CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Stephen Cartwright knows the latitude and longitude of his location for every hour of every day since 1999.
He knows the amount of time he’s spent cycling, running, walking and driving; how much money he’s spent and the sorts of things he’s spent it on; and the temperature, wind speed and precipitation of the places he’s lived.
Cartwright is a professor of sculpture in the University of Illinois School of Art and Design. He uses the data he collects to create sculptures that portray the information as graceful, curving lines, or as etchings of lines, or as acrylic mountain ranges, or as kinetic sculpture with rods moving in oscillating waves.
Though compelled by mapping and by travel, his objective is not data visualization but art – finding ways to generate interesting landscapes with the data.
“The translation from data to drawing to object is trying to find new ways of looking at things,” Cartwright said.
He keeps track of data in binders of handwritten logs initially, then transfers it to his computer. He graphs the data and then uses a 3-D modeling program to manipulate the line graphs, creating surfaces in a digital model.
In this sculpture by Stephen Cartwright, the intersecting blue lines represent human-powered outdoor activity (walking, running and bicycling) and precipitation.
For his most recent work, he started with solid blocks of plexiglass. Guided by the digital model, he used a CNC router to carve the shapes of the surfaces onto two pieces that will fit together. In the gap between the two pieces of plexiglass, he poured colored resin. Then he sanded and polished the piece. The result is a clear block with one or two graceful, curving waves of color flowing through it.
The plexiglass pieces might show his running, walking and biking mileage and the corresponding temperature levels over a period of two years. Or it might compare that human-powered mileage with his driving mileage.
Another piece is layered sheets of acrylic, with each layer representing a year and showing his location while spending time in his wife’s hometown in England. A continuous line shows his location as he moved around the town during his visit. A similar mapping of his location in Champaign-Urbana shows lines concentrated around and spreading out from the places he spends most of his time. In the mass of radiating lines, he can point out his home, his office and his studio, as well as the grocery store where he usually shops. For those projects, he used a pointy bit on the router to etch the lines.
This acrylic sculpture, “Comparative Meshes,” shows levels of human-powered outdoor activity and precipitation for 2013.
The mapping started by chance when he was studying for a year in England. He and a friend ate lunch at a market every day, and they got to know the older ladies working at the market stalls. The women reminded Cartwright of his grandmother, and he began noting every grandmotherly figure he encountered by writing a short poem. Eventually the poems were replaced by simply noting the location.
He continued the practice when he moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, putting a dot on a map every time he saw a woman old enough to be his grandmother.
“I saw it wasn’t a map of older women in Philadelphia, it was a map of where I was in Philadelphia, and the old women were a marking trigger,” Cartwright said, so he began simply recording his own location.
He began collecting data about weather when he moved to Illinois from Virginia and wondered how much the weather was influencing his outdoor activity.
“I think about the forces of nature and how separate we are from that in normal life. Doing this was a way to remind myself about those natural systems and how I interact with them,” he said.
Cartwright likes seeing the qualities of the lines that come from his data. For example, his graph of latitude and longitude for 1997 shows a jagged line of points close together across the northern United States. They represent his location when he was biking across the country, and they contrast with the smooth lines with points much farther apart formed while driving on interstate highways.
Stephen Cartwright made this programmable sculpture, “Kinetic Mesh,” in order to be able to quickly update or alter data in a sculpture. The machine reads a data file and alters the shape of the piece to match the data. By choosing data sets with high variability within a small range (for example, the number of miles he runs per day), Cartwright can create a continuously undulating surface.
Cartwright’s artwork is in three shows early this year. He has a piece at the Elmhurst Art Museum until mid-February, in a show called “Sense of Place.” He has several pieces – both kinetic sculpture and some of his plexiglass block pieces – at the University of Louisville for a six-week show, “Unseen: Visualizing Ecological Systems,” that opened in mid-January. He’ll also have work at the University of Richmond from Feb. 9 through May in a show called “Crooked Data.”
He is working on an ongoing project, “Life Location,” to map the locations of himself, his wife and his immediate family members since each person’s birth. For Cartwright and his wife, he wanted “to see what happened to make our trajectories coincide.”
He’d like to create an online version of the project where anyone could submit information and see how they move through time.
“It seems like a good time to be thinking of how the world isn’t that big and we’re not that different, and everyone has a complicated story. This is just the geography of that, but there’s a lot to be learned from a person’s geography,” he said.
Editor’s note: To reach Stephen Cartwright, email srcartwr@illinois.edu.
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