methods

Initially, when I thought of using tracking as one of my artistic methods, I intended to apply it similarly to the way a wilderness learner would, when they track and interpret their surroundings trying to reconstruct the recent past. Indeed, the wearewildness.com website in its article “The Art of Tracking” provided me with the detailed definition of tracking as a method of learning.“To track is to read and interpret an almost forgotten language in our modern times. The tracks, signs, sounds, weather, and more. To read and consciously interact with the language of nature,” they said. The article built a case not only for being observant and curious enough to follow the subtle paths of the forest life but also for developing respect for those tracks that would hopefully make us be more considerate about our own. That resonates with me. I track my past to make sense of my present, I track my present to better understand my past, all this extends into the future, which is already now.

There is something uneasy in this straightforward definition of nature tracking, the question of who is the tracker and who is the tracked one keeps me unsettled. Is the tracker the knower, or a knowledge producer, studying everything around them as “tracks” or “signs” that gesture toward meaning that has been hidden until now? The tracker is the subject and the track is the sign of the object waiting to be discovered. Am I a tracker naming, making sense, discovering the tracked? Is the tracked tracking the tracker? I am not sure.

Tracking is used to describe the US American educational system process of separating students with higher IQ and higher achievements from the students with lower IQ and lower achievements, which many critically call a modern day “method for maintaining racial segregation.” Therefore, tracking becomes a colonial relationship of the so-called knowing subject “the tracker” and the so-called ignorant (of themselves) object “the tracked” where the tracked is being defined, evaluated, categorized and assigned a place based on their evaluation. This segregationist concept cannot escape my view, when I bring in tracking methods into my research of working with personal temporal narratives.

To further complicate this terminology I add other possible usages of the word “to track.” When sending or receiving mail, you can pay a bit more to track its itinerary using a unique tracking number. An internet user can be tracked to their IP address. We can track our lost phone location by using Find My Device app or any other alternative. The Google search provides multiple suggestions on how to track someone’s location without them knowing. Russian activists are being tracked through their VK accounts. VK is a Russian widely-used social media platform notorious for its connections with the government. The tracking is somewhat random, which maintains the culture of terror - everyone can be tracked at any moment from their social media post to their body. Currently, I am trying to track my own VK account, which I stopped using a few years ago, to delete it. To delete my tracks, so it won’t be tracked by the authorities later. But how do we know that digital tracks can actually fully disappear? Is that possible?

We leave it everywhere for the “trackers” to search, make meaning of and use for different, punitive, commercial, invasive purposes.

Thus, when I say that I am doing a temporal choreography of tracking my past through my present and my present through my past, I am also aware that the tracks can likely be misleading, the tracking instruments can be colonial, capitalist, repressive, that in the process of tracking I can fall both into the role of the tracker and the tracked simultaneously. While I am tracking objects with my eyes, they blur, change shapes, escape my gaze, reflect me, become me. In the end, I am tracking myself tracking.

When I was 17 and lived in Izhevsk, a friend of mine helped me to set up my first email account. It was the beginning of 2000s, we went to the internet cafe on Udmurtskaya Street, I paid for the 30 minutes of computer time. We used Mail.Ru email server to make an account called zvesdulya2026. Zvesdulya was a made up silly word that pointed toward someone being a star-like like I thought I was. I used some free associations based on the recently read Kafka’s novel “Amerika” and my family narrative of the upcoming immigration of my mother to the United States for marriage, to create a password. Later, I began to use this email to communicate with different media regarding my journalism job. When my mother moved to the United States in 2003, I started writing her elaborate electronic letters - she had a hard time in her new life and I wrote essay-like detailed descriptions of my living and thoughts as a young journalist and artist in Yekaterinburg. When I myself moved to the United States, in 2004, I used this account to share my first San Francisco experiences with friends and colleagues left in Russia. I made new contacts in San Francisco and began to use this email to stay in touch. I arranged my under-the-table jobs, art gigs and sexual encounters. In 2010 or 11 I gradually stopped using zvesdulya2026 account and transitioned to gmail to finally cut this digital connection to Russia. Similar to the ethnic last name Chernova, mail.RU was giving away my origin. In 2012 I visited Russia for the first time since my immigration. I finally had a green card that allowed me to travel outside the country. While staying at my friend’s dorm in Moscow, I made my first VK account page to stay in touch with my newly acquired Moscow friends. I uploaded photos there taken both in Russia that summer and in the United States the fall after. I became expose, visible as never before. My father, who I have had no contact with for a decade, tracked my VK page and reached out to my mother, scolding her for letting me lead a nomadic irresponsible life style and have no family at my age.

Soon after I made my Facebook account and left the VK account behind. A few years later when traveling to Russia for the second time I tried to access the VK account but the system would not let me and the support team would not accommodate. The account was connected to the Russian phone number that I did not have anymore. I had to set up a new VK account to be able to track my old one and watch it from the outside. I began to use my second VK account daily when I moved to St.Petersburg in 2017 to organize Telaboratoria program. I communicated with the participants, possible teachers, a lover, the administration of the dance studio rentals, fellow activists. I shared several activists posts and a few thoughts on politics. When I moved to Finland I lost access to my second VK account. Similarly, email account zvezdulya2026, which holds seven years of my youth and early adulthood experiences is not accessible anymore.

Now, I imagine that these digital presences are still somewhere, floating in the vast digital stew exposed and ready to be tracked by anyone, except for me. Therefore, I begin my artistic tracking practice from the place of a tracking failure. From there I continue on. Maybe the direction of the tracking should point elsewhere, as in Jack Halberstam’s Queer Temporalities, the queer time and spatiality is different than a straight, or a normative one, therefore the tracking’s choreographies can also shift from the linear back-and-forth steps to the stepping around myself, not stepping, stepping away.

And here, a few more words on choreographies of tracking.

Tracking in typography is the process which measures the distance between the letters in a word - making the word appear denser or more loose. Thus, the tracking is the type emotive choreographic technology that promotes certain affectual orientation toward the text and, ultimately, its meaning. I will be working with tracking in this meaning as well, focusing not only on what is being tracked and is tracking but how.