Locative Media in the Wild - ICAM130/Vis149

In the Spring quarter of 2007 at UCSD, a group of particularly rugged and conceptually edgy students specially volunteered to take my section of ICAM130/Vis149, contemporary computing topics. Here is the course description they were presented with:

"ICAM 130/VIS 149 will study the history and recent practice of artistic walking works, including recent walking art practices that have included the mediation of computers and various location aware technologies. A special focus of this seminar will be walking works that take place outside of urban environments. The goal of this course is for students to produce a theoretical treatment specifying a methodology for a "computationally mediated" walking performance, and then to implement their project as part of a larger group performance. The field research/performance component of the class will take place all day on June 2nd 2007 in the proximity of the University of California White Mountain Research Station, Crooked Creek Laboratory, at 10,200 feet elevation in the beautiful White Mountain Range on the remote Eastern edge of California. Students will use the area surrounding the University of California WMRS Crooked Creek Laboratory to implement their own computationally mediated walking performances informed by recent locative media practice and theory."

As it would turn out, this event and the students who participated in it made me more than a little uncomfortable. Gen Kobayashi and Jose Luis Lopez both developed algorithmic walks that intentionally forced them to become very lost, and in one case, to lose parts of one's psyche and fall from a cliff. In their searches for emotional vortexes and bigfoot moments of topographical splendor (respectively), the athletic rock scramblers Heather Clark and Jon Huntoon both promised to attain high and dangerous perches if necessary. I personally saw Jon in places that humans should not be without ropes, while Heather was just gone all day and totally out of contact with the laboratory. Heather would later embark with Christin Turner on a late hike/rock scramble, in the black of night before moonrise, to finish the last of Christin's cell animations for her GPS virtual geoglyph. (Probably the first animation of it's kind, and first land art of its kind.) Ryan Velasquez was inspired by the monkeys walking on Klas Kinkski's body at the conclusion of Werner Herzog's 1972 film "Aguirre, Wrath Of God", setting out to make himself the embodied performative subject in his own impossible quest: to find the oldest living thing on earth. Adriana Barraza and Sara Gevurtz tested the limits of their endurance, one by projecting outward in various directions until the high mountain topography stopped her from going further, the other by doing a biodiversity survey as art project which required long hours and careful patience for the completion of 25 field sketches. To be fair, not everyone made me think twice about the liability waivers in my bag. Chris Baker and Zane Andre suffered the technical demons that always plague field research with high-hubris technical ambitions, fighting back with strong conceptual retorts and clever workarounds. Christina Tam used GPS to track her free-range rabbit Laci across the ancient landscape, while Thao Vo tracked almost everyone in their endeavors for her visualization project. Andrew Kim, Britni Wenck and Sarah McClelland all worked at some distance from the WRMS Crooked Creek facility to complete their mapping and narrative projects. But even though the later projects left me less in fear for the physical well being of the young artists, I was thrilled by their efforts nevertheless.

The best art today strives to turn from representation toward action. Not where one is mutually exclusive of the other, but where the emphasis shifts toward the performative and doing. Like the best of happenings, which always transcended the quaint commitment to "process", the generative is mediated by some from of algorithm that emphasizes the production itself over any particular remains. This kind of art adores the crystallization of the virtual in the substrate of the real over splendid virtual artifacts, and celebrates the potential new intersections of experience as mediated by computation in its every possible manifestation. It moves from art as didactic presentation to peripatetic action and cultural adventure. On June 2nd, 2007, this group of top UCSD art and music undergrads spilled out of the dorms of the remote Crooked Creek research station and walked away into the people-less landscape of a 10,000 foot high desert to develop and experiment with contemporary and historical models of practice that tilt toward this kind of action. This website presents the results of their research.

Brett Stalbaum

Thanks:

Department Chairs
Lesley Stern, Visual Arts
Rand Steiger, Music

White Mountain Research Station
Frank Powell, Director
John Smiley, Field Stations Associate Director
Denise Waterbury, Scheduling Coordinator
Tim Forsell, Crooked Creek Cook

Department of Visual Arts Staff
Judi Griffith, Financial Coordinator
Fang Chen, Instructional Computer Specialist
Candy Harris, Undergraduate Computing Consultant

Special Thanks to Visual Arts Faculty member Naomi Spellman, whose work on the original Locative Media in the Wild workshop inspired this derivative project for students, and for helping to supervise the event. Thanks also to Laura Capanema, independent journalist, for observing the event, and Naomi's son Elon for his post-apocalyptic urban refugee performance.