Topology of Loss
- Jennifer Cohen jen-co
A few weeks ago I lost my wallet soon after I had just moved to Berlin. Since this happened I discoverd an online lost and found database which I have been looking at daily (http://fundsuche02.kivbf.de/MyApp.asp?wci=Suche1&MDT=berlin-ZFB) to try see if any of my lost wallet items have been found.
Every day the record of lost items gets updated. The number per day varies quite a lot and after the weekend there is a signifcant number of items added. The details here usually include the date of birth, sometimes color (of wallet) and the location it was found (e.g Alexanderplatz).
I have been thinking for a while now that there is something intriguing about this collection of data. First of all because from my own experience there is this hope of recovering my lost items but also because the data represents lost fragments of people. There is also something about that feeling of losing something, especially when its a document/object linked to one’s identity that is quite distinct and quite visceral.
I want to try capture these feelings in an installation. The first phase would be a purely digital exploration which I would then like to extend to a physical installation that would somehow capture that strange feeling of having lost something and or this idea of fragments of people fading in and out of places they have been found and collected.
Digital: For now the most interesting (and common) data bits are the date of birth and location found so I thought it would be good to start off visualising those. I thought a natural representation of date of birth would be a circle with rings in it (like a tree). We would then have a map of Berlin and wherever an item was found, at that location the circle of rings would fade in and out. The appearance of rings would also correlate with the dates the items were found. I don’t really feel that the actual map of Berlin needs to be obvious to the viewer and it would merely guide where the circles go but this can also be debated. This kind of data visualisation is inspired by this: http://flowingdata.com/2011/03/21/history-of-the-world-in-100-seconds-according-to-wikipedia/
Physical: There is something about the sensation of air rushing on one’s skin that invokes this feeling of loss and also a sense of a kind of fragment/tiny presence of a person. So this could possibly involve a matrix of tiny fans hanging from the ceiling, the grid being a representation of the x-y of the map. The strength of the air pressure could correlate with the date of birth perhaps although I am not sure this feels like a natural mapping. Perhaps instead, vibration points would be better, and the grid of vibrating points would be on the floor. Maybe it could just be an LED strip grid, where the length of the lit leds correlates with the birth date. This doesnt feel strong enough for me in terms of capturing that physical feeling of loss etc. It could also be a 3d grid/sculpture that a viewer walks through or maybe there is another way of making something physically expand and contract in a grid to be a 3d translation of the digital rings.
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