ARCTIC CIRCLE is an investigation into two parallel conditions of contemporary loneliness.
"Which is lonelier, being somewhere we no longer belong, in one of the earth's last hold outs - vast stretches of Canadian arctic wilderness - for <arctic circle> , or trying to connect to people on the other side, the cyber-side, of mini laptop screens?"
-- PHILIP POCOCK , excerpt from the lecture space<>between, Art of Exhibiting symposium, Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, 2000.
Arctic Circle is a 'double travel' taking two artists North to a last great remote wilderness on earth, the Arctic in Canada, where they 'connect' with virtual co-travelers in the very early days of Net culture via email from trailer parks, auto repair shops and research stations, constructing a video performance website as they go 'on the road' and over the Infobahn. Arctic Circle, as such, is media critical, questioning our place, our identity within geographical or datagraphical frameworks simultaneously.
What begins as a 1970s-oriented 'travel-as-art' conceptual performance, where two artists make their way up 1000s of kilometers of road to the Arctic Circle to walk along it and transmit that to 'co-traveller' via the Internet in 1995, develops into 1990s pulp melodrama, when two hitchhikers, Norah and Nicolas, hop on board, and any and all preconceived ideas are chucked out the 1974 SuperVan window.
Months later, when two more artists join, Christoph Keller and Florian Wuest, they detour south to the heat of another 'circle' for TROPIC OF CANCER, where they find themselves confronted with cultural baggage in a poor country, and resort to poking fun at heroic artistic myths.
PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY curated by Prof. Manfred Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut and Florian Roetzer investigates the relatioship between memory and photography in the age of new media.
web - http://roundearth.zkm.de/arcticcircle
ARCTIC CIRCLE Double Video - http://philip.battlix.com/datatectur...
