Paula Levine is a visual artist whose works in digital media focus on experimental narrative and creating new models between narrative and physical spaces. Her current research interests are in locative media, specifically GPS and wireless technology. Projects explore location, navigation and site in relation to urban geography, cultural and social history, and local geographies. Recent projects used GPS technology, digital video and sound to understand the nature of place by revealing hidden dynamics.
Signature, 2005
Signature is an installation exhibited in April 2006 as part of the Sonoma Country Museum exhibition commemorating the centennial of the Bay area quake and fire. The project is a confluence of geographical space and historical time.
The word, “signature,” is thought most commonly as an individual mark made by hand on paper. However “seismic signature” is a seismological term sometimes used to describe characteristic waveforms of a seismic event. Signature brings together both references – hand written words and seismograms—as well as recordings of earthquake survivors to create a portrait of seismic history as it intersects with local lives and landscape.
At the heart of the installation is a digital image of the city of Santa Rosa that seems to ripple and dissolve each time an earthquake sound is heard. The sounds are audible translations of seismic graphs from the 1906 Bay area quake. Both image and sounds are controlled by Global Positioning Satellites that trigger the eruption of sound from one of the 1906 seismic recordings each time a satellite passes overhead. With each sound, the surface of the city disrupts as ripples erase the familiar and visible landscape, replacing it momentarily with a view of the Rogers Creek Fault that lies beneath the city.
Like history that repudiates the past, Signature marks the movements between what is past and present, visible and invisible, as each refuse to remain conveniently fixed in place.
http://www.sonomacountymuseum.org/indexUpcoming.html
Mediascape, 2005 (Land & History)
Mediascape, 2005 is a GPS controlled narrative walk situated in the South of Market area of San Francisco. The project was carried out in collaboration with KQED, Hewlett Packard and the Mobile Bristol Project, and produced in conjunction with, and showcased at the Digital Storytelling Conference, 2005, hosted by KQED, San Francisco, CA.
Mediascape focused on three blocks in the south of Market – the Mission Flea Market, Project Artaud and the block between the two called Land and History. The project created active portraits of these three areas, with histories and stories of lives lived there woven into the sounds of the streets.
Land and History focuses on the forgotten cultural and environmental history of the area that existed prior to the overlay of the city; the presence of the long existing Ohlone people, and the lost natural environment of marshes, wetlands and ocean and all the accompanying natural habitat. It also brought back to the surface the hidden Artesian wells and flowing Mission Creek that still exists under the streets but rise again to flood homes and building during heavy rains. Land and History recasts this concrete and very urban space as the environment it was, and through this dialogue with its past, raises questions and instigates new connections and understandings about its present.
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2005/oct-dec/mediascape.html
Shadows from another place, 2004
Shadows from another is a series of hypothetical mappings, both web based and site specific, that use Global Positioning Satellites to imagine the impact of political or cultural changes that takes place in one location, upon another. Collapsing what is ‘foreign’ and what is ‘domestic,’ these hybrid spaces are new territories, redefined through new border or land configurations.
The longitude and latitude of each bombsite in San Francisco is marked using a GPS device, the same technology used by the military to target sites in Baghdad, Iraq. These sites are mapped, chronicled and documented with photographs, showing what currently exists at these locations. The series offers variations on the impact of political or cultural traumas, such as wars, shifts in borders and boundaries as the transposed spaces collapse the safety of distance and allow distant and foreign events to be translated and experienced on local ground.
http://paulalevine.banff.org
SpeakingHere, 2004
SpeakingHere is a GPS controlled narrative walk in Banff, Alberta. Nine people speaking different languages described the view outside seen from a small window. Their narratives, along with the visual descriptions of the same place shot in video daily over a week, were “embedded†within the same landscape. Walkers, equipped with laptop computers, headphones and GPS devices, moved through the landscape, listening and seeing the place around them in nine languages and seven videos. The images and sounds juxtaposed and interwove with the experiences of the walkers as they moved through the space surrounding them.
The work engaged with the idea suggested by Wallace Stevens that, more often than not, we live in the description of a place, rather than the place itself.
Leave Your Response
You must be logged in to post a comment.