tracing mobility: cartography and migration in ... - Trampoline

Introduction to
the Exhibition
The exhibition, Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration
in Networked Space, is the final event that completes the
Tracing Mobility project; a project which spanned two years
and four European countries. The overall project included
residencies, workshops, exhibitions, symposiums, and other
satellite events that took place along the Croatian coast
(north of Split); in Nottingham, ; Warsaw, Poland; and
Berlin, Germany. This final exhibition in Berlin showcases
works that were either commissioned specifically for
the show or produced in distinct relation to the Tracing
Mobility programme. Overall, the exhibition is a continua-
tion and a further exploration of an ongoing dialogue that
seeks to descry the cultural aspects of our mobility, the
future of our mobility and the new spaces thus created or
altered as a consequence.
Through the positions of sixteen international artists
from various backgrounds, such as visual art, new media art
and performance, the show is a provocative staging of the
role electronic networks play in transforming our concep-
tions of time, space and distance. In a variety of formats or
platforms, such as installation, video, performance, painting,
‘Apps’, maps and open-source collaboration, these artists’
projects visualise a current of developing strategies lobbying
for a position of awareness, observation and engagement
within the sovereign as well as restrictive field of our ‘new’
spatial condition(s) and conditioning. Within that (or out-
side of that), unravel many questions and provocations: How
shall we understand, or rather, how can we even enunciate,
the new space that arises in the convergence of online and
offline; what does this do to one’s perception of time and
space; when every corner of the earth is mapped and within
one’s digital grasp, how is one’s physical and conceptual
sense of distance and space affected; how does the omnipo-
tent presence of our virtual mobility effect the movement
of a body in a landscape and what does it indicate; how does
the ubiquity of mobile technology and its media alter our
own mobility?
Clearly concerned with experiencing, questioning, under-
standing, probing, mining, and redefining what space, and
its relational antecedents, means today and how we navigate,
negotiate and mobilise within it, the exhibition presents a
diverse and dynamic topography of such encounters. Each
work on display executes its own variation of cartography,
some in a more traditional way in referencing geographical
maps, while for others the point of entry is their own move-
ment — ‘real’ or virtual — logged, mapped and transposed
as the artist’s medium, which as the exhibition enumerates,
is employed to exponential variety.
As in Landon Mackenzie’s pieces, Vancouver As the Centre
of the World (2009) and Houbart’s Hope (Green), Hope Advanced,
Hope Dasht (2001–2004), both paintings are based on
geographical maps, a map of North America and a world
map only to be manipulated and reconfigured blurring
the boundaries, as they truly are, between the factual and
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