DIGITAL NOMADS ATLAS
This project explores a new mindset related to the rise of nomadic lifestyles, using an interactive web survey with StyleGAN latents space expolarion that visualize respondents' concepts of 'home', freedom, and mindful practices, challenging traditional sociological methods by engaging participants actively and returning power to the individual through personalized map visualizations.
... I concentrated my project around Deleuze and Guattari and their ‘Nomadology’ where they discuss how nomadic societies operate outside of the state control and challenge traditional views of social structures.
I found that the concept of ‘deterritorialization’ - a process of unbinding, releasing and leading to transformation - helps me connect the conventional digital nomadism with my idea of digital nomadism as the new mindset which is more ecological and aware.
So both variables that I explore - the ‘size of home’ and ‘ the size of freedom’ - define ‘deterritorialization’.
Some other ideas from the book also helped me bind in my artistic method (Al generation from a model that was trained on maps) in to my research.
The latent space of AI appears a lot like ‘smooth space’ in Nomadology.
Even though the AI model is indeed a stiff and closed structure in the inside, in my project it appears quite fluid as the viewer has the ability to travel through and see various possibilities.
Actually I find a lot of synonimic motions here: the traveling of nomads, the traveling through latent space; the fluidness in the postmodern.
There are other challenges in my project that concerns the use of AI generation as visualisation tools and interfiering into survey data collection with visuals.
I’d like state some advantages of AI in my case : I use cartographic language which inherits the imperialistic narrative and AI generation helps to liberate it, because images do not represent any particular territory but rather portray the lifestyle and mindset of the respondent and offers him the control.
Same with realtime feedback for the survey , while traditionaly researcher avoides influencing respondents, I want my works to cultivate agency.
I’m still working on restricting the image generation according to answers: like more nature for people who practice consious consumption, bigger scale for people with high freedom level, more meta-instructions on maps of people who pratice mindfulness and somehow I though to attach the ‘age’ of the map to the ‘size of home’. Unfortunately the results are still a bit unpredictable.