between conflict  and resolve

2006

Experimental project within the Banff Centre Media Lab, 3D space
Video, Text, Stereogram Images

3-Dimensional space combining 19th and 21st century technology allowing viewers to shift between past and present — the sites as recorded within the 19th century Jerusalem stereograms and now, more than 100 years later. Events taking place the year the stereogram was taken and those taking place 100 years later are embedded within the images, allowing viewers to slide between the culture, history, politics and everyday life then and now.

The viewers’ physical immersion with the 3-dimensional space and their control over what is seen and experienced through the spatial tracking system links the viewer directly to historical and contemporary streams of information, linking the viewers’ body and subjectivity directly to politics, cultural conflicts and histories of the area.

The idea is to make more of the details of the historical and political forces shaping these sites available to viewers’ experiences, nuances which are as much a part of these places as the architecture itself.

Presentations

• New Media Lab, The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta (April 2006)

Sources

• Video: Original footage taken of monument and cultural sites in Jerusalem matching corresponding 19th century stereogram views.
• Text: Historical events taking place the year of the stereogram and 100 years later; selections from The Jew as Pariah by Hannah Arendt.
• Stereogram Images: From Underwood and Underwood Publishers.

Thanks

Visualization Researcher: Dr. Maria Lantin
Visualization Technician: Steve Nichols

Produced with the generous support of Banff Centre for the Arts, Co-Production Residency, April 2006

flight 93 – memorial proposal

In collaboration with Susan Schwartzenberg, Peter Richards and Tom Leder

2005

Submitted to the Flight 93 Memorial Task Force, Advisory Commission and the National Parks Service, call for entries.

In September, 2001, United Airlines Flight #93 crashed just outside of Shanksvilles, Pennsylvania in an empty field near farms and homes. The force of the crash left little remaining of the plane and its passengers. While immediate attention fixed on New York and the World Trade Center, the residents of the greater Shanksville area and the families of the Flight 93 passengers and crew faced the shock of the event, quietly mourned the loss of people on board Flight 93 and watched as the old mining community slowly came into world wide focus.

The proposal mapped the matrix of inter-related events, forces and experiences within the landscape using land restoration systems to transform and convert the pools filled with water runoff from past mining in the area, Global Positioning System satellites to create a walker controlled series of narratives that provided both context and nuances for events leading up to and following the events of the tragedy. The site becomes a location of healing and restitution both metphorically and environmentally with words, and stories of peoples’ lives and experiences delicately etched and embedded into the terrain.

The proposal was submitted in response to a September, 2004 call for entries sponsored by the families of Flight 93, the Flight 93 Memorial Task Force, Advisory Commission and the National Parks Service.

Refrences

Flight 93 Memorial, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States

Thanks

To my collaborators visual and public artists Susan Schwartzenberg and Peter Richards and landscape designer, Tom Leder

Beneath the epic stories of politics, globalization and war are the individual accounts—the countless acts of heroism, collective action, and human empathy, as most aptly embodied in the events that took place on Flight 93, and in the community adjacent to the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. - From Flight #93, Proposal Description

facing fear: How to survive the 21st century

1999

Cards, Book

Adapted from the SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea by John Weisman, the British Army, Special Air Service’s complete course in being prepared for any type of emergency.

Originally produced as a series of cards, facing fear is now available as a downloadable book and can be found at : Blurb.com

Selected Exhibits

• FacingFear, San Francisco Commission Gallery, SF
• Security, Root Division Gallery, SF

Play Blotto!

1999

CD-Rom, Rorschach Blots, Bible

PLAY BLOTTO! is an interactive CD-Rom game that creates an archive of projective interpretations of ten blots, each made from small pieces of pulp from the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy).

Players’ first chose a religion and gender, and then compose narrative interpretations of ten “blots.” Their interpretations become part of a large, ongoing database that is searchable by variables and combinations of religion, gender and blot.

Once a player enters their interpretations, they are able to search the database to explore other descriptions of the “blots” made by previous players.

BLOTTO HISTORY

Blotto was a popular parlor game in the 19th century. Players would make up stories of poems based on a series of inkblots that they would either either create themselves or purchase commercially. Children loved the game so much that teachers would use the game as a reward in classes for good behavior and academic excellence.

Hermann Rorschach (1844-1922), a Swiss psychoanalyst, took this popular game and used it as the basis for what is now known as the Rorshach test, a psychological projective test used to assess an individual’s personality characteristics. Rorschach was familiar with the inkblot game and apparently, when he was a child, he played it so frequently that his friend nicknamed him Klecks, or “inkblot.”

Rorshach used the inkblot in his later research in psychology using blots as designated fields upon which patients projected their interpretations of the visual abstractions before them. Rorshach used their interpretations of the forms as a basis for his analysis and research in both childhood schizophrenia and in his later study of religious cult leaders in Switzerland.

His research and later subsequent thorough analysis and quantification of each image by John Exner in the 1960’s, has made the Rorshach test one of the most familiar and most frequently used psychological tests in the field.

References

• The Rorschach by John E. Exner
• Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorscharch

Programing

Sarah Rosenthal

Programmed in Director with Lingo, and distributed by CD-ROM