Drifting through the looking glass [a road less travelled] making living books with old and new tools

Abstract

From Winchester, UK, artist Danny Aldred acts as a stationary, virtual flaneur, processing a far-away geography understood through Google Earth. He selects and transmits his experience of the area surrounding Street Road image by image via fax. The viewer is in turn invited to experience this re-invented version of the very landscape that surrounds him or her through the artist’s digital eye, traveling to unfamiliar territory both within a close radius and across continents.

The images, which rhythmically and somewhat loudly enter the gallery space at regular intervals through a hanging fax machine, are fleeting, fragmented, sometimes eerie, pieces of a puzzle which doesn’t quite add up to anything akin to physical reality.

The fax, a near obsolete technology, was almost comically difficult to set-up. We first had to track down the kind of fax machine, which would take rolls of paper, on Craigslist, then tinker with it over a significant length of time to get it to print continuously, and test it through internet fax service. In the end, (arrivals) 3531 miles and back again presents us with a convergence of different technologies (fax, satellite imaging, e-mail and data sharing) and art discourses (eastern scroll painting, romantic landscape painting, digital and conceptual art in the post-modern tradition) creating a layered experience of space and a slightly disorienting effect.

In A Road Less Traveled, Aldred invites viewers to participate in this subjective map-making of Route 41, to add their own pieces to the puzzle. Multiple processors/participants are introduced and the scroll becomes a never-ending map of subjective geographies.

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