On the Move: in the Virtual and the Physical Worlds

Without doubt, physical and virtual mobility are becoming increasingly complementary. On a simple level, GPS helps us find our way to the next party. And that brilliant When is My Next Bus Coming app means I don’t have to try to read a timetable any more. But more poetically, experiencing a place in reality is often merely a follow-up to the virtual journey already begun online. The physical experience of a place is measured often only in so far as it can be described to those who are not there, via photos, videos, tweets, Instagrams or Facebook.

As an artist and curator I’m interested in the impact of this ever-increasing mobility upon our sense of self, both when alone and as part of a community. I am interested in the way we negotiate these double lives, between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. My girlfriend is in the bathroom; a long-ago lover on a different continent, in a different time-zone, tweets a picture of her lunch. And in how this impacts upon the way we move through space and interact with the people we live alongside.

While linking up via technology should reduce the need for travel, it often does the opposite. Mobile technology changes our concept of ‘near’ and ‘far’. We know more about what is going on somewhere else than ever before. After a while, the desire to experience this for real translates into a flight or train booking. For virtual mobility is not yeta substitute for physical mobility. 

As someone whose life is divided between Birmingham, Berlin and London, this constant awareness of events going on in different cities also brings a sense of restlessness – a feeling that I’m never properly anywhere.

As for working lives, the more people work from home, the greater the danger of feeling isolated. Connected Isolation is the title of an online exhibition I am curating in November – December 2012, on NYC-based site CultureHall.com. I’m worried that physical mobility will be reserved for the ‘important’ people, while the workers will feel cut off. Loneliness is a side effect of virtual connectivity. Even with Skype eye contact is not possible.

Trying to persuade people to travel less is difficult, so the key is in building up local communities and making people aware of what’s happening near by. It’s just as easy (if not easier) to hear what’s happening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as it is to find out about the gallery down the road. So local venues need to figure out how to draw close-by people in, to bring them together in real time, same space, away from computers.

On a personal level, I do feel guilty about the amount I fly, but art, as yet, cannot be appreciated entirely online. In the art world especially, interpersonal relationships are the fulcrum of collaboration, so meeting face to face is imperative. My latest curatorial project FRAME_birmingham has been devised in response to some of these issues. It installs small 2d works by artists from over the world in venues and businesses across the city as a way of bringing art to new audiences. Art in this sense can bring local communities together and build stronger links within cities.