[-empyre-] week two | transnational collaboration research/practice

[Dale Hudson]

Thanks, Leila and Cary, for this overview of IH+. I’m looking forward to your forthcoming article in Leonardo!

I think that IH+’s challenge to the “default mode” is precisely what Patty and I found so productive about the various projects that we discuss in the book. 

In particular, we were impressed by ways that IH+ not only tries to dislodge default assumptions about mobile devices but also our default assumptions about our participation in a broader environment that includes human and nonhuman animals — and animals and nonanimals, including pants and trees along with less visible living and vibrant matter.

I would love to know more about ways that IH+ helps to dislodge default assumptions about “wilderness.” Can you offer an example?

Best,
Dale

On Nov 18, 2015, at 4:20, Leila Christine Nadir <lcnadir at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone:
> 
>  
> It's a pleasure to be working with all of you to build upon the discussion initiated by Dale and Patty's Thinking through Digital Media book.
> 
>  
> First, I'd like to provide this URL so that readers might be able to see some imagery and get a feel for Indeterminate Hikes+ if they like: http://www.ecoarttech.net/project/indeterminate-hike/. I'd also like to say that we have a in-depth essay forthcomin
> 
> ​g​​​​ in Leonardo about Indeterminate Hikes+ project, part of a special issue on mobile media art, edited by Mimi Sheller and Hana Iverson.​
> 
>  
> Our Indeterminate Hikes+ mobile media app project originated in our desire to rethink the way mobile media devices are used, and to test some of the criticisms leveraged against mobile computing devices by media theorists and environmental thinkers--and to also adapt psychogeography, happenings, and maybe even a little Buddhist meditation and mindfulness for the smartphone era. We are environmental artists, so we are involved in a lot of ecocritical scenes, where it was quite common a few years ago to hear that smartphones will destroy the planet because all those screens are directing attention away from the world around us.
> 
>  
> In that context, Indeterminate Hikes+ was a sort of test, a social hack, a way to break down the instrumentality of GoogleMaps, and to work against what Jason Farman calls the "default mode" of mobile media use. We use this quote a lot, so if you've ever seen one of our talks, you've probably already heard it: "While our devices can and do pull us away from a deep engagement with people and spaces, this doesn’t have to be the default mode for the ways we use our mobile media… if used in a dynamic way that addresses the medium’s strengths, mobile media can actually get us to engage with each other and with the spaces we move through in deep, meaningful, and context-rich ways." At the same time, we were adapting the discourse of wilderness--most famously deconstructed by historian William Cronon--for urban settings. Misusing "wilderness" and turning it into a poetic concept rather than a geographical or ecological label.
> 
>  
> Here's how the app works:
> 
>  
> After downloading the app, IH+ users input their starting points (usually their current locations) and their destinations. The app, rather than providing the quickest route from one location to the other, mis-uses GoogleMaps to create an indirect, meandering path that makes no sense in terms of efficiency. As their phones direct them along these spontaneous trails, participants are stopped at Scenic Vistas. In traditional wilderness discourse, a ‘scenic vista’ signifies sublime nature that is supposed to awe and inspire: views atop mountains where one can see for miles, a canyon where one pulls off the road for a closer look, a majestic waterfall where one sets down her backpack. Indeterminate Hikes+, however, does not work this way. The app’s Scenic Vistas have a decidedly different character than the special markers we are accustomed to. Rather than landmarks designated on a static map, predetermined by either cultural values or an authoritative human guide, IH+ provides Scenic Vistas entirely at random, so you might end up at a rain gutter, alleyway, or abandoned house. To put this in terms of media and mapping: IH+ does not use mobile media technology to communicate pre-established environmental data, simply linking hikers with pre-approved places understood easily as beautiful nature or sublime wilderness. This would repeat, in effect, the privileging of wilderness that Cronon criticizes. And such an approach would not take advantage of the unique qualities of mobile media; it would entail simply uploading the age-old, hierarchical experience of print cartography onto our smartphones. Instead, IH+ reworks navigational technologies in order to create Scenic Vistas that are always changing, using mobile media to navigate the earth without a captain in charge. As a result, the app creates the possibility of place-making and ecological awakening anywhere, unrestricted by prior assumptions about what that place should look like.
> 
> With Indeterminate Hikes+, mobility, rather than detaching us from our immediate environment, becomes a tool enabling us to spread our capacity to experience wildness—or environmental otherness, as Cronon puts it—to any geographical space. At each Scenic Vista, participants are asked to complete a directive and engage in a meditative task that facilitates mindful awareness. They are also given the option to send a text, take a fieldnote, or capture an image. Examples of directives include “Follow the path of falling water,” “Listen to the mood of the walking path,” or “Wander the caverns on the surface of the earth.” Wedding wilderness vocabulary to non-wild places requires the stretching of environmental imagination. A walking path may be a nature trail or it may be a well-traveled concrete sidewalk; wandering caverns may entail spelunking through underground caves or taking the stairs or elevators into the vast depths of basements or skyscrapers.
> 
> “The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of a swirl of forces. Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild.” --Gary Snyder
> 
> Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermin
> 
> ​t​
> 
> *:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*.*.*.*
> Leila Christine Nadir, PhD
> Lecturer, Sustainability & Environmental Humanities, University of Rochester
> 2015 Artist-in-residence, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
> 2015 Artist-in-residence, Center for Land Use Interpretation
> Art+Food+Environment: www.EcoArtTech.net

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