Primary and Other Remote Locations

29 Jul

Posted by media center as nature, outdoor, wilderness, environmental, art, flats, salt, gps, hiking, database, locative, media center remote

Primary and other Remote Locations, a paintersflat.net project,Paula Poole and Brett Stalbaum
Performed in Box Elder County Utah, USA, August 12-15 2K5
Supported by

CLUI
www.clui.org

The UCSD Department of Visual Arts
visarts.ucsd.edu

GPS Tracklog Graphics implemented in the C5 Landscape Database API 2.0
www.c5corp.com

Special thanks to C5,
eteam (www.meineigenheim.org),
Achim Mohne (www.achimmohne.de),
and CLUI.

For the Painters Flat project “Primary and Other Remote Locations” the South East corner of Center for Land Use interpretation Remote Location property on Lemay Island, located in a small bay on Lemay Island in the barren deserts and salt flats of Northwest Utah, was used as the input point for a large regional database search.

The database, containing topographical data for the surrounding area including Lemay Island, Crater Island, Floating Island and the Silver Island mountain range, was searched for locations with similar topographical characteristics.

Through the database search and generative locative media algorithm by Brett Stalbaum, the five closest topographical others of the CLUI Remote Location were identified.

It is important to note that the algrorithm seeks the most similar topography, and that most interesting azimuth from which to select a view was chosen by Paula Poole from the perspective of the location selected by the database.

For an understanding of what the algorithm produces, note that each site is a few hundred meters from the “shoreline” of the salty muds that surround the local islands, just as the the CLUI remote location SE corner is a few hundred yards from the shoreline of the Remote Location bay.

For example, if we had run the algorithm against a point representing a hill top, all of the most similar hilltops would have been discovered.

The “Other Remote Locations” were visited over the course of two days with the help GPS, four wheel drive, and 32 kilometers of hiking.

These C5 landscape database images show the GPS tracklogs of Brett and Paula’s hikes in the context of a grayscale representation of the surrounding landscape.

Upon arrival at each of the “Other Remote Locations”, the site was documented, with the primary goal of producing landscape paintings in which agency of site selection, often assumed to be the natural province of the painter, is turned over to the algorithm digesting the landscape data through data mining and pattern matching.

The database literally told us where to go, and therefore from where to represent the landscape.

The final paintings of the Other Remote Location 1, Other Remote Location 2, Other Remote Location 3, Other Remote Location 4, and Other Remote Location 5, are original oils measuring 18×24, completed by Paula Poole in 2006. Locative Media/New Media art.

This is not gps drawing, but rather the other way, as in, being animated by database and gps.