Featured mediascaper: Teri Rueb
“all that knowledge that I had through my body and my hands through my sculptural training seemed lopped off somehow and I felt at a loss. But that challenge was really compelling to me- to think of other ways in the digital medium to engage the senses and the body beyond the keyboard, mouse and screen interface”
Teri Rueb began her public arts practice as a sculptor and painter, eventually creating public space interactive installations. She was drawn towards technology because she thought it could be used to reach audiences in the spaces of everyday practice although initially she did not know if she was going to paint computers or use them! While an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, Teri used technology for email and learning the basics of Pascal programming but it was not until her follow on degree at New York University in Interactive Telecommunications that whole new worlds opened up and the possibilities for programming in a new context became apparent and accessible. It was around 1996, Clinton was in office and GPS was just becoming usable for consumer use when Teri got a residency at the Banff Centre and made her first GPS-based in-situ work called Trace.
Trace was specifically designed for a network of trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds which are a UNESCO World Heritage site. The area is very resonant with different cultural meanings as well as being spectacular in landscape and geology. The site is unique because of the type of unusual soft bodied organisms that were captured and imprinted in its geological matrix. To Teri the site had a metaphoric reference to a grander scale of time and memorial, presence and absence, and archive as place. Her idea was to create a framework in which people could contribute and hear sonic memorials as they hiked the twenty two kilometres of trails. This vernacular form of memorialising or marking loss was inspired by the memorial garden cemeteries of the late 19th century whose civic function as public space had waned in popularity. Teri sought to use the new medium, which she felt was intrinsically of and about memory, to re-inscribe a new way of memorialising or marking loss in a shared public sphere. She covered the site with sounds and spoken words which were contributed by artists, poets, composers in addition to people with no formal artistic training.
After Trace Teri did an urban piece called “choreography of everyday movement”. She was reflecting on the different kind of movement you have in an urban context and how heavily mediated movement is in most non walking cities and how the built environment directs and shapes our movement and behaviour in observing social conventions. She had the opportunity to collaborate with a group of dancers and a choreographer based in Baltimore. She asked the dancers to carry GPS units with them on their daily travels and to mark their movement - which was explicitly meant to be a subjective marking they would choose when and how to record. She then gathered a trail of their movement and presented it in two forms. One was a real time form which was a trace of their GPS track being gathered in real time and presented as an animation as a Java Applet in the web. The second was an archive moment of a print trace of the travels that were sandwiched between sheets of glass as a drawing that would accumulate over time. As the sheets stacked up higher and higher with each journey you would get a morphological record of movement over time.
Teri’s next work was called Drift. It was commissioned by the Cuxhavener Kunstverein gallery in the north of Germany and set along the coastline of the Northern Sea. Teri recalls how the landscape inspired the work:
“as the tide recedes up to two and a half miles out you can walk onto these very shallow tidal flats, it is kind of a disorienting space as there is not much differentiation as you look out to the horizon – there is just this wide open expanse of rippled sand and estuary – but it is a dangerous space too. If the tide comes in and you get isolated on one of these little islands you can get cut off – they have these little rescue baskets on poles throughout the landscape so you are always aware of the fact that this is not a place for novices to just stumble about but I decided to open it up to that anyway”
Teri wanted to work against what she thought the GPS was trying to do in privileging a very direct and goal oriented kind of efficient movement – marginalising that kind of exploratory movement or exploratory navigation that we get when we just follow our noses or allow ourselves to follow a current. Her piece asked you to wander the tidal flats with a GPS enabled sound playback device and surrender yourself to a wandering movement that may or may not produce an encounter with the sound. The sounds were not anchored, rather they were programmed to be displaced over time with the movement of the tide so they were drifting.
All of these pieces were made prior to the availability of the Mobile Bristol toolkit or mscape. In each case Teri worked alone or with programmers and engineers to accomplish the final result, each piece needed to be developed anew as the hardware and software changed. Once Teri started to use Mobile Bristol she was able to create focus on the composition rather than the technical aspects of a work. She developed Itinerant, Surfacing and Core Sample. She also found that it became possible for gallery staff or even National Park Service Rangers to gear people up whereas in the past it required trained technical staff to get the various laptops, GPS, and communications equipment working. This has meant that it was possible to increase the audience size for her works and to leave them running for longer periods of time. You can hear Teri describe Core Sample in her talk at mscapeFest and you can also download a sample of the mediascape.
