Personal Space

Many years ago I had set up camp at a remote national park in the NT, there was a designated camping ground of about a hectare in size and I chose a spot in the far corner away from the entrance road, I’d driven alone for days and was content to be the only one there. As the sun was going down the feeling was short-lived as another car arrived. They got out and after looking around hopped back in and drove up to where I was camped. To my disbelief they started unloading their gear to set up right next to my camp, my personal space was immediately desecrated. They had the entire camp ground to choose from! I thought what a bunch of insecure nomad sheep.

I explained to them, as the tents were going up, that statistics reveal Australia (7,682,300 sq km) had a population of 21,468,700, that’s 2.84 persons per sq km, or each of us gets to enjoy 416,666 sq meters of personal space. In the People’s Republic of China (9,596,961 sq km), with a population of 1,323,324,000, each person has 7,246 sq meters of personal space. Australia is close to the bottom of a list of 238 countries, ranked at 232, China is in the top 100, ranked at 73. I definitely could not live in Monaco (1.95 sq km), population 32,965, representing 59 sq meters per person. I said, mathematical calculations aside, how is it that an Australian rubbing shoulders with fans at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (capacity 100,000), or a commuter on the Beijing subway (average number of daily passengers 3.4 million) can create an invisible barrier as a place of personal space. What is personal space? I’m sure each and every one of us on the planet has a very ‘personal view’ of personal space, and what it means to them. Personally, I’m glad to have grown up in a country where I get 416,666 sq meters of personal space, which I am attempting to enjoy right now.

So I told them to f--k off!

Fast-forward to present day and personal space has a whole new meaning. In the landscape described above there were few electronic communication technologies, not even personal computers. In the so-called modern world, personal space is invaded in a multitude of ways, marketing profilers, surveillance cameras, corporations buying information on individuals from government agencies, and electronic fingerprints on personal computers. In recent times Facebook was forced into an embarrassing back flip. It wasn’t enough for Mark Zuckerberg to make multi-millions out of his invention, Facebook, he wanted to go further and invade people’s personal space by owning all the content of the 175 million users world wide stored on the Facebook matrix. This control of personal content would continue after a person cancelled their account, even following the death of a user. The real reason for this desire for ownership was ‘Beacon’, a tracking tool that broadcasts information about Facebook users’ shopping and lifestyle habits. My only resort to protest is to never be a Facebook user.

So I told Mark Zuckerberg to f--k off!

Wenxiang Su, a curator in Beijing, and myself, invited Darwin and Beijing artists to respond to their interpretation and notions of personal space. The results are an intriguing and multi-faceted incursion into both private and public worlds.

Tobias Richardson’s Personal Space ‘pit of death series’ sees a return to a childhood space, and his fascination for collecting and preserving Serpentes. Whilst many associate these venomous and non-venomous creatures with devilish evil, and clubbing their limbless scaly forms to death, Richardson was admiring their beauty and assembling them with a passionate reverence. During the 1700’s there were aristocratic collectors who travelled the world in search of zoological specimens, works of art and books, it was these collectors who established the first museums. Animals collect things for survival, but human collecting goes beyond items that are solely used for survival, there is obviously some demented motivation in humans that modulates the collecting drive. Some individuals have ‘problem collecting’, showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder leading to abnormal hoarding behaviour, in Richardson’s case, satisfaction comes from arranging and classifying parts of a-big-world-out-there, eliciting a comfort zone in familiarisation of the natural world. He still holds many of these reptilian samples in collection to this day, but Richardson has ‘séanced’ back from the dead, the snake pit, when Steve Erwin types toyed with people’s fears and hence cemented anxiety of the natural environment they inhabit.

On average only two people, of approximately 3,000 bitten, die from snakebite each year. It’s the man-made world we need to fear most. Man’s best friends are the ones to watch out for, annually in Victoria alone, 7,700 people were hospitalised from dog attacks, horses injured 5,628, and killed two. The most common symptoms of all snakebites are panic, fear and emotional instability, with unwarranted thoughts of imminent death. We must control the natural world to make it safe!

