Photocartographies
May – July 2009
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Announcement: Travelogue
Films by Bill Brown and a video installation by Bia Gayotto
May 22 at 7:00pm

Hosted at g727, 727 S. Spring St. in downtown LA
All welcome, $mall donation, popcorn and beer…

Bill Brown

Confederation Park (1999), The Other Side (2006), Mountain State (2003)
Bill Brown is a “nomadic” filmmaker, photographer, and author from Lubbock, Texas. He has produced films on the United States–Mexico border, North Dakota missile silos, the Trans-Canada Highway, among other places. The films have been exhibited at numerous film festivals and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He describes his films as postcards with a pretty picture but instead of words on the back, his films are narrated with voiceover.

Bia Gayotto
Xing LA: From Altadena to Long Beach (2008)
Xing LA is an investigation of the mobile space of the commute, exploring three parallel routes by foot, by train, and by car. From “footslogging” to modern modes of transportation, the travelogue provides a portrait of Los Angeles, examining how the route and the experience of the route change depending on the mode of travel.

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Shaping LA, Panel Discussion
Maps for Planning, Developing and Resisting the city
June 23

Join us for a panel discussion with Meredith Drake, Liz Falletta, Lewis MacAdams and Andrew Montealegre – moderated by James Rojas.

“While most people use maps for directions, all our activity – where we work, play, eat – are color coded on a zoning map which describes where these daily performances can legally take place. However, the general public rarely sees these life shaping maps because they really don’t care. The vast majorities of people view their home, lifestyle, and mobility patterns as choices rather than something predetermined or conditioned.”

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Tattered Fragments of The Map
NOW AVAILABLE: Order online for $15

Although some artists involved in the exhibition have also contributed written work, this publication is certainly not a catalogue of the show. Instead, we hope that various ideas which surfaced during our investigation and preparation, as well as a few of the people we came into contact with, could be presented here in a sort of schizophrenic, scattershot survey of mapping and its associated theoretical implications.

Introductions, Adam Katz and Brian Rosa
Interview with Denis Wood
Anthony Auerbach, The World is a Cut-up
Bill Brown, Oklahoma Motel & Biosphere 2
Simone Hancox, The Map is Performed in the Territory
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, The Rise of The User Generated City
Bill Fox, The Angels of Mulholland drive
Herbert Gottfried, North Acton, Route 27 Community Gardens & Comfort Suites Under Construction, Bedford
Gerardo Greene Gondi, Image Texture
Alex Haber, Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces
Cris Benton, A Brief History of Kite Aerial Photography
Anusha Venkataraman, Situating the Grassroots: Collectivity and Imagination

Order A Copy of the Book From Lulu

This is a no-profit venture – Purchasing a copy of Tattered Fragments helps to fund the Photocartographies project. If you would prefer, books are also available at g727 in downtown Los Angeles.

.pdf versions of the book are available for those interested in reviewing or promoting the project, contact us.

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Sticky: SALE: EDITIONED ARTWORK
Commemorative Pieces – all sales benefit this no-profit project

Participating artists have donated editioned work to help raise money for the Photocartograpaphies project. Prices vary but are all under $300.

Pick up recent works by Anthony Auerbach, Charles Benton, Adam Ryder, Noah Beil, David Horvitz, and Gregory Michael Hernandez.

View available works.
Arrange sales / inquiries.

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enGage ludiCity
A Situationist-inspired ludic urban action with UCLA’s REMAP
personal distruptive ludiC Actions: June 13 to June 19
collective situationist ludiC enGagement: June 20

Saturday June 20 at g727
Daylight Engagement: 4pm to 6:30pm
Night Engagement: 9:30pm to 12midnight

enGage ludiCity is a Situationist-inspired ludic urban action (detournement / derive) using mobile technology for collective design and reflection on the psychogeography and historicity of Los Angeles. A Cultural Civic Computing experience by UCLA’s Center for Research in Engineering Media and Performance (REMAP).

For more information, visit la.remap.ucla.edu/ludicity.

The term “ludic” refers to any situation or activity relating to play or playfulness. As was the case for the Situationist International movement, playfulness is a key component of this project. Participants are invited to explore the city as a “ludic space” and to experience the city through “ludic actions”. The intention is to disrupt capitalist psychogeographic tendencies and promote new ways of seeing and thinking the city.

For one week leading up to the collective engagment (June 13-20), participants will generate information about the city by logging locations and actions with their phones using text messages. On June 20th everyone is invited to explore downtown LA using new maps created from this accumulated information.

The process is structured in 3 stages:

    A) Personal Disruptive Ludic Actions (ludus constituo)
    + Participants create and register a Fictitious Identity at http://la.remap.ucla.edu/ludicity/createuser.php
    + The enGage ludiCity Situationist Messaging System (sms) sends random ludic action requests to each participant’s cell phones. Participants send feedback on the performed/completed actions.
    + Through their ludic actions and feedback the evolving Situationist Ludic Map at la.remap.ucla.edu/ludicity/actionmap is created by the participants.

    B) Collective Situationist Ludic Engagement (ludis locus)
    + Participants gather to explore downtown using the collectively-created Situationist Ludic Map and sets of Situationist Dérive Instructions generated from the ludic actions feedback.
    + As they explore downtown participants engage in repurposing and transformative activities (detournement).
    + Participants are equipped with mobile technology to generate automatic documentation (paths, sounds, images) of their Situationist experience.

    C) Reflexive Situationist Dialogue (ludis meditor)
    + Participants and others will be able to access all of the materials generated in the first two stages, comment and dialogue about them.

We hope you will join us for all three stages of the experimental process. But you can choose any combination that fit your schedule and interest. We do ask you to please register using the form at http://la.remap.ucla.edu/ludicity/createuser.php.

REMAP
The Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance is a joint effort of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. REMAP bridges the world-class faculty and students of HSSEAS and TFT to explore new enriching cultural forms and empowering social situations enabled by the thoughtful interweaving of engineering, the arts and community development.

“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” (From Guy Debord’s Theory of the Dérive)

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