Having received a letter from my degree course briefing me on an 'Introductory Project' titled above, I am now in the process of beginning the project.
Having been advised to begin with a space, and from there explore this space in order to find influences for the work. I have decided upon the global non physical space of the internet. Considering I access it like almost everyone else I know on a daily basis, it has to be one of the more dominant spaces in my life.
That settled i headed to a friends for a night of pizza and Xbox, during this i noticed how certain games use a map as a real time geographic of all the players who are currently on the said game at that moment in time. examples can be seen below (lights indicating where the players are in the world):
a better quality version of the map can be seen below
Looking at the map there are the obvious heavy traffic areas of America and Europe, though it was not these florescent blocks that attracted me, it was the sparse and dim singular entities which can be seen dotted around seemingly unique locations such as Niger and Ethiopia, Alaska and Bolivia.
When looking at the people accessing the internet in this way I have an image of such remote landscapes and and such beautiful landscapes within which is being overcrowded by the vast space of the internet, accessed literally through portal like windows of LED screens. I find the contrast quite powerful and it is this that I want to explore in my work.
Wanderer above a sea of fog - Caspar David Friedrich
The image I had of these distant internet users was one which reminded me a lot of the painting above which I first saw on the cover of Mary Shelly's novel 'The Last Man'. His large series of Romantic landscapes contain many figures which stair into the distance, conversely I feel making a series of landscapes in which the viewer or potentially a protagonistic figure is drawn to ignore the landscape and focus on an LED screen would suit my interests well.
The images would be asking the viewer questions of how they see the internet in terms of a 'Space' and whether or not that fact that it is pulling us away from nature is a good thing.
