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Publisher Melville House Publishing says: A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu's notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a groundbreaking collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years. Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This lavishly illustrated book features more than a dozen maps; artwork by Francis Alÿs, Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen; and recent projects by The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Raqs Media Collective, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.
The book accompanies the traveling exhibition of the same name. You can catch it until September 20 at The Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico. A quick look at the calendar of the exhibition tells me that, alas, they have no plan to come to Europe. I'm usually weary of reviewing the catalog of an exhibition i've never visited. Just like i tend not to blog about artworks and events i've never experienced. This time however, i feel that the book stands on its own legs. Mostly because the field of experimental geography has not been overwhelmingly explored in publications. So i take what i can get get my hands on and didn't find any reason to regret it. Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen coined the term 'experimental geography' back in 2002 and given his experience in the field who better than him could define this emerging genre? Experimental geography means practices that take on the production of space in a self-reflexive way, practices that recognize that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each another, and that cultural and intellectual production is a spatial practice. Moreover, experimental geography means not only seeing the production of space as an ontological condition, but actively experimenting with the production of space as an integral part of one's own practice. (More in his essay Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space.)
The fact that Paglen's work has inspired the exhibition and the book, doesn't prevent him nor the other authors of the volume to pay tribute to Walter Benjamin, Robert Smithson, Henri Lefebvre, Vito Acconci, Michel de Certeau and Guy Debord and of course the work and thoughts of the Situationists. However, many of the artists featured in the book do not stick strictly to the ideas and methods of the European artistic avant-garde. They are somehow much more pragmatic and show a greater commitment to engaging "everyday" people into the discussion.
Among the projects i found most interesting is The Road Map by Multiplicity. In 2003 the Italian collective tried to measure, with their EU passport, the density of border devices in the area surrounding Jerusalem. They first traveled on the highway 60 along with a person with an Israeli passport from the colony of Kiriat Arba to the colony of Kudmin. The following day, they traveled along with a person with a Palestinian passport from Hebron to Nablus. Both routes start and end in the same latitude. Their traveling times, however, are different. The Israeli traveler took around one hour, while the Palestinian took five and a half hours.
Another striking map is the one that Bill Rankin made to document the locations of U.S. Indian reservations. The kind of questions triggered by the map is particularly interesting: can a traditional map accurately represent the sovereignty rights (or claims) of indigenous peoples? Experimental geography reflects the width of geography's interdisciplinary approach. It is made of loads of maps (there's a wonderful archive of artists, designers and activists maps online) but it also involves interventions in public space, bus tour, performances in urban areas and nature, etc.
It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston by kanarinka (Catherine D'lgnazio) is a thought-provoking and probably quite exhausting performance. In 2007, kanarinka run the entire emergency evacuation system installed in the city to demonstrate the city's preparedness for evacuating people in snowstorms, hurricanes, infrastructure failures, fires and/or terrorist attacks. By attempting to measure the distance in human breath, the artist also aimed to measure our post-9/11 collective fear. Experimental Geography is currently on view at The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico until September, 20, 2009. Previously: Book Review - An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Trevor Paglen's talk at Transmediale and Conflux 2008: notes from the panel Cartography of Protest and Social Changes. |
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LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon (SP) cultivates the art of coming up with unexpected exhibitions. The moment you believe you can safely define it as 'center for new media art', they inaugurate 1. a show on experimental design and 2. an exhibition of projects that record or evoke a series of actual or imaginary journeys, either through the local landscape of Asturias, or through a comparably remote and mountainous terrain. I like that. I don't want new media art to be segregated in a cage, no matter how shiny and alluring this one might be. I might come back on the design exhibition later on but let's have a look at There is No Road (the road is made by walking).
