arctic circle

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arctic circle log


Double Travel

For this 'travel-as-art-as-information' project we go by
camper van up the Alaska, Klondike and Dempster Highways
to the edge of the Arctic Sea; simultaneously uploading
along the way performance loops and text exchanges on to
the swarming Infobahn.

Our real road journey takes us over the Arctic Circle to
one of the globe's last remote wildernesses...

With some sort of connectivity available everywhere now,
we will be uploading video, sound, image and text files to
you, our co-travellers, from the road... from tire repair
shops probably, RV-hookup campgrounds, trailer homes, who
knows?
 
Via one of the worlds most northern Internet nodes, the
Inukshuk machine at the Inuvik Research Center (Thank you,
Alan Fehr and Les Kutny!) and with accounts on Yukon Net,
Compuserve and The Thing, we shall construct a virtual
presence there from here, as we eat up 8000 kilometers
of pavement and gravel, and chew even greater distances
on the Internet at one and the same time.

Our virtual travel is planned to continue months after our
physical travel ends. Why not? After all, fast media slow
down the perception of time in direct proportion
to the build-up of déja vu residue, like archetypes or
myths did, and CNN or TV reruns do.

<<arctic circle>> is an investigation into two forms
of contemporary loneliness:

On the one hand, the feeling of being and not belonging in
a vast, natural space like the Canadian North, picturing
oneself as an ant, a smudge on a map.

On the other hand, sitting in front of a laptop screen,
trying to conjure a two-way link to you all somewhere in the
swarming cyberspace on the other side of the screen. Which
is lonelier?

Contact, natural or virtual, is purely loneliness, or at
least a reminder that we end in ourselves.





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