Abstract
The Great Orbital Run was a solitary run/artwork that took place over nine days around the inside boundary of the M25 London Orbital. The journey was mapped through a stream of photographs and GPS coordinates relayed live from a mobile phone to a web interface and shown as a projected artwork at the University of Greenwich, London. It was later re-configured as the M25 in 4000 images, a unique concertina bookwork/sculpture produced from digital data into tangible, printed paper form. Cut, folded, and constructed by hand, it makes visible the mass of images that embody the running activity and the terrain it represents. This essay considers this artwork and its status as a document and artist’s book, reflecting on (1) the original running activity, (2) the mapping of the boundary of Greater London, (3) the performance of technology in relaying the run, and (4) the transformation of digital images into material form. The document is considered in relation to the run as a performance and in relation to its performative potential. This is extended to the documentary properties of the artists’ book as ‘a form of three-dimensional representation’ that, through its ‘agency’, aligns itself with spatial practice.
Highlights
IntroductionOver the last ten years, I have developed an endurance running art practice as part of a larger inquiry into the performative nature of human physical activity, in the interplay between the body and technology
Towards a Framework between the Physical and Digital and BackOver the last ten years, I have developed an endurance running art practice as part of a larger inquiry into the performative nature of human physical activity, in the interplay between the body and technology
I align this work to performance art practices in the ways in which the limits of my body are tested through the physical demands of long-distance running, whilst the limits of technology are challenged through the ways in which I communicate that experience to others
Summary
Over the last ten years, I have developed an endurance running art practice as part of a larger inquiry into the performative nature of human physical activity, in the interplay between the body and technology. The printing of the images into a physical document/artist’s book work allows a further consideration of the image and of the document to take place in its transformation from a digital to a physical, tangible format and for status of the image to be reconsidered and re-presented through its status as a physical document and artwork In this case, the (re)production of the images are not foregrounded as part of the live action of the event (the original run) nor through their physical output in the process of printing but through the physicality of the image as a printed document and record of a journey undertaken, and through what the images and the document themselves depict and represent. Documentation in performance follows as a means of developing the theoretical context before its further reconsideration in relation to the artist’s book
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