CYCLES: The Commute

I decided to document – using video, photo and text – my cycling commutes from home to work during a one-week period (Monday to Friday). This commute takes me from downtown Toronto to Kettleby (a hamlet just north of the city) which is about 46.5 km each way. During this week I uploaded and catalogued my documentation, and collected data, to the blog site including GPS information and my body's vital stats. With each day's log viewers encounter detailed route maps with accompanying graphs representing my heart rate, cadence and speed fluctuations along with elevation statistics. The data collected has also been analyzed and used in my work – as a means of creating video montages that mix found footage - culled from Science Fiction films that feature superhuman female protagonists - and source material collected during my cycling commutes. The sequencing, editing and pacing of these montages are the result of a calculation based on my fluctuating heart rate, speed and cadence. This blog was the first stage of a multimedia installation entitled Elusive Body that was exhibited at Forty Seven Gallery in April 2010. Click here for more information on the exhibition.

click on day to view documentation
MONDAY
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
FRIDAY

Cycles

Cycles is an ongoing series of physical and virtual interventions that continues Cheryl Rondeau's exploration of the intersection between art and the everyday. Using the bike as the main mode of travel each intervention is fueled by determination and human-power.

Cycles projects:

the Route (Art Spin 08/2012)
43˚33'27"N 79˚35'24"W - Port Credit 2010
The Commute
Cycles 2009: Approaching Caribou Harbour
Cycles 2008: Toronto - Sudbury
Art Ride 2007

Physical endurance forms a central theme of the project. The use of the body in the artist’s displacement, its emphatic integration in the terrain, proposes a questioning of our perceptions of time and space in a world constantly shrinking within the virtual realm of cyberspace and ever-increasing air travel. Borders and geography are collapsed, disappearing from our collective memory. With this series of physical and virtual interventions Cheryl Rondeau pursues an investigation of the relationships between space and the body, gesture and the individual as well as the rupture between lived experience and its representation, so as to see and think differently.

Loaded with maps, camera, phone and notebook Rondeau logs her trouvailles and maps out her parcours. The Situationists were known to use walkie-talkies on their dérives. Similarly, she exploits today’s technology. Daily activities involve collecting ephemera, digital video and photography to map the geography of the experience and record the multiplicity of interstitial spaces between the departure and arrival points. Maintaining a record of the borders crossed and the landscapes traversed; while dealing with the elements and the fatigue that is at the core of long-distance cycling.
For more information: rondeau.cheryl@gmail.com

CYCLES

The Commute

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Cycles

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