We are changing the website from a strictly linear log, which offers little other than a set of non-contextual facts, into a magazine-style layout. Each layout will be an ‘issue’, with a central idea and various related concepts, themes, drawings, theories around it. A kind of ‘gestalt’ that situates the project.

Rory and Marek are giving a talk at Dorkbot in New York at location One.
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Composite images of a typical installation – each image showing left, center, right and back projection screens. In an installation with four projectors, the scene moves depending on how people are positioned in the space.

Plan showing installation with four projectors – as we had at Indaf in Korea. This arrangement however is not essential, there are many other possible layouts.

A few days later we have added forms to the project.. compare to the first screens below.

First screenshots of [here][now] based on the Montalvo residency.

Last night we held a workshop at our residency at the Montalvo Art Center with the resident artists, staff and culinary experts. We started by asking people to create a diagram of the space they navigate when in their neighborhood at home. We then split everyone up into groups of 4 and asked each group to identify common ways to understand these personal diagrams. Finally, we met together, 12 of us, and tried to limit these common understandings, or ‘elements’, into 7 groupings.

The text for the workshop: MontalvoWorkshop1

Here are the individual diagrams:

We then split into groups of four and asked each group to come up with 7 ‘elements’ that their drawings shared. Then all 12 people met, we put up all the elements, and tried to find a way to distill them. Here are the seven final ‘elements’ condensed from the individual maps:

We will use the seven elements created at the workshop to generate the forms for the studio installation at Montalvo on January 12th.

While visiting family for the holidays, I stopped by the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City, CA.

What a wonderful visit! The current exhibit being shown is Urban Crude: The Oil Fields Of The Los Angeles Basin all about the oil field underfoot throughout the Greater Los Angeles area. Having grown up in Culver City, sporadic oil pumps were just an occasional part of the landscape, but as a child of course I had never stopped to think in-depth about what their presence meant, and definitely never realized the complex and unique network underpinning the entire endeavor.

I was also lucky enough to meet Matt and Sarah, and I told them a bit about our project and they shared some ideas about potential connections to stuff they are working on. When Marek arrives this evening I’m looking forward to relating all this to him and I think we should consider applying for CLUI’s residency program in Wendover, Utah.

After hearing about our project, Sarah recommended You Are Here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination by Katharine A. Harmon, which I purchased and have just begun reading. It is a collection of many people’s uniquely personal maps and relates quite nicely to some things we are trying to do with [here][now]: mainly, aggregating subjectivities into something that hopefully creates a whole greater than the sum of parts.

Marek and I have been reading about the upcoming 01SJ Biennial put on by ZER01 and others, and taking place in San Jose, CA in September.

We’re super excited about the show, and especially about the possibility of participating in it, as it seems exactly in line with many of the ideas we are interested in with [here][now]. Mainly that people can not just affect, but literally shape their world, just by participating in it. The path to meaningful change consists of thoughtful observation, conceptualization, and confidence in the belief that we all possess the capacity to re-program our environment.

Some literature about the show proposes that contributing artists are “invited to either interpret the UN Millennium Development Goals or to propose goals of their own.” The goals are listed as:

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Achieve universal primary education
• Promote gender equality and empower women
• Reduce child mortality
• Improve maternal health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
• Ensure environmental sustainability
• Develop a global partnership for development

The thing that initially strikes me about all these items (except for perhaps the last) is just that they are such massive problems despite many possible solutions existing, and despite the fact that most people clearly agree they are problems.

One reason for this disconnect — between the world we all want and the world we have — is our inability to recognize our ability/responsibility to change things. In this “information age” now more than ever before, as life becomes data and data becomes digital, we all possess the capacity to reprogram the pathways and architectures that define society. Technology can be a democratizing force or it can simply reiterate past structures. The key is to recognize and harness it’s distributed capacity, to realize that we can come together to talk to each other, and collaborate to visualize and make the future.

Yesterday I arrived at Montalvo Arts Center for another residency. I’ll be here until January 16th and Marek arrives on the 6th to stay until the 20th. It’s been great to see lots of familiar faces and some new ones and we’re looking forward to another productive time here.

On the evening of January 12th we’ll be doing another showing of our work in progress. If you are in the area stop by! And we’ll posting more reports and documentation of progress here over the next couple weeks.

I recently submitted an abstract for a paper to the “Taking Up Space” conference at Duke University.

The abstract describes one potential theoretical framework for understanding some of the ideas addressed by the project. It focusses on urban space as understood through simulation, and touches on our use of psychogeographical methods in constructing virtual urban worlds.

The abstract is here: Neither Here nor There: Simulation and Urban Space (pdf).