Key to any artist’s practice is their process of making art rather than the end product or the predetermined plan for the final composition.
As part of my process, I’ve been doing a great deal of reading, making journal notes, making mind maps which will go on to feed many topics I'm exploring around, time, place and space. At this point I’m now going on to create a visual vocabulary from practice based research through making artifacts. The research I've been doing is more or less a continuation of my "Mind the Gap" series which culminated in a series of photographic compositions which examined the lives of people moving at the advanced speeds of flight across vast geographical areas, I’m now thinking about how social relations are rapidly changing relations stretched over geographical physical space.
Just to give a little update to the background of the current project:
In 1833, the English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet which included a hypothetical example of over-use of a common public resource, in this case a piece of open land for public use called a Common. Then in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin explored this social dilemma in his article "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the journal of Science.
Both of these writers were looking at the different issues that arise out of the use of common public areas i.e. a public park. The tragedy is that while the public benefit from this shared space, no one is responsible for it and that collective indifference destroys it, therefore the very people who need it and benefit from it effectively destroy their shared space.
Today, although we have public areas where people meet, the predominant global public space is the internet. The tragedy is that's it's becoming a bit like Central Park, New York in the 1970’s, a place where no one dared to go after dark. Does it need regulating and will people simply return to older modes of communication – phone, fax, letters to protect their privacy?
Reference:
Freidman, G. (2017, January 4). The Internet and the Tragedy of the Commons. Retrieved from https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-internet-and-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
