Kieran Boland

Platform 2, Spencer Street Train Station 
Melbourne 23.1.01 - 2.3.01

Digital prints on photographic paper, each 60 x 84 cm

When I look away from my home computer screen I can see a tram line, a train line, a bridge that would let me bypass the CBD of Melbourne via one direction, the other would take me directly to the airport. As bolakier using an Instant Messenger Computer Program, I chat with people from around the world. Many multi-tasking office workers seem to use it as a buffer zone that helps put into perspective the demands and pressures of the day. A chat transcript displays the potentially endless traffic between strangers. A chat session lasting from 9 AM until lunchtime will be quite a few pages long if saved as a text file in the end. In regard to a transcript being non-interactive (interactivity being integral to the original activity) and a form of detritus (a by-product of curiosity with no specific purpose in real time across vast space) I'd been thinking of parallels and differences between a chat project and the late series of works by conceptual artist Ian Burn in which text appears progressively over discarded amateur Australian landscape paintings; specifically the way in which a throwaway dialogue with distant voices might sit within another definition of an ‘over-used’ landscape.