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The Book

Locative Dissent

  Jeremy Hight

 

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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VJ Theory: TEXTS
Date published: 01/09/06
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