The Line of Concurrence 2015
The high-tech, real-time, digitally connected, perpetually 24/7 world that we now live in has produced peculiar new global time-space correlations. Traditional notions of perceptual space and linear time have been ousted and replaced by fragmentation, overlapping, and new experiences of simultaneity.
In the last twenty-five years, the spread of webcams—like a network of mechanical Cyclops colonising the planet—has grown in tandem with the rapidly expanding Internet. When we look at a scene through a webcam, our perception of place undergoes a transformation, as the distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is reconfigured; it is as if we are there, even though our bodies remain here. Indeed, the digital wiring of the world has effectively collapsed geographical distance, with a virtual map of webcams offering us a chance to connect in real-time with remote, yet carefully framed, landscapes. This compression of time and space has allowed us to become computer-chair tourists, able to cross horizons and embark upon a Grand Tour while never having to step outside our front door.
The Line of Concurrence collages that appear in this large book were constructed from images taken at the same moment in time from a multitude of webcams, each possessing varying digital resolutions and abilities to mediate light and colour. These aberrations in pixilation and colour produce a compelling aesthetic all of their own. The landscapes are linked together through the juxtaposition of their horizon lines—a powerful element that has changed over the centuries. Whereas the horizon line once stood for a limit—the edge of the world that enclosed us—its meaning shifted during the Enlightenment to signify infinity. The geographer Jay Appleton calls the horizon “the line of demarcation which separates that portion of the field of vision which can be perceived by the eye from that which can be reached only by the imagination”. Physically, the horizon line will forever be beyond our reach, always existing far off in the distance. Webcams, however, extend our horizon, albeit in a virtual sense, allowing our eyes to traverse cyberspace to settle upon a new one. Our mind makes the journey in real-time while our body remains firmly rooted within the material realm.