Taking its cue from the famous lines of the poet Antonio Machado and the proximity of the Camino to Santiago , There is No Road calls forth intimate and long walks towards culturally significant locations or more daring and stray journeys towards the wilderness, the unknown, the challenging. There is No Road gives the public the opportunity to witness LABoral's role as a producer of art and culture as approximately half of the works by fourteen international artists featured in the exhibition have been commissioned by the art center itself. The exhibition is a tribute to the sublime majesty of Asturias's landscape and other mountain scenes. It transmits a sense of isolation, reflection and affinity with the untamed nature, it evokes a 'spirit of place' that no man has ever managed to tarnish. In doing so, the exhibition conjures the great Romantic tradition of landscape that emerged in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe.
This Romantic viewpoint is both the strength and the weakness of There Is No Road. At a time when every artshow dedicated to nature offers an opportunity to comment on or simply survey the contemporary culture of mass tourism, the many bruises inflicted on the environment or the way it is recklessly exploited, this show quietly rises above such concerns. There is No Road is a refreshing but also unnerving case of Romanticism in the age of locative media and ecological drama. Sentiments prime over reason and while the absolute beauty of mountain landscape is splashed all over the screens, one can't help but marvel that the relationship between men and an almost Arcadian landscape can still be so picturesque. That being said, the selection of art works is extremely good. Here's just a couple of them: 0°00 Navigation documents Simon Faithfull's eventful, irresistibly tongue-in-cheek, and never deviated dérive along the line of the meridian through the East of England. Guided by a GPS device, the artist has to jump walls and fences, face cliffs, swim through icy waters in order to follow an absolutely straight trajectory.
Axel Antas' Structure for Birds were photographed in the Catalan Pyrenees. In this interventions within the landscape, the artist built delicate structures for birds on top of cliffs reaching into the sky. They look poetically absurd and fragile, lost in a landscape that seem endless and about to swallow them.
All images courtesy LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial . There is No Road (the road is made by walking) is curated by Steven Bode, Director of Film & Video Umbrella in London. It runs until March 16, 2009. |
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On Sunday September 14, i had the great pleasure to host a panel on Cartography of Protest and Social Changes with 3 artists and activists i admire a lot: Brooke Singer, John Emerson and Lize Mogel. I usually avoid writing about the events i'm so closely involved in, either because i don't have the opportunity to take notes or because there's some video of it about to broadcast the ridiculousness of my accent on the world wide web.
When Christina Ray, the director of Conflux, asked me if i'd like to host a panel i said i'd like to moderate one inspired by An Atlas. Lize Mogel is one of the editors of the book (together with Alexis Bhagat ), Brooke Singer and John Emerson contributed to the volume with maps. Just like the book, the panel was an attempt to demonstrate that maps have the potential to bring about social changes. I am not going to write down everything that was say, i'll just share with you tiny bits from the presentations: Lize's presentation focused on the maps of An Atlas, you can find information about them online but her intro contained some fascinating facts. Here's just one of them: One of the world's most famous maps can be seen on the flag of the United Nations.
The first version was drawn in 1946 by someone from the US department and had North America at the center of the emblem. The design was changed after some complains from other countries. But one question remained: how do you design a map of the world that has to be fair and display equality between the nations? There is always something on the top, something in the middle (and thus the center of the attention), even being on the left side is not innocent as our eyes are used to read from left to right, the right is also meaningful as advertisers have discovered that the eyes always seem to fall on that side of an image. The solution adopted represents an azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole. But that area which one would believe is blank and neutral is in fact a space for debate: the area is owned by Denmark, Canada, Russia, Norway and the US and it's unclear how it should be divided up exactly.
An Atlas of Radical Cartography exhibition opens on September 23 at the Global Education Center, UNC campus. Upcoming venues for the exhibition include New Jersey (October), New York City, Utrecht (2009), etc. John Emerson has a very impressive portfolio and a blog i'd recommend anyone to subscribe to. He often collaborates with grass-root, independent, non-profit associations dealing with human rights, from California Coalition for Women Prisoners, to the Office of The Tibetan Government in Exile, or Injection Drug Use, Syringe Exchange Programs and AIDS in California. His belief is that maps can be useful tools that visualize power and are able to create social change, influence opinions and alter relationships between powers. By making abstraction visible, maps help us navigate through complex concepts.
