The Trips
2018 October 12 departure & November 21 arrival
2019 April 26 departure & June 8 arrival
2022 August 27 departure & October 20 arrival
I fly to and from Pearson International Airport (YYZ) almost annually but have only included dates of trips made specifically for this project. I flew to London in 2018 to visit Greenwich as the first stop on my Earth-measuring journeys before travelling to begin webwork at my first international artist residency, Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, Scotland. In 2019, I spent a month at the Can Serrat Artist Residency near Barcelona, Spain before travelling the length of France. I followed the 18th C astronomers survey to measure the Paris meridian of longitude arc, which they used to calculate Earth’s circumference and the metre dimension. After a 2-year COVID delay, I went to Toronto’s antipode and the Fremantle Art Centre residency, Western Australia in 2022.
Airports are included in this project because they are the main entry points into the countries where I did research. Measurement standards and mapping are crucial to navigation, national boundaries, and aerodynamics. On my first measurement trip to Greenwich in 2018, I started photographing the road from home to the airport while practicing with the phones apps I planned to use: Clock, Google Maps, Compass and Weather. I took photos of signs and lineups at the YYZ, Toronto’s international airport. I watched the plane’s progress on the seat-back monitor. A year later, my cheap flight to Barcelona had no screens, so I couldn’t keep track of where we were.
History Notes
Pearson International Airport (YYZ) located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, serves the Toronto area. It is the largest, busiest airport in Canada and ranks 30th in the world for passenger traffic. The site covers 1,867 hectares (4,613 acres). In 2022, Toronto Airport registered a total of 35.6 million passengers down from 50 million passengers during 2019. It was named after Lester B. Pearson, Canada’s 14th Prime Minister. The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (known as the GTAA) is a non-profit organization that was selected by Transport Canada in 1996 to operate Pearson under the terms of a 60-year lease.
Contemporary airport design is crucial to demonstrating the desirability of tourism. As examples, architecture and art in Toronto Pearson Airport (YYZ) and Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) are manifestations of national pride. Both are named for 20th Century politicians who were instrumental in raising their country’s profiles. The grandeur of YYZ Terminal 1 and CDG Terminal 2 are testaments to a former colony and past colonial power.
Neurodivergent Travel
It turned out that I was hyper-focussing on some things while ignoring others. On the first trip, my phone was only 4 years old but didn’t have enough space or battery power to shoot and store videos. My focus began to shift from historical standardization to how the process of increasing measurement precision has propelled contemporary technology and our increasing digital dependencies.
Click on photographs to enlarge
