In an era of increasing communications and globalization we are all attempting to relearn spatial politics. A collapse of time and space causes some borders to blur and others to be drawn more clearly. Dispersal for various reasons makes many long for a nostalgic home that no longer exists or may never have existed. Differences in point of view come to the fore. Shared events, experienced or seen through media, connect people in strange and difficult ways. Privacy has disappeared.

Learning Distance attempts to broach this subject and is both a website and a floor projection installation. It references the childhood game hopscotch, which is played around the world from Thailand to Argentina. The piece records imagery from 15 webcams on 5 continents (of streets, highways, airports, and waterways), and incorporates it into a hopscotch board, capturing patterns of movement from around the globe. Sometimes cultural differences are clearly visible. Sometimes the patterns look similar. Obviously, there are no cameras in many places.

Each ‘turn’ of the game randomly selects a new camera and chalk word to ‘play’. Still frame grabs from the webcam move around a game ‘rock’ like feet on a sidewalk game. At the end of the moves, the hopscotch plays the recorded sequence back in each numbered frame, much like a time-lapse movie. The ‘rock’ these images move around is a video clip of drawing out one of 15 words by hand in chalk. These words resonate in both real and virtual spaces and include: public, private, community, home, border, connection, memory, site, border, distance, link, speed, connection, shared, difference, and perspective.

Learning Distance has two manifestations: a shockwave Internet artwork and a more animated projector file that can be projected on a gallery/exhibition floor. Both utilize perl scripts on my web server that record 10 images from each webcam at regular intervals (every 20 to 30 minutes).

Funded in part by a Drescher Fellowship.