Jeremy Wood in the Department of Digital Humanities
Working in collaboration with Dr Stuart Dunn, Reader in Spatial Humanities and Head of the Department of Digital Humanities, Jeremy Wood is an artist-in-residence working on a project challenging and deconstructing the use of modern GPS applications.
The aim of this project is to challenge and deconstruct the 'digital narcissism' which many modern mapping applications foster. The glowing blue dot at the centre of the map, and the information which the map feeds us as we use it to find our way through the world, encourages us to limit our understanding to the information which the map provides.
Typically this is information is tailored by the internet’s personalizing algorithms to ourselves by smoothing our journey and reducing the effort to navigate. It eliminates disruption and seduces us down easier pathways in order to way-find, socialise, to spend and to consume – all at the behest of the commercial interests which surround us online.
Working with a group of King’s students, we will construct a series of experiments which will restore this sense of disruption using the medium of GPS. Using the physical location of King’s as a reference point, our students – wherever they are in the world – will be challenged to anticipate their eventual journey back to the campus through walking. They will develop their own personal GPS traces that we will then explore and contextualize into an GPS-based artistic installation.
Project team
Stuart Dunn is Reader in Spatial Humanities and Head of the Department of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. He is the author of numerous texts on the relationship between space, place and technology, most recently his 2019 monograph, A History of Place in the Digital Age.
Jeremy Wood has for over twenty years paced urban and rural landscapes with a GPS in his pocket. His personal cartographies have been exhibited internationally and are held in private and public collections, including the London Transport Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Library.
This collaboration is also supported by Claire Reddleman and Cristina Kiminami from the Department of Digital Humanities.
Claire Reddleman currently teaches in the Digital Humanities department at King’s College London, working on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art. Prior to this she carried out postdoctoral research using visual research methods to engage with the history of France’s penal colonies. She is also a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.com
Cristina A. G. Kiminami is a PhD candidate in the Department of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. She is an architect and urbanist, and her current research is on digital mediation relations with the users' perception of urban surroundings.