proposal: Although technology is recognized as a daily presence, perhaps even a necessity in modern life, its effects on the experience, and the very concept of travel are often overlooked. The invention of the train brought the ability to quickly move across land and the advent of photography gave us the ability to capture and share that experience of travel. The telegraph gave us the ability to communicate with each other over large distances and the telephone gave us the ability to separate our voice from our body in instant communication. Now that the Internet has arrived, not only are vast amounts of information democratically available, but also our physical notions of space and time are being altered and compressed. It is fascinating that I can be sitting at my computer, “surfing” the web and in two clicks of the mouse jump from the United States to Brazil and then from Brazil to China. Though the information seems to be floating in “Internet space,” it is really data sitting in servers located all over the world. As I “surf” from site to site, I am really jumping from server to server and in the process traveling the globe. The world is now a much smaller place than it used to be. I would like to journal my daily Internet “travels” and record not just the cyber locations, but also the physical locations that house this information. I believe that doing so will reveal social and political connections between information and also between the information and it’s geographical location. I consider my piece, space/time, to be a sketch for the process of decoding and visualizing this information. By recording my cyber movements, I will be able to track down the server’s physical locations using publicly available serverices. I will record my “surfing” for an entire year to record trends in my travels. This information will be compiled into a statistical analysis, tracking the movement of information across the globe. Satellite images, company names, virtual addresses and physical addresses will all be used in a visual and statistical journal of seemingly banal Internet wondering.
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