the
path more or less taken: steve dietz
C5,
a nomadic collective loosely based in California, recently mapped China's Great
Wall onto US soil, using GPS data of the original Wall and the path taken to map
it onto Californian terrain. Steve Dietz investigates.
DUNSMUIR,
SHASTA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, SATURDAY, APRIL 9
Joel
Slayton, president and founder of the artist group C5, has the look of an everyman.
Prone to dress in a proletariat edition of art world black, in his T-shirt and
jeans he resembles a slightly seedy version of Marlon Brando, although with his
beloved fly-fishing hat on his balding pate, there is also a touch of MASH's Henry
Blake.
Close to
midnight, following a more or less successful 14-hour, 14-kilometer assault on
the California "other path" of the Great Wall of China, he summarizes
the day's events:
"We
continually seek something definite. Where are we? How do I get there from here?
. . . Determining what leads to what is the demeanor of the short path, . . .
[which] is like a paragraph in a great run on sentence. Go here, go there, go
around that, go back, move, stop, start, faster, slower. . . . To get there from
here is not a matter of direction but rather the inference of similarity, memory
and discovery. Every short path is an other path and every other path is a set
of directions."
Slayton
concludes this distinctly un-Stanley "field mediation" with his trademark
aw-shucks-what-do-I-know crooked grin, which probably served him well growing
up as a trouble-prone air force brat. It is now disarmingly reprised for his roles
as digital artist, conceptual entrepreneur, extremist athlete, poet theorist,
and chairman father figure of the artist collective C5.
C5
According
to its website prospectus, C5 is a corporation that "specializes in cultural
production informed by the blurred boundaries of research, art and business practice.
Theory as Product." From Andy Warhol's Factory to shares in etoy to RTMark's
Mutual Funds, there is nothing particularly original about an artist group setting
up shop as a corporate entity. As C5 member Steve Durie says about the corporate
model:
"It
works well and easily in an ironic capacity but even more interestingly when you
consider it for a redefinition of creative activity and the collision of disciplines."
Within
the art world, it is in this context of veering away from irony and moving toward
a redefinition of creative activity that C5 is viewed, somewhere between King
Lear's jester - willing to speak truth to power while playing the fool, and an
autistic savant - nerdily brilliant but inscrutable and unartworldly.
THE
C5 LANDSCAPE INITIATIVE
C5's
newest endeavor, "The C5 Landscape Initiative," is a trio of projects
- "The Analogous Landscape: Rim of Fire," "The Perfect View,"
and "The Other Path" - that combine live performance (hikes), real-time
data recording (GPS devices), and rigorous analysis of large data sets (digital
maps; GPS coordinates) to understand and explore what they see as an epochal move
"from the aesthetics of representation to those of information visualization
and interface."
An
exhibition of their work opens May 24 at sf Camerwork Gallery and The C5 Landscape
Initiative is featured on the Whitney Artport.
I
first commissioned C5's "16 Sessions" in 1999, and have included a number
of their projects in various exhibitions. Slayton is my co-conspirator in launching
the biennial ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge in 2006. So I
am no neutral observer, but never before have I participated directly in the planning
and execution of a C5 project. For March and April 2005, I was an embedded reporter
for C5's The Other Path campaign.
WILLOW
GLENN, SAN JOSE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, THURSDAY, MARCH 24
C5
has met nearly every week for the past 6 years, usually at Slayton's home. When
I arrive many of the members present have a glass of red wine, and I hope I haven't
blown my embeddedness on the first day with the beer I bring. Everyone is surreptitiously
eyeing the limited supply of crackers and cheese. Apparently, when Geri Wittig,
one of the leads of the Other Path project, holds working group meetings, usually
at someone's workplace, she brings full takeout dinner. But it is only in the
presence of the embedded reporter that this is slyly broached. Slayton has been
the teacher of almost every C5 member when they were in graduate school, and some
boundaries can take a while to cross. It is 9:00 pm, and the meeting will last
until nearly midnight after a full day on the job for most of the members of the
group. They are discussing the upcoming hike of the other path of the Great Wall
of China in northern California.
Slayton:
Short path vs. long path. Need to discuss every time we take a detour. Doesn't
make a difference. It's not like the Wall is going to appear. But you need to
be looking in the right place.
Steve
Durie [Speaking in phone conference falsetto to a C5 member in San Diego]: Is
this Brett Stalbaum? This is Steve Durie. Do you know the secret handshake? Seven
members here and an embedded reporter.
Slayton:
Brett, we're all in agreement that we have a software solution to reposition the
Wall into the California landscape, and we have ID'd the start and end point from
the input data.
Stalbaum
[in San Diego]: I've been thinking about this all day. Amul's algorithm should
definitely identify the start and end points within the search area. The random
virtual hiker algorithm looks for the closest distance between the two points
and through a natural selection algorithm produces a track log, which can be loaded
into the GPS.
Slayton:
Sounds like the solution for the start and end points is achievable. The second
part of the problem is how to traverse the terrain.
Stalbaum:
Use the random virtual hiker.
Slayton:
Then what is the relationship to the original data? Is that the strategy the group
wants to move in or is there a different way to more closely align data?
Bruce
Gardner: Easy thing to do would be to take north / east values.
Amul
Goswamy: Why not do both?
Stalbaum:
The simple method might put us into a terrain that's not traversable - and that's
interesting. More like an archaeological investigation where you find an area
that you might make a find in. Where it enters pure experimental art is going
there and not being sure what will happen.