One of the projects he highlighted are the compelling and revealing maps of Gold Trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo he created for the Human Rights Watch report The Curse of Gold. The gold trade is fueling conflicts and atrocities for the last 20 years in northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The maps makes clearer the relationship between gold concessions, paramilitary groups in the country and gold companies from all over the world. The art crowd will probably have heard about a project he developed together with Trevor Paglen.
Paglen's project 'CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006' explores the practice of extraordinary rendition. Emerson designed the map that visualizes the movements of aircraft owned or operated by known CIA front companies in order to reveal the relationships that have been forged between the United States and other countries in the name of the 'war on terror.' Back in 2006, Paglen and Emerson installed a huge billboard displaying the map of the rendition flights on 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles. The billboard, part of the The Clockshop Billboard Series. The reaction of the drivers passing by was not an unanimous feeling of revolt in front of the CIA activities, some felt proud and satisfied to see that the government was doing a good job.
Another great project Emerson discussed is the NYC Guide to War Profiteers. First published in March 2003, the map located precisely government and military agencies, weapon makers, corporations, media benefiting from the war, etc. The map was available at progressive bookstores around town, and was distributed at organizing meetings for various protest events. It also listed a series of like-minded websites. You can find a scan of the hard copy online.
Brooke Singer discussed briefly her contribution to An Atlas: the Map of U.S. Oil Fix as well as her fantastic project Superfund365, a website that chronicles 365 of the worst Superfund sites where Americans live at risk of exposure to toxins.
In her introduction about map, Singer reminded the audience of a few relevant facts: - mapping is more about representation than truthfulness,
She showed also two thought-provoking maps that illustrate this idea of maps as representation: McArthur Universal Corrective Map of the World, designed in the '70s by an Australian man who was upset by the idea that he came from the "bottom of the world". The second one is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map, the first world projection to show the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion. The map highlights the fact that the earth is essentially one big island over one ocean. |
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Sunday at Conflux, the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space, was hot in every sense including (unfortunately for Summer-phobics like me) in the meteorological one. Given both the temperature and his own intrepidness, all my admiration went to Lucas Murgida. Last year, the artist was teaching Conflux participants the handy and delicate art of lock-picking. For this edition of the festival, he built a beautiful wooden cabinet, left it on a sidewalk and hid inside it. Mugida stayed in this torridness, for hours and with just a bottle of water, not revealing himself until a passerby would bring the cabinet to their home.
The name of the performance is 9/10 because Murgida wanted to check what would become of the often-quoted phrase, 'Possession is 9/10 of the law' when private property is placed in a public space. As he wrote: A person is not sure how to look at the object at first, but will usually fall back on the golden rule of U.S. culture (finders keepers, losers weepers) and claim it to be theirs. I am hoping to subvert the "finder's" personal space by claiming it to be my own public space. Saturday wasn't much of an adventure. The cabinet was left in the street, people appeared to be tempted but they left it where it was. Now Sunday was more eventful, the artist and the cabinet got rolled into the storage room of a restaurant. As he had drilled a hole in the cabinet, Lucas was able to take pictures and get an idea of what was going on. The plan was to slip out unnoticed and leave the cabinet to its new owner. Get the details.
Jenny Chowdhury was braving the mellowing heat in her 802.11 Apparel - Wifi Jacket. Part of a line of clothing that reflects wifi strength detected in the wearer's immediate environment, the jacket literally "bring to light" a portion of the invisible radio waves by illuminating five stripes in accordance with the wifi signal strength.
