The
landscape is the map. Our histories of panic, of dread, of the disorientation
of shifts and slippages, attempted erasures: all is a map. The advent
of locative media art makes this possible.. The nature of wireless
signals and global position satellite data (GPS) as available in
many laptops , and cell phones is that it allows information to
be placed in a location in real time. The landscape can hold dissent,
can reveal facts less known or even repressed in time and be accessed
in a live triggered feed of important information.
A protest is an event that exists physically
in a single moment in a single location, or in multiple locations.
The crowd disperses, and the message gets voiced as best as possible
through channels of dissenting voice, sometimes in bits and pieces
in the mainstream media (usually as a blip, and with lowest possible
numbers reported). All of this occurs after the fact and away from
the event of protest. The audio files triggered in a location are
more permanent (for years, until the technology possibly becomes
outmoded) and inform the space in any moment. Anyone with a cell
phone can trigger the layers of a place as they pass through.
All locations are full of unseen layers: in
time, of events past, of places gone, derelict or even remaining
but with ghosts of former resonance, and of people. Place is an
agitated space; anywhere you stand has unseen stories and knowledge
dormant beneath you. The cell phone can trigger the lost layers
of what has come before as signal triggers sounds, accounts, images
and even video of what must be remembered.
A drawback is the fact that not everyone can
afford a laptop, PDA or cell phone. This is a limit in terms of
dissemination, to be sure. A way to circumvent this can be funding
raised by arts organizations and political awareness organizations,
to give tours and community access with locative-enabled equipment.
The voices of personal accounts of injustice, malice, tragedy and
also of positive accounts of struggle, empowerment, and community
can be heard and facts can be sewn to places in real time, seen
and known.
An example of this in America could be a project
at Manzanar, one of the sites of the internment camps of Japanese
Americans in world war two. The site now is a barren wasteland with
only a small visitor center and a few derelict ruins of the temporary
city/jail that held many people. The current site is a sad metaphor
for American memory of what occurred. The dry cracked earth and
pathetic memorial is a further erasure and implication of suppression
by forgetting. The project can be GPS driven and trigger all the
accounts, images, maps, videos and tapestry of the individual stories
and lives of the many people forced to stay there in wooden shacks
and the tragedy of the internment and prejudice. The place will
agitate into life as navigated with what must be remembered
The dissemination of knowledge must move beyond
the disconnect of books (read in isolation away from the physical
place of the text's origin and gist), of the unfortunate ephemerality
of individual protests. Multiple projects and efforts can be developed
that trigger in the same area as one moves through. This allows
any variety of information and art to be available to many. The
site-specific nature of a project triggering in a location allows
many layers of place to be available to be “read”. In a location
will trigger accounts and information from a war in 1930, a tragic
shooting of protesters in 1957, a town and individual citizens raised
in 1968 and a hazardous chemical spill from a multinational company
in 1989.
The work can be with scientists, historians,
etc., utilizing all types of information; or can be grassroots narratives
(accounts) of communities. The works can be narratives and text,
mixtures of text and image, video, etc. The “authority” of the intellectual
here is negated, but by intention, the power is in pure present
experience.
The authoritative voice of intellectual discourse
is counter-intuitive to creating works that speak of place, events,
moments, important layers of a place lost in time. Instead of the
voice of authority, what is needed is the voice of the work and
location itself :the information, the artistic use of language and
image, and most of all, of the agitation into being of a location
as multi-tiered, alive. By shedding the implied distance and finality
of authoritative voice , has greater freedom to allow the account
, facts, importance and power of the place itself and what must
be known to be felt with great clarity.
This is where the landscape can now agitate
into being what needs to be known, what has been neglected in time,
what has not seen the emergence of a voice as loud as necessary
for it to now be made fully known. History is multi-layered, not
just in archaeological terms in a sense of layers, periods and their
artifacts, but of what has been displaced, forgotten in the short
memory of general culture, suppressed. Dissent now can be memory
and can be live.
History also is told in many voices. Context
shifts in time as well. The intellectual, the artist, the local
citizen: what knowledge of events, moments, ways of seeing beyond
the present and literal, do these voices have to implant in places,
to be known and heard?
Stories can emerge from standing where
a building decayed and was abandoned, where an empty space now stands
in the place of an event, a gathering, a human architecture broken
in time. Turbulence can be the effect of the present, of the wash
of information, of disinformation, of media bias, a blurred multiplicity.
In time that present can be seen more clearly, more wisely, more
deeply, and even the quiet things and small voices can be heard
as deeply resonant and vibrantly clear.
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