Aaron Parecki

Tonight from 6-9 pm, Social_Net_Works opens over at Recess Gallery (4315 SE Division, inside the Artistery), featuring artwork inspired by social networks. I've gotta admit, these projects sound pretty awesome: Alicia Gordon is showing photos which she shot during "Casual Encounters" arranged through Craigslist; J.P. Huckins is truncating a previous social experiment, Best Friends For A Day, to present, Best Friends For Ten Minutes (it's exactly what it sounds like— you'll be BFing with Huckins for ten); and according to Hungry Eyeball, Dane Overton "has converted two monitors into cyborgs that will attempt to communicate while observers can send them text messages to provoke or interrupt the conversation."

While the above projects sound great, l'm most intrigued by Aaron Parecki and Amber Case's GPS-generated self-portraits. Parecki has been logging his location every seven seconds via a mobile GPS tracker for the last two years; and for the past six months, Case has been doing the same. Using the GPS data gathered, experiential portraits have been generated, representing the artists' lives not in literal pictures of the body, but in images of where the body has been— plotting the artists' movements onto maps, and color-coding these movements under variables like time of day, speed of movement, etc.. See some examples here, or stop by Recess tonight.