The Personal Space of Min Wong is day-to-day life dominated by ‘space invaders’, the 1978 Japanese arcade game designed and programmed before the invention of pinball machines. The irony is that in the original game the raining figures were to be soldiers to shoot down, but given Japan’s no war policy since WWII it was deemed politically unwise, so they changed the figures to aliens. Wong’s space invader figures are human, not soldiers, but children, raining down in cacophonous babble of talk. Wong claims that her space invaders are too young to define what personal space is and are yet to concede how they affect the personal space of another’s, step in the superhero parent, the doer of good deeds, the unassuming saviour and teacher. Why rabbits? Simple, Wong’s childhood personal space was invaded by racist theories of Asians ‘breading like rabbits’, a colloquial idiom for a fear of an influx in Asian immigration. For generations, the vast majority of early colonial and post-Federation immigrants to Australia came from the United Kingdom and Ireland, and since World War II ended, the population more than doubled with large scale European immigration. Embarrassingly, the White Australia policy was not abolished until the mid 1970’s, which then led to an increase in non-European immigration, mostly from Asia and the Middle East. However, the fear of an ‘Asian invasion’ was simply racist political posturing and fear mongering, with around 8% of the current population being of Asian decent. In the 2006 Australian Census, only 3.37% of people nominated to be of Chinese ancestry, 0.87% Vietnamese and 0.81% Filipino. Ironically, whilst the people of non-Asian decent were preoccupied by a fear of an ‘invasion’ from the North, a real invasion was taking place that indeed came from European, the rabbit. Introduced on the First Fleet in 1788, the rabbit population exploded to become one of Australia’s most invasive species whose destruction of habitats is responsible for the extinction of many native species, the erosion of farmlands and crop damage costing the economy many millions.

Simon Cooper’s Personal Space ‘Minor Deaths’ is set eerily in the sphere of public space where ghost like shadows contort to an industrial audio track, a track generated none the less by natural forces. Mother nature can indeed be annoying for us humans, mosquitos or a green tree frog in a downpipe. Cooper says that, as he traverses public space tantamount to being in a dreamlike state and mystified by his objective presence, he leaves only a non-intrusive trace. Cooper’s dreamlike experiences of navigating public space without causing adverse affect flies in the face of the ‘butterfly effect’ theory and the undeniable truth that humans, without a doubt, leave a monstrously heavy environmental footprint. There are few places on this planet that do not contain vestiges of human intervention, let alone terra firma, homo sapiens have invaded space. There are today approximately 600,000 objects of manmade material larger than 1cm in low earth orbit. This has given rise to the Kessler Syndrome where the volume of space debris in earth’s orbit is so high that objects are frequently struck by other debris causing even more debris, a snowballing affect to the point where satellites will inevitably be rendered useless. Poor Lottie Williams of Oaklahoma learnt of the Kessler theory when struck in 1997 by a piece of space junk from the US Delta II rocket. I’ve enjoyed Cooper’s work, it confirms, we are out of control.

Unlike Cooper, Rebecca Arbon’s People, Places. Spaces, Traces remembers past, less complex spaces, whilst confessing the traces we leave behind. Arbon’s personal space is dominated by the ancient craft of knitting, the earliest known example of which was a finely decorated pair of Egyptian cotton socks from the first millennium. Arbon’s grandmother taught Arbon’s mother, who in turn taught Arbon to knot, from the Dutch verb knutten. Waiting at the bus stop, watching the evening news, and during my interview with her, Arbon knits. The art of knitting, by hand, became a social craft activity with the invention of the knitting machine. Arbon sees a relationship between a dying craft and past spaces, people and places, a connecting thread. Knitting constructs a space enveloping Arbon in a meditative trance, the knotting process is robotic, devoid of any conscious consideration to shape or form. Unlike the craft of coopering or building with wattle and daub, recent times have actually seen a resurgence of this craft. Between 2002 and 2004 there was a 150% increase in women knitters in the United States, further demonstrated by the brainchild of Casey and Jessica Forbes, Ravelry, a social network website for knitters. By January 2009 the network had 270,000 members with a waiting list of over 5,000, no doubt it has a tab labelled yarn. It all started with a sock in ancient Egypt and in 2006 Joanna Ratcliffe decided to hold a charity knitting event, it is estimated to contain around 1,500 stitches and measures in at 4.95 x 4.3 x 1.9 meters, the worlds biggest knitted sock. With Arbon’s interest in knitting and the traces we leave behind, I suggest she may wish to join a ‘yarnbombing’ group!

Back to my now solitary campsite, they had taken my advice to respect my 416,666 sq meters of personal space, and f--ked off.

Now I’m lonely.

Steve Eland