arctic circle

main menu..................arctic circle...................tropic of cancer


Cultural Alchemy


The tropic is different from the arctic, maybe simply because
you don't have the loneliness and the pathos of the nordic
landscape. We agreed to combine travelling with an almost
synchronous documentation on the web. The travel makes the
first step and the documentation the second. Thus we travelled
at daytime and worked on the computer in several night shifts.
The project was unpredictable like our journey. It is a story
built up by many fragments of time, not unlike film-sequences,
that you put in an order, so that they make sense. In this way
we used the technology as an easy and fast medium for publication
and distribution, with which we could explore yet new forms of
direct-documentary or (maybe better) transformation of what we
experienced.

We arrived in Mexico City, warm and lively, and met urban life
not unlike 'home'. The web seemed to be an adequate medium for
exchange and communication for people we met there.

The next phase was travelling along the pacific coast in Guerrero
and Oaxaca. Other than in the arctic, we did not merely explore
vast land with our project, but we were also confronting the people
with the technology we brought with us. We felt trapped in cultural
representation.

So we hired a Volkswagen and took off to the Chiapas' Highlands.
It was cold there, and we were freezing and rethinking the project.
Double-travel meant reacting double on situations: As a stranger
down in Mexico, and as a translator to the net-community on the web.

We decided that we didn't want to document acurately what was going
on. So as a next step we executed a modern land art show in the
middle of the jungle at the ancient maya-site of Palenque. Philip
travelled on the net from Germany. Right at the same day he wrote
an email to the jungle urging us to finally start to perform...

New York, February 23, 1996



Links

Background Info I, "Gold Rush", February-May, 1995

Background Info II, "Virtual Realists", February-May, 1995

"Die Arktis und das Internet", Siemens Media Lab Talk, July 1995

"email reading", Ars Digitalis, HdK Berlin, April 1996

"Medium bedeutet Mitte", Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Munich, July 1996

THE THING



main menu..................arctic circle...................tropic of cancer

copyright 1996 felix s. huber, christoph, philip pocock, florian wüst