YOU ARE THE NETWORK 2014
WritingsFor many people, the notion of origin suggests a narrative of immigrating to one place from another, having daily roots in one country and familial, cultural or historical roots in another. However, since the proliferation of public access to DNA testing, narratives of origin have become more nuanced portraits of who we are and where we have come from, giving diversity visibility, as it is embodied within each of us.
Along those same lines, our daily use of the web and wireless connections contains geo-spatial diversity that is invisible to most of us, most of the time; hidden dimensions of multi-variant pathways and relationships to elsewhere. For many these pathways of global connections and interconnections are invisible, but, what if that could change? What could this information reveal about the complex relationships we have both to and within these emerging global systems? If tracked as a more common visible byproduct of each connection, what information would it reveal about the system and sites that sustain and enable it? Could it contribute to an emerging global perspective based not on physical properties of space or location, but rather on revised, complicated relationships to local and global?
These considerations have led me back to data visualization and projects that have represented information in ways that powerfully alter our relationships to it.