Nowhere Else

Nowhere Else takes the form of an interactive double-screen video projection which the viewer navigates via a network of dates and astral maps to discover hundreds of images depicting incidental urban situations. The location for each photograph is determined by overlaying a map of the sky onto a map of London. The resulting superimposition of three mapping and imaging ‘regimes’ (temporal, astral and geographic) produces chance associations between stars, the names of streets, squares or parks, and the contingencies of the street landscape. It thus locates the viewer within a matrix of the sublime or the unknowable, the quotidian, and the overlooked. The work also investigates notions of autonomy through action, and aims to raise questions relating to the relationship between subjectivity and systems of governance evidenced in a subject’s navigation through systems of mapping and naming.

With the support of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) the work was developed to foreground an element of collective play, consciously explored through the staging of the double screen projection for a gallery context, and formed a focal point of Tallentire’s exhibition, This, and other things, 1999-2010 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA (2010). Nowhere Else at IMMA built upon earlier works that employ methods of chance to investigate alternative inscriptions of place with particular emphasis on the overlooked and mundane within the context of urban life. Furthermore, as with works such as ‘The Readers’ (2010), the work engages viewers’ activities directly in the production of the work thus raising issues of participation, authority and collective play.