2014
To the Unknown Place
Concept
To the Unknown Place piece is a map-ode to the potential of the unexplored and the unchartered place, revealing an aesthetic attempt to reconsider the utopian. Based on his ambulatory method, the artist conducts a virtual walk into the digital landscapes of Google Maps. His tactic is defined by a speculative excavation; a botanizing on the unnamed streets labelled as ‘without name’ by Google. Initiating from the digital grassy slopes of Acropolis, his wandering becomes a virtual psychogeography from place to place across Athens and Greece; collecting more than 120 topographical stills of locations that do not share any identity. His final postcards draw connections to non-places concept. The street name reveals a geology of collective memory, an identity which is questioned ironically. Based on the poetics and politics of maps, the work collects, archives and digitally elaborates on the old towards the birth of a new place without name. The artistic output offers a printed map, ode to the place as a becoming process (influenced by Moore’s Goplacia).
Description
Virtual performance, digital collage, printed map
Technical: C-print 1m x 1m framed in glass
Dimensions: 1m x 1m (other dimensions available)
Year: 2014
Credits
Concept – Creation: Bill Psarras
Exhibited
The work was invited to be exhibited at Goplacia group exhibition, Metamatic: Taf gallery, Athens (2014)
N o p l a c i a was once my name,
That is, a place where no one goes.
Plato’s Republic now I claim
To match, or beat at its own game;
For that was just a myth in prose,
But what he wrote of, I became,
Of men, wealth, laws a solid frame,
A place where every wise man goes;
G o p l a c i a is now my name.
Sir Thomas More (Utopia, 1516)
