Emirati artist collects GPS coordinates over 14 years

An Emirati artist who has collected 14 years' worth of GPS coordinates is displaying his artistic journey around the world through a multi-media installation at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah. Mohammad Kazem who described his latest project ‘Raw Data (1999-2013)'as a "semi-retrospective biography”, has combined art and navigational principles by collecting GPS readings throughout his professional career and representing them for the first time on an atmospheric computer-generated installation. "I started my journey in the UAE in 1999, and I started collecting the GPS coordinates from my trips to difference places where I was working on different art projects,” Kazem told Gulf News. From India to Holland to the States, Kazem compiled coordinates from different points on land and under water. "The project shows the constant change in time and my existence over the past 14 years in different places,” he added. The installation includes large screens which show the constant change in coordinates that display the date, time, and cardinal directions of a point in time. "I also collected lots of photographs, recordings, and art work along with the coordinates to identify the locations and my presence in these spaces,” said Kazem. Working in collaboration with Zlatan Filipovic, an Assistant Professor at the American University of Sharjah, the artist used unconventional media to turn his concept into a reality. "This is the first fully animated project which includes data that deals with time as ongoing change,” said Filipovic who helped in the production of the installation. Taking more than two months of group work to put the project together, Filipovic highlighted that the nature of the presentation was slightly challenging. "The one challenge I found was that the project was not done in a static environment where the details about the proximity and the relationship of the elements work out in a single image but instead what we have here is a constantly changing relationship of the sets of data,” he explained. Filipovic added that the project included over 4,000 individual animations and segments. The exhibition will run until January 11. Source: Gulf News