‘It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level withoutleaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.’
William Gibson
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As we live , work and traverse the city, town , countryside we leave behind marks, traces of our existence upon the physical landscape.
The development of distributed networked computing has created a virtual layer of space, a meta-Landscape of data – ‘dataSPACE’.
Increasingly, physical space is being overlaid by layers of dataSPACE connected and interwoven by the creation of everyday data. Activities such as using mobile phones, wireless computers, GPS systems, Oystercards, or purchasing items containing RFI tags etc, all mediate between physical space and dataSPACE casting ‘data-shadows’.
These data-shadows, etched into the hardware that enable dataSPACE, will provide a rich mine of information for the future digital-archeologist to unearth, sort and analyse.
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John Wild has collected the GSM location data created by his own mobile phone, whilst taking a walk radiating out from the abandoned Leytonstone Woolworths store.
The data was solidified into a series of 7 small metal (pewter)plaques, and embedded back into the physical environment at their corresponding locations.
Maps indicating the location of the data plaques can be obtained and taken away from an installation within the Woolworths store.
Pick ‘n’ Mix
Address: Old Woolworths building, 817 High Road, Leytonstone, London, E11 1HQ
Nearest Tube: Leytonstone, Central Line, Zone 3
Opening dates and times:
Saturday 27 June: 12-6pm
Sunday 28 June: 12-6pm
Thursday 2 to Sunday 5 July (incl.): 12-6pm (Friday until 8pm)
Thursday 9 to Sunday 12 July (incl.): 12-6pm (Friday until 8pm)Thursday 16 to Sunday 19 July (incl.): 12-6pm (Friday until 8pm)
Traces :: constitutes the solidification of the marks we leave behind, within everyday data, as we traverse the networked cityscape.
