Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman
Geolocation: UK
May 3 - June 3, 2012
"As a society, we strive for means to abate a loneliness that seems exasperated by an increasingly overly connected culture. Cell phones and instant messaging have simultaneously made us more connected virtually and lonelier than ever."
"Geolocation: UK" is one part of a larger photographic project by the collaborative artistic duo Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman. Using location coordinates of posts made by users of Twitter across the United Kingdom, Larson and Shindleman go to the places where each "tweet" originated and make a photograph of what they find there.
"For this work, we mine the public time line of tweets for those with GPS coordinates, then mark the locations with a photograph, including the original tweet below the image. We follow these strangers through their Twitter updates, becoming intimately involved in their banal daily errands. This work is a means for situating the virtual into the physical realm. We imagine ourselves as virtual flâneurs, ethnographers of the Internet, exploring cities 140 characters at a time through the lives of others. Like a historical marker on the side of the highway, these photographs interrupt a historical narrative, that of the Twitter public timeline."
Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman's collaborative work focuses on the cultural understanding of distance as perceived in modern life and network culture. Their projects were recently featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Utne Reader, Flavorwire,Frieze Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, the BBC News Viewfinder, and the public radio program Marketplace Tech Report. Collaborative work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center Las Vegas, and the Marks Arts Center in California, and selections from projects have been shown at the Athens Photo Festival in Greece, the Houston Center for Photography, Baltimore Museum of Art, the 2nd Moscow International Biennale in Russia, RAIQ in Montréal, Peloton in Australia, the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, City Without Walls in New Jersey, and the Conflux Festival in NYC. Larson and Shindelman's first New York solo exhibition was with United Photo Industries in Brooklyn, January 2012.
Nate Larson is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and serves on the Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education. He received his MFA from The Ohio State University in 2002. Marni Shindelman is Associate Professor of Art and an associate of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Rochester. She received her MFA from the University of Florida in 2002.