TALKING TO SATELLITES

White Street Pier, Key West, Florida

2013 – 2015 

with author, Bernarda Strauss 

https://vimeo.com/144951419

c-prints of GPS tracking, videos of the sky and the pier ground

64 9″ x 16″ c-prints and 35 minute video loop, 12′ x 20′

A phrase is written with a bike and recorded with video and GPS. Moving images of the sky and ground are shot from the bike as each letter is formed and the two views are synchronized during the video projection. Photographs layer GPS tracking on Google Earth images. The phrase, “I want no one and the whole world to know,” is perhaps a wish to simultaneously float in anonymity and to be known.

White Street Pier’s structure defines guides for each letter formation. The southern-most edge of the U.S., this pier reaches into the ocean and evokes ideas of relational navigation: locating oneself, drawing borders, and sensing proximity with the power of water. Like the author of the phrase, South Florida and its islands are facing a difficult diagnosis. This is the first of a series where an idea expressed by someone living with illness is embedded into a landscape that is also facing impending transformation with sea level rise.