Transforming personal daily GPS data through performances: movement, memory and time

Abstract

This thesis examines three plan b performance pieces, which are all based on a long-term practice of recording GPS data daily (fourteen years for me at time of writing). The works comprise different performative processes to materialise the data through public drawing, narrating and collective knotting. Each of the pieces is related to the respective central themes of movement, memory and time. Through performance methodologies involving durational and slow processes, I show how all the works deal with means of visualising and materialising the otherwise invisible: the traces and journeys of where one has been and when. I argue that alongside these performances of our data, the works create new insights and knowledge of a spectator’s own sense of the shape of their own daily movements, the scale of journeys, recall of their own biography, and their experience of time. I examine how the art works ask the viewer to consider their relationship to the idea of the drawing of their own lives, the stories they would tell if revisiting their own journeys and what they might learn from seeing their pattern of activity across a whole year in the form of a carpet.