5-month project exploring themes of isolation, integration, nature & technology:
http://mlab.uiah.fi/~apaterso/projects/lo/lookingforpulse.html
[Digital animations, image, text]

In 1998 I was awarded a Peter Kirk Memorial Travel Scholarship to spend the period of 3 months in Finland. With a research plan reflecting my artist-research interests of the time, I followed an 'Isolation/Integration' theme.

I approached this theme in a broad way, initially investigating different aspects by travelling to Central Finland (Jyväskylä, Kuopio), Lapland (Inari, Rovaniemi) and Helsinki, in the formal way of research. However I took some liberties in what is termed research, by going camping on my own in the forests and lakes, swapping music, taking many saunas, and never failing to be fascinated by the fact everyone had a mobile phone (this was 1998, when over 60% people in Finland already had one, and not yet myself). The theme also inspired the media art-work I made while in residence at the Jyväskylän Centre of Printmaking and Creative Photography, and developed unconsciously from the benefit of people I either arranged to meet or met along the way. In the end, I explored this dialectic (isolation/integration) both culturally and personally.

Communication, socialising, networking, relating perspectives and experience are core aspects of the process of integration. It was ironic that only in summary - writing the report - I realised these processes also applied to my literal lived time in Finland, which eventually spanned 5 months. Beginning in a position of spending much time on my own at the workshop, slowly developing friends in the town I lived; Making journeys, plus further contacts around Finland; eventually collaborating with others; exhibiting the artwork produced during the time. I learned the process of the transition from being isolated to being integrated within a community, and that these states are always relative. Often meandering between reality and virtuality, networks and solitude in numerous forms, I concluded from my lived experience that neither of these categories are actual psychological points of geography.

Due to the mix of theme in both the personal and cultural spheres, I decided to make a report in the form of a personal-theoretical diary. Although I had difficulties trying to pull together a report in this way, it did teach and inform me how to (and not to) approach and document what might be called 'practice-based research'.