CARINE KRECKÉ
“A writer maps psychic areas. And like any explorer he runs the risk of being unable to return.”
William S. Burroughs
(Introduction to Jacques Stern's The Fluke, 1959, Private Edition)
Av. Ramón Rayon / Ciudad Juárez/ Mexico
Satellite Image © Google Maps, 2014.© GOOGLE Inc. 2014
I am an artist and author from Luxembourg.
I spend a lot of time exploring maps. I like to get lost in them, always hoping for some unexpected story to come my way.
In the past 15 years, online cartographic data such as those provided by Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Street View, have become essential investigative tools in both my artistic and literary works.
Geospatial investigations
From the start I was intrigued by Google's obsessive-compulsive desire to cover or, rather, uncover, all aspects of the world, in meticulous detail.
What do these surveillance images tell us about our daily lives? How do they affect our perception of reality? What do they reveal about wars, or extreme violence, in some remote regions of the globe? These are some of the questions I try to find answers to.
In this quest, I've been impressed by the extraordinary documentary value of those automatically generated, authorless, images of the world. Over time, I learned to apprehend them with the obstinacy of a forensic analyst. Albeit, I assume that my approach to geo-intelligence is highly unorthodox. I'd rather consider it as a form of forensic story-telling, in a grey-zone between reality and fiction.
Formal variety
My work takes on a variety of forms, including photography, drawing, video-installation, audio-documentary, travelogue, poetry, novel and theatre play. From project to project, the first challenge is always to identify the most effective medium for the story to be told. I always start out with creating vast archives and atlases, all kinds of open source data files that I subsequently connect in whatever ways. When I work on a story, the end result, i.e. the resolution of a case, is not necessarily what matters most. The erratic process of searching some potential truth interests me more than the truth itself, which is often unfindable anyway.