The basic stripes of LEDs are integrated into a flower motif. This design choice associate our natural environment (the flower pattern) with the synthetic one (technology.) More wearable devices were displayed all along the festival: CO2RSET which monitors air quality and tightens or loosens on the body in response to the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere; the Back-to-Back Massager vest which rows of electric massagers are pointed outward in order to massage others; Compli-mum, a kind of armor for women that plays movies and changes its own shape by separating or gathering parts of its construction through the use of microcontroller and a motorized skeleton structure and a very fetching Helmet Piece which i'm inconsolable to have missed.
Another work i missed because i was so busy passing the microphone to the public for a Q&A of the panel i curated for Conflux (more about that soon-ish), is The Light Mobs which showed participants how to use a simple little mirror (the pocket Lightcoder) and sunlight to transmit information. But lucky me! i met Geraldine Juarez the day after and she gave me one of the Lightcoders to morse around and lucky us! she documented the action online. The project had a very praiseworthy goal: to bring attention to our blind faith in digital technology as a medium of communication, using a simple analog "device": the pocket Lightcoder.
I finally did a Botanicalls tour in which plants guide you by telephone in the area surrounding Conflux HQ. Each tree or plant, speaks in their own "Botanicalls" voice, based on their botanical habits and characteristics. It all started with the arrogant Rose and her ridiculous French accent (i'm allowed to write that cuz i gave her my voice) and ended with heart-breaking cries for help coming from the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant.
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The documentation of the Satellite Voyeurism Workshop, which took place last Summer at HMKV in Dortmund, is online as a PDF download (hi-res and low-res.)
The workshop addressed questions of the production and consumption of satellite imagery. Discussing the success of Google Earth and similar software, artists aimed to create their 'own' satellite images. The participants were provided with the hands-on experience to receive satellite images from the NOAA satellites, which is documented in this publication. The workshop was great and extremely insightful. The least one could say about my contribution to the document is that is extremely minimal but the rest is well worth your sunny afternoon my friends. |
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The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven't been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest. Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.
The way people live and behave in each zone of London can be reflected in the quality of the tap water. Tap water in London Notting Hill very probably benefits from the high density of organic shops found in the area. Tap water in the city of London is presumably enhanced with all kinds of stimulants, from caffeine-rich drinks to cocaine. Golders Green which houses an important Jewish community can be expected to 'produce' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
Back in January, at the opening of the department work in progress show, Tuur presented My City = My Body, the first chapter of this research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our urban environment. He offered tap water to the visitors of the show and asked them to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. The samples, their biological information and postcodes were then added to a map of London which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes. The mapping of tap water creates separate territories within the city. Could these areas be the biological counterpart of gated communities?
The next step is a website which helps London inhabitants describe, speculate on, map and share what they think are the unique characteristics of their tap water. The map thus created reveals potential local city-body ecologies, or biotopes. The system will also generate a custom-made label which you can download if you want to sell your own tap water.
That's what the designer did. He went to the hip and organic-addicts frequented Broadway market in Hackney to set up a stall, offer people to "buy" bottles of tap waters, branded with the London area they came from and engage in a discussion about the possibility of new urban biotopes.
You can find various websites which details the quality of various tap waters. But most of the systems employed to analyze water do not check for say, anti-depressant substances or cocaine. What if biotechnology could provide us with cheap detectors?
With the help of bioengineer James Chappell, Imperial College, Tuur developed the concept for a Urban Biogeography tool. The instrument would enable anyone to study the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time by monitoring sewage. With the tool, a tiny amount of sewage can be pumped up and scaned for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, without having to lift a manhole cover.
Using synthetic biology and in particular the biobricks tools, bacteria are programmed to become cheap biosensors. The bacteria-sensors, housed in the small transparent compartments, change colour when oestrogen, antibiotics, Viagra or Prozac are detected in the water. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this instrument can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeographer, even amateurs as the technology is becoming increasingly accessible. The set of data thus obtained can be used to influence healthcare or property prices in the area, that of course would be the ideal scenario... All images courtesy of Tuur van Balen. Related: 24c3: Programming DNA - A 2-bit language for engineering biology, Designer Microbes. |
