Michelle Teran / Ubermatic

“Future Guides: From Information to Home” is an artistic research project on following: how to practice and theorize following. It was carried out between 2010-2014 within the Norwegian Artistic Fellowship Programme and around the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. A final exhibition of my artistic research, “Your Revolution Begins at Home“, took place at the USF Gallery and Cinemateket in Bergen, September 4-14, 2014. “Confessions of an Online Stalker“, a critical reflection text on artistic results of the research, was submitted in 2015.

Link to Critical reflection

The study outlines the emergence of an artistic research method combining data mining, systems for mapping, storytelling, and translation and its application in the fields of media art, microhistory, and activism. The development of artistic works (several books, text, film, installation and public performance) become the aesthetic results of conversations, negotiations and reflections around the proceeding questions: How are tracking, guiding, following and stalking used as artistic research methods? What role does image production play in everyday life and how does it create tension between the public and private experience? How can strategies of translation provide the critical tools for experimenting with shifts between context, subjectivity and scale?

This artistic research reflects on a contemporary condition in which personal and social archives constitute a new type of city guide that challenges the official representations of cities online. It reflects on the phenomenon of documenting and sharing one’s urban life to the world online, an act reflective of a culture of making oneself and one’s life visible thus, present in online social networks. The work focuses on the micro or working on case studies, whereby the studying and following of trails of data produced by different individuals and seeing where it leads is a process of trying to establish where one “is” from other people’s data. However, the effort of pinning down a location is not merely to focus in a machinic system of (geo)precision on the place where one might be standing but to recognize the people who occupy (or have occupied) that place in the city. It is a method of online tracking which leads to spatial tracking, from which a narrative language emerges. The question is implicitly addressed: to what extent urban media art can help us to locate ourselves in the mediated city by offering to trace and reveal the connections between places, people, and digital culture. But what if the connections reveal a city in crisis? The research leads to a flight to Madrid and ends up in the homes of evicted families, where anti-eviction activists use digital information to locate and make public the everyday effects of crisis. In the foreground of the crisis is the crisis of the home. It is there that we encounter sites of political struggle, the act of making oneself and one’s life visible becoming a strategy for collective empowerment.