You are (w)here !?

I've been lost in virtual space :if I'm not stumbling through the various scattered thoughts in my mind, I'm trawling through the various scattered thoughts on the Internet. Surfing like a pro without getting my feet wet.

Of all the possible topics for a thesis, of all the possible combinations of concepts and words, I am in the process of filtering, focusing and distilling. Space, Time, Maps, Psycho geography, archiving daily lived experience ....these have become the catchphrases of my existence. My head is full of french social theorists: Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault. I fall asleep with them every night gurgling through the digestive tract of my consciousness. Despite what may be said about french men, none of these fellows are really good in bed. Lefebvre's socially produced space bounce off Debord's Psycho geography and ricochet against Foucalt's theories on Power and hetertopias. They all speak about similar notions: about space, place and site being the product of the people who occupy and navigate them; about space existing in time and therefore in history and memory. The point of departure when considering space must surely be the human body-as a vessel which both contains and occupies space and must mediate between internal psychic/mental spaces and external spaces. Bodies interact with other bodies, shaping environments through their thoughts and (inter)actions.

I am interested in exploring the manner in which individual bodies move through space during the course of their daily routine. I track my routes with GPS, I collect objects (one per day)which remind me of my presence in a specific site, I carry a small journal(one per day) around with me at all times to document my thoughts and experiences.The collecting and documenting of personal lived experience is an attempt to locate my body in time and space. This is a one year (365day) project begun on the first of January 2007. At the end of the project there will be an object and a journal for each day of the year---a personal record of one person's routine existence in linear time and gridded space.

My art uses maps--cut up, stripped of place names, stitched into and re-presented as 3d cubes. This is my attempt to interrogate the separation between perceived space (material space) and conceived space which interprets and transcribes physical space into a 2dimensional format. Space is organic, places are always changing according to the movement and interactions that occur between the people who occupy those spaces. Maps lock place into a specific, immutable time frame---they can never be completely accurate yet we use them to make sense of the spaces we occupy. Maps are symbols of power: they influence the manner in which a space is navigated, perceived and remembered.

Look around Durban and see how the act of changing the city's street names is an attempt to erase and rewrite the history of a place. There are going to be lots of spelling errors :New street signs labour beneath the bulk of un- pronouncible double-barrel surnames....

...But that's another issue. For now I'll plunge back into the surf a terrain without street names
theories on spatial practice bounce off Foucault theories of space and power which in turn ricochet against (but seething with social theorists). The waves are always great in the ocean of Google.