|
|
| A STEP LASTING A DAY, OR “KEEP YOUR HEAD IN THE SKY AND YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND”1 Ieva Auziņa Excerpts from the diary of the "Milk" project | |
|
"Regarding a landscape without human presence is an intellectually stimulating activity." (C. Sauer)2 Voluntary participation in a landscape, in the knowledge that someone is watching you in it, is an equally stimulating and tense activity. Only in the case of the "Milk" project, this awareness is somewhat inappropriate, since in fact you're being observed by nobody other than yourself. The positioning sensor attached to your shoulder or belt, an antenna no larger than a mobile phone, which records its location by means of radio signals received from satellites, is in fact doing nothing more than recording and collecting strings of numbers in its memory every ten seconds. And if in the course of the day it gives rise to some unpleasant or amusing moments, when the power of the myth has made you anxious or has made you consciously do something differently, just because "you're being watched" (although in fact no-one is watching, since the unit only receives a signal, without re-transmitting it), during the rest of the time this small piece of equipment is useful in turning your attention to thoughts and memories, to which insufficient time and attention are otherwise given. When the software created by programmer Markus The arranges the pixel points on the liquid crystal screen in angular and curved lines - an ascetic drawing derived from the above-mentioned strings of numbers - your experiences during the day obtain an abstract, but at the same time highly personal visual form. Meditating by the white, transparent "footsteps", which run, then slowly disappear, then stop and remain for several hours at one place, you come to appreciate that each of these represents a cultural point in the existing natural landscape: a well, a beehive, a granary, a barn, a footbridge across a river, a paddock gate, an apple orchard, a crossroads, a local shop or post office. And more than that: a conversation at the milk table, a moment of contemplation at lunchtime, a vivid memory when drinking cold birch sap in a hay meadow. Art as communication, art in geography, geography as art, the art of mapping, art as ethnography, the artist as anthropologist, art as panhuman knowledge? And there's no need for a single definition, since this simply isn't possible. Just as, in its time, "the greatest contribution of the Sauer and Berkeley school of landscape was to free countless geographers, landscape architects, environmental theoreticians, writers and even poets from mechanical dogmas about the environment, man and culture"3, so too, let "Milk" remain outside any one particular discipline and visit a great variety of audiences: farmers, state officials, artists, tractor drivers, cartographers, directors, shareholders, bakers, traders, customers, etc. As regards the sound recordings and photographs, these should have the character and quality of a report, since such are the situations in which they are created. The material is put together like a comic strip: nine stories consisting of motionless colourful pictures, sound recordings and subtitled frames: white letters on a black background. The latter serve as pauses lasting 7 to 9 seconds. Thus a certain rhythm is developed, and even dynamism between the picture slides and text slides, creating a "film", which is presented by the software as a large-format projection in synchrony with maps shown on the liquid crystal screen. People also view the "film" from beginning to end, and it lasts about 40 minutes. Latvians undoubtedly prefer the photographic image, while European viewers find it easier to contemplate and understand the white pixel drawings and, by comparing the coordinates, seek precision and literal interpretation. I'm reading in the book quoted several times already about the way in which social and cultural differences determine how people orient themselves and how they find places. Thus, for example, Inuit maps often carefully record the directions of rivers and journeys, but not linear distances, marking only how far one can travel in a day. The Salteaux tribe of American Indians, for example, are not familiar with circular movements. Going clockwise they refer to as going from east to south, west and north. The Siberian Chukchi are said to have twenty-two compass directions, most of which relate to the sun and seasons. The long-distance travellers of Micronesia make use of the constellations of stars and the location of islands in their asymmetric navigation networks. The people of Tikopia used the terms "seaward" and "landward", in order to give the location of something (for example, there's some mud on your "seaward" cheek). Westerners are egoistic in terms of space, since they give directions based on themselves: right, left, further, closer. The Chinese and Balinese give directions according to points of the compass, for example: "move the table to the west" or "play the piano key east of the one you played before".4 It seems that Latvians attach importance to signs forming a certain structure of movement in the imagination: the big pine, after the first bend in the road, behind the crooked spruce, there, behind the scrub, before the railway crossing, etc. Important is a scale that can be grasped, rather than a limitless expanse. The everyday space, limited by values connected with certain traditions and mentality. If someone says "down there in the meadow", and if you've never been there, it's hard to say exactly which place is meant, but if you've been there, then you know exactly which place in the wide meadow is being referred to as "down there". It is with comments of this kind that the project participants encode the abstract white drawings. The participants from the Latvian side‑- farmers - compare the graphic image drawn by the positioning unit with plans they have in their heads, while the Dutch are guided more by time and the geographic coordinates, shown at the upper left corner of the screen. "There are few things more pleasant than a clearly-perceived landscape. But it is clear to just a few. A landscape with a pixel Milky Way speaks its own language, understood only by those familiar with the landscape. They read meaning into the mute line, and we see it through them. Suddenly, this mute line has become maximally personal. [...] In observing our own movement, as we usually do, we obtain less understanding than we do in studying others. The subject becomes an object, and we're nothing more than our own remote control, an imitation of our own movement and action."5 Chronology of the project: July 2003 - pilot project in Latgale during the locative media creative workshops. Summer 2003 - autumn 2004 - research and development of the project 2-10 October 2004 Installation at "Rumbiñi", the Memorial Museum of the Bārda Family, in Katvari Parish of LimbaΩi District 5 November-10 December 2004 Installation at Kasteel Groeneveld in Baarn, The Netherlands 21-22 December 2004 Installation at the Justus Lipsius EU administrative building in Brussels, within the frame of a meeting of EU agriculture and fisheries ministers. 15 March-31 August 2005 Installation at the exhibition "Making Things Public" at the ZKM Arts and Media Centre, in Karlsruhe, Germany.n _____________________ 1 French peasant proverb. 2 Carl Ortwin Sauer wrote the essay "The Morphology of Landscape" in 1925, on the study of the cultural landscape as an important task of human (or in those days "cultural") geography. (See also: Bunkße, Edmunds Valdemārs, Sirēnu balsis: ©eogrāfija kā cilvēcīga erudīcija. Bērklijas ainavu skola, Rīga: Norden AB, 2000). 3 Sirēnu balsis: ©eogrāfija kā cilvēcīga erudīcija. Bērklijas ainavu skola, p. 27. 4 Ibid., p. 114. 5 From the text by V. Gailītis for "Milky Way" in the catalogue for the "Making Things Public" exhibition. | |
| go back | |
