Jen Southern

I made some gps scarves at a screen printing workshop this weekend. The intention is that they embody and catalogue safety proceedures, the repetition of learning and accidents that can and do happen during the process.

I used images of GPS tracks I made while learning to fly in 2003. A major part of the process is flying numerous “touch and go’s”. Landing and then taking off again immediately after the wheels touch the ground.  In between flying the ‘circuit’, usually just a loop around the airfield from take off to lining up for an approach for landing. This image is of the repeated circuits it took me to  learn to land safely, some flown with fewer mistakes than others. My first solo flight black from the grass runway, is in black. The details of all the flights and their individual tracks are here on my website.

The line quality is very pixelated because I used low res images from my website. All the original data was lost when I dropped my external hard drive, and I had no other copies.

There are 10 scarves, some with fewer mistakes than others,  as I learned the screen printing process.

They are printed on scarves in reference to WWII escape maps printed like scarves onto silk, in the event of an emergency landing in enemy territory.

I’ve started running. This image is the GPS tracks of several runs in Greenhead Park, and is intended to be printed onto scarves, each scarf having an additional run added.

Japanese map scarf, with embriodered birdcage and printed bird.

At the Rodchenko & Popova exhibition at Tate Modern, there were textile designs by Popova following an ideal of merging art and life, through practice across art and design forms.

Mobile technologies can connect us to a wider world, social networking software can allows us to perform a sense of ourselves, and to a certain extent clothing and other wearable accessories already do this, and we carry them with us in our handbags, in our pockets and on our persons.

This scarf that was on ebay reminded me of Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns.

www.spurlock.uiuc.edu/…/new/silkmap.html

WWII silk escape maps for pilots.