About the Artwork
This artwork used to be able to be viewed at locate.aaronmcconchie.com.
Within our current era information has become so easy to access that we are at risk of overloading our lives.
This work gives you personal information about my life, my location, and offers that data as dynamic on-screen drawing.
With most web based information, consumption is the key. Offering up easily accessible data for a mass audience. I wish to subvert this consumptive culture with dynamically visualised data that offers a unique aesthetic rather than swamping the viewer with info.
Triggering the voyeur in all, the viewer is able to see my exact location (the centre of a refreshed screen) but yet the actual location remains hidden. The lines on the screen highlight my travels in the last 30 days with a slowly decaying path.
In essence this is a larger than life digital drawing that captures my movements and manipulates the relationship between the physical and virtual.
In the work’s current configuration the colours change regularly over 1 hour to mimic the passing of time over 24 hours.
What the? How? With what?
The data source of the artwork comes from a custom Android app developed by Aaron and Carl that is programmed to send the phones position at a user selected interval.
That data gets sent to a web database. That data is then called via javascript by the web page and the ‘map’ is styled to suit the artwork.
The website runs within the Ruby on Rails framework.
Many thanks to
Panasonic New Zealand, for the loan of the awesome 50″ Viera plasma display for the length of the awards exhibition.
Carl Pattie for all the hours of coding and handholding as we walked through creating the Android app and website for this visualisation.