Rhode Island School of Design.
Since 2004 Teri has been an Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her class is called “Network Landscapes” which is a term she has advanced toward thinking about the inter penetration of different kinds of network from the natural to the technological to the social to the ecological. Students can explore any cross section of what that might mean through projects that can explore geospatial technology from the vastness of GIS on to the very concrete kind of forms of interactive sound and media installation as supported by mscape.
Students first need to identify a site which could be a place, an itinerary, a route or even a temporal condition. They then need to clearly identify what it means for their project and undertake a body of research around that site. They must then propose a design intervention, augmentation or overlay to that site. In some ways the course draws on practices from large scale spatial design as well as fine art site specific, public and performative practices. In parallel with a full investigation of their selected site students learn about different techniques and technologies so that the design can be informed by that knowledge and take into account what is feasible for the time frame. They will also go on to implement a working prototype or concept. There is an interdisciplinary context and students often seek one another out for collaborations.
“some of those intersections are the most interesting moments when you have an landscape architect working with someone from electro-acoustic composition and developing maybe software radio projects and public art or landscape architecture and design proposals. So you really get these hybrid forms that do not fit into one or another category and that moment when people begin to understand and develop a vocabulary that can bridge between practices allows them to see their own practice in a new light and appreciate the skills sets and approaches of other disciplines which seems to me more central as a concern in higher education at this point than specialized approaches”
Teri reflects that technology increasingly penetrates all aspects of our daily life and so it is important that its design is being informed by the really human element, which is infinitely diverse. Working in an art and design course is a great opportunity for questioning “What is design?” and “What are future models of design research and art and technology research?”
Inspirations.
People who inspire Terri in her work are:
Richard Long and Hamish Fulton - “walking being a primary concern in almost all of my work”
Christina Kubish and Bernhard Leitner - “I strive for the level of subtlely and spatial articulation that they explore in their practices”.
Joyce Hinterding and Paul deMarinis for their sensitivity to soundwave as material.
And John Stilgoe, historian of the vernacular landscape.
Teri is currently doing a doctorate looking at constructions of space and sociality in mobile networked society. She is interested in remoteness, in isolation and in wildernesses of all kinds. Many of her works have been in landscapes that are very difficult to get to and might have very limited audiences or have subtle interventions that might be missed.
“I think certain kinds of experiences happen in isolation, in that moment of reflection that is not possible in a context with a high degree of visibility or a medium of mass distribution. I use digital media in a kind of antithetical way consciously – most people imagine digital media to be inherently about the social or inherently urban but I have never treated it that way. I have started quite at the opposite end by designing works that are intended for solitary walkers in the moment in situ. It is not an ideological standpoint, it is an aesthetic sensibility and a concern for understanding a medium on many levels.”
Teri references Andy Goldsworthy as an example of how incredible pieces of work that take enormous amounts of skill and time and yet are mostly not seen apart from in documentation form can still reach a large audience and have great impact.
“Why? Because the work brings people to a place of identification and resonance with an idea – it’s not really about the ice or the leaves or place where they happen – it is not ultimately about the medium it is about the message.”
Future projects.
Core Sample was a very large scale project both in landscape and architectural scale and so in contrast Teri is now interested in doing something more in the small scale interventions in a landscape that you might even miss if you moved too quickly over them. Something that might be just so subtle that it operates more in a quiet moment of discovery perhaps with sound regions the size of dinner plates and in the range of less than a dozen. She travelled to Japan a year ago and was deeply moved by the Zen gardens and the garden design throughout Kyoto which is just stunning in its blending of the naturally occurring form and the composed. She appreciates the contemplative space that is set up as you move through these staged and framed moments or the fact that you don’t move and its about stillness.
At the recent mscape fest Teri was delighted to find a whole community of people working in this genre – company which she is not typically accustomed to. She loves that paradox or dual nature of network.
“You can be at the same moment in the same space at one instant isolated and at the other over exposed or intimately connected. The ambivalence or the frisson of that moment is deeply fascinating.”
