I Went (1968-1979)
On Kawara

In the series «I Went», On Kawara records his daily journeys over the span of almost 10 years starting off in Mexico City. He chartes his movements on photocopied maps that are scaled to a consistent size, so they would include his home at that time and the needed surroundings. He precisely marks the routes with a red ballpoint pen in one homogenous continuous line, starting with a big red dot where he got up that day or the exact last position from the day before at midnight if not returning the same day. Leaving the area shown by the map results in marking with an arrow and the destination of the whereabouts outside the focus area.

The maps then get put in sleeves after marking them with a timestamp and later organized in binders – whereof he fills two a year.

It's a noticeably tidy work that On Kawara does with tracking his movements, especially for that time. Today this wouldn’t be as big of a deal because this data, in most cases, gets tracked automatically by the GEO-positioning of your smartphone whenever communicating with a cell tower. But back then that was all done tediously by hand and required a lot of organization, discipline and precise working. But these are all things I would say are more frequent amongst individuals growing up or being around in Japanese society and culture back then. As far as I am aware this work-ethic is rooted deep within Japanese culture, even today. Knowing him having roots in Japan, at least to me, the level of detail and just repetitiveness in this work doesn’t come as a surprise.

Today, this kind of data collection and in Kawara’s case movement tracking on a personal level is just an industry standard going on in the background. But back in the 60s it must have been such a new concept that one could have made a name for it – in this case being on Kawara. Ironically now, decades later, we fight for the right to not have that tracking being done to us knowing the downsides of being monitored all the time whereas Kawara in his context wanted to do this out of own motivation. Apart from being an artist, this might make him a pioneer in data tracking even before tech giant like Google and Facebook.