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.