, the log book now contains more than 600 pages, with more than 100,000 entries. Curiously, I passed that milestone on my 37th birthday, but it went unnoticed. It will take until age 49 to amass the next 100,000 entries, and I will need to live to 83 to collect 500,000. The project continues, expanding incrementally. Each new point of data further defines a single life. The data acts as an external timeline of my life that I can consciously consult to access my subconscious. I ride this massive wave of data now, afraid to stop recording—as if in stopping, the past will slip into irretrievable memory.

Topographies at the Tarble Art Center

Stephen Cartwright - Topographies is now open at the Tarble Art Center at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston IL. The show runs Oct 2 - Nov 28, 2010. I'll be giving a lecture at the gallery at 7pm Wednesday Oct 6.

Tarble Art Center Installation

dh

I spent several days this week down at Eastern Illinois University installing my show at the Tarble Art Center. The installation went very well with the help of my Dad, Amy, Erica, Michael, Michael, Andy, Jess and Gabe. There were no major problems hanging the work, many of which had never been fully assembled or installed before.

Range Video

Stephen Cartwright - Range from Stephen Cartwright on Vimeo.

Range

Acrylic, aluminum, mixed media

96x37x25 in.

2010

Average running mileage determines the shapes of the moving panels in Range. The eight panels depict the 30-day rolling average of all miles run for the years 2002 – 2009. On a few panels, the averages fall to zero while I am away on extended cycling journeys.

Columbia College Chicago A + D Gallery Install

Last Friday we went up to Chicago to install Fort Peck in a group show called Data Mining. The show is at the Averill and Bernard Leviton A + D Gallery Columbia College Chicago curated by Bill Linehan and Terence Hannum. Jennifer and Megan at the gallery provided me with loads of help so the job was finished in about 6 hours. The piece looks great in the front window but I didn't get very good pictures.

Half finished

I got far enough along on this piece that I decided to put it aside and concentrate on some other projects that aren't as far along.

Running wave machine fabrication

After making the prototype I spent some time planning out the piece so I could be efficient when I ordered all the materials. So far I have stuck pretty close to this drawing made in Rhino.
Fabrication is going fairly well, the only major change so far has been to add some guide blocks to the channel where the plex will sit. In the prototype the heavy MDF parts were enough to keep everything upright, I also fed the panels through slots in a top surface, which I will skip in the final piece.