Stephan Cartwright Question/Response

1. A lot of your work is very technical and consists of many numbers and graphs. What kind of artist would you consider yourself to be?
2. What do you want your viewers to get from your work?

I went to the Stephan Cartwright lecture on a whim and I was pleasantly surprised by the experience I had listening to him. He is an avid biker and traveler. That was what initially attracted me to his work. He has traveled all over the world and has done extensive bike trips, one of his biggest trips was something like 9,000 miles! His longest project to date is his "Latitude and Longitude" project. For the past 11.5 years, he has recorded his whereabouts using GPS. He records his whereabouts every hour on the hour. From this data he creates line drawings and maps detailing his travels. He makes graphs as well, with each line representing a different year. This is the premise for most of his work. One of his pieces, the "Life Location Project", was a way for him to figure out his life and where he had been and also to see how his life could have intersected with other peoples'. He uses a line for himself and then he also has lines representing his wife and his immediate family. It's really interesting to see how all of the lines diverge and then intersect at other points and then all diverge again. When I looked at all of the lines flowing together, it made me think about my own life and how it has intersected with so many other people, coming together just for an instant and than breaking away again to go separate paths. My favorite pieces that he did were called "Frequency." He did one for Richmond and one for Philadelphia. It comes back to the GPS coordinates again. He would keep track of everywhere he went within the city. Each location, for every time he was there, equaled one cube. If he went somewhere multiple times, there were cubes for each time he went there, stacked on top of each other. Eventually what he ends up creating, is a cityscape of sorts, made up of all of these cubes. What was really interesting was that he could point to certain cubes and immediately know where the location was. Overall, he was a very interesting and engaging speaker to listen to. I'm really glad I ended up going to this lecture. I've never been to a sculpture lecture before so it was a nice break from all of the photo/film lectures I have seen.