Panoramio - Photos by Mike Glier

Mike Glier

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Hi, I’m interested in using new media and old media to visualize the globe as a shared space. I just completed a trip along the 70th longitude from the Arctic to the equator and pictures and stories from the trip are posted on Alongalongline.com. The line I followed began at the arctic circle in Pangnirtung, Canada, (63 45N, 68 31W), passed through New York City (40 43N, 74 00W) on its way to St.John, U.S. Virgin Islands (18 20N, 64 50W) and ended on the equator in the rainforest of Ecuador (0 59S, 77 49W. Painting is my primary medium, but I also write and photograph. At each location I worked outdoors to make a set oil paintings on aluminum panel. Like many artists before me (Pollack comes to mind most quickly), I’m trying to communicate the richness of the world through analogy as well as description. The Caribbean, for example is a sensuous place that comes to you through your eyes and your nose and your ears and your skin. There is water on skin, and sun on skin, and sand on skin and coral on skin. And to convey some of this tactility I brush, wipe, knife, feather, splash, poke, tickle and abrade the surface of the picture in an attempt to give the feeling of the place as well as the look of the place. One of the best things about plein air painting has been the heightened awareness of my body’s perceptual apparatus. I can take in sight and sound and smell and touch, and then press this densely detailed information through the filters of my own experience, my emotional life, my past, my sexuality, my education, so that all this information is reduced to something that I can understand. Then I put this subjective distillation back out into the world as a shape or a color choice or a brushstroke. All of this happens in a fraction of a second and it often does not require language to process. I think of these paintings as being a performance of the act of human perception. I set out to make a series of paintings, but returned from the trip with not only 50 oil paintings on aluminum panels, but a collection of stories, and an iPhoto Library of 3000 images. I realized then that I had made two art works: an exhibition of paintings and a blog, Along a Long Line. I’m claiming that this blog is a work of art, not to elevate its value, but to support the notion that the events of any day, whose account is the core of the blog, can be experienced and appreciated as art. I hope these two projects create more compassion for the living world and that this sensitivity translates into improved environmental policy. I love painting and it has its role to play as a kind of intimate exchange. But as a vehicle for social change, a plein air painting is absurdly mismatched to the task of consciousness-raising in a digitized, global environment. The web, however, the offers individuals the opportunity to develop and participate in a larger dialog about the issues of the day. I am now using Panoramia, Google Earth and Flickr and starting to use of geo-tagging and tagging to engage more fully with the digital community. The blog has transformed itself into a book, also called, Along a Long Line. Published by Hard Press Editions, it will be available September, 2009. The next project in this landscape project is called Antipodes. Over the next three years, I’ll be visiting opposite points of the globe to paint comparisons and reporting the adventure at Antipodes.us. Beginning July 1, 2009, I’ll be reporting from Botswana and then from Hawaii, its antipode. It’s remarkable to live in a moment when communication between people can take an intimate form like a painting and a global form like the web.