Matt
Mays: It's like passing the common sense test. If I put the two paths together,
and they don't look alike, then . . .
Gardner:
To be honest with you, I don't want to go down that path.
Stalbaum:
It's really easy to get lost with GPS.
In
hindsight, it's remarkable how prescient this conversation was, but at the time
my head was spinning. Short path. Long path. Other path. Standard deviation. Virtual
hiker. Random hiker. Least resistance hiker. The Great Wall of China in California.
What were they talking about?
THE
PROBLEM OF BIG DATA
Slayton
did much of his graduate work at the Visible Language Workshop at MIT in the late
70s. In 1985 he founded the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University
- one of the oldest new media art programs in the country. In 1998 he discussed
with Durie that perhaps the most appropriate response to the dot com euphoria
was to form an art company. Not just a company to sell it's members' art, but
a collective that viewed business structures as important as - and as fertile
as - network structures. After a "very involved process" with much time
spent on a "first business plan, intellectual property issues and internal
personal org documents" (Durie), C5 was formed.
C5's
first project was "Radio Controlled Surveillance Probes" (RCSP), which
debuted at SIGGRAPH, the huge computer graphics trade show, in 1998 and was intended
to demonstrate "the powerful combinitorics of theoretically devised surveillance
strategies and heuristic data analysis leading towards emergent knowledge representation."
Characteristically,
C5 thumbed its corporate nose at the conventions of the trade fair, and instead
of setting up a booth in the very expensive real estate they had managed to wangle,
they stood around in yellow checked racing shirts and biker shorts using remote
control devices to send video cameras mounted on radio controlled cars around
the floor. Other than the athletic wear, they looked more or less like any of
the thousands of nerds attending SIGGRAPH playing with the latest electronic gadgets.
Except they were spouting verbose speech acts about complexity, autopoiesis, ubiquity
and adaptive learning, as if they were barkers for some Godardian carnival of
theoretical excess. For only 25 cents, step behind the veil and you too can have
the scales drop from your eyes and SEE the Emergent Enterprise caught in an Entailment
Mesh! Truly it was the word made flesh, theory as product.
The
performative aspect of a C5 project is critical to their hybrid practice. It is
also a Trojan horse. Part of the goal of RCSP was to gather enough data to choke
on; enough so that the body of data would be literally incomprehensible. Then
C5 could run various analyses, without knowing any kind of answer in advance,
to see if the amorphous body of data can take shape, so to speak, as some kind
of data body. In other words, the goal was not, necessarily, to solve some real
world problem about "human interaction in a public architectural environment,"
but recognition that there is "big data" in the world that materially
affects us and inflects our behaviors, which we do not understand. RCSP gave C5
a big data set to play around with and explore. And as it turns out, it's a widespread
problem. As Wittig says,
"At
Siggraph when our art approach to surveillance strategies and knowledge mining
were of interest to both cancer researchers and intelligence agencies, we knew
we'd found our world in these hybrid spaces."
Every
C5 project since RCSP has dealt to some degree with this issue of big data. The
C5 Landscape Initiative projects also do so but add the body into the equation
more directly than in any other previous project. Stalbaum, I suspect, speaks
for most members of C5 when he says:
"We
can experience the problem of big data not only through visualization (though
this is an agenda of other C5 research), but very important to me, personally,
is the ability to experience large GIS datasets with our feet, with packs on our
backs. That is the performance layer. It is a pretty exciting space to experience
data art."
It
is certainly why the Landscape Initiative is the most accessible of C5's projects.
NORTH
FROM SAN JOSE, FRIDAY, APRIL 8
I
drive up to the designated meeting point near Mount Shasta in Northern California
with Slayton and C5 "Catalyst" Lisa Johanson, who is not a member of
the core group, but she has been involved in all of "The Analogous Landscape"
mountain climbs as the First Aid and Safety Officer. I have my doubts about this
as she fell and broke her wrist on an earlier climb, but she is married to Slayton,
so I keep my mouth shut.
During
the 5 hour drive, I share the back seat with Sam, a year old chocolate Lab, and
read various C5 texts on my computer, grilling Slayton about C5 and the Landscape
Initiative. In a very real way, such conversations between C5 members are central
to who they are and what they do. I learn that all projects begin with a so-called
field mediation.
In
2001 Bruce Gardner, who is sort of like C5's Marshall from Alias, cycled out to
Alviso, an area of levies at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay, and collected
GPS coordinates at which C5 members were later instructed to rendezvous. They
sat in a "Robert Smithson spiral" and read papers about landscape and
data or performed various exercises such as location/perception tests. Out of
this - and subsequent weekly meetings and research - the specific projects of
the Landscape Initiative evolved.
We
arrive at 11:59 pm, and I lose the bet about whether we will get there today or
tomorrow, but only because at the end Slayton drives recklessly down residential
streets. Competition is not an unknown element in the C5 psyche.
C5
RESEARCHERS
Most
of C5 is already at the rented lodge where we are staying the night. We do introductions.
Geri
Wittig is a pink-haired Tinkerbell who hiked the Chinese Great Wall of China for
six weeks in the spring of 2004 to gather the GPS data for The Other Path. In
conversation she has a kind of Terri Gross hitch that puts you off guard until
it's too late and the trap is sprung; you are forced into admissions you would
not normally offer up. Wittig is senior Web producer for Adobe and heads up The
Other Path project.
Wispy-chinned
Jack Toolin has the self-confident smirk of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.
His background is in performance and photography, and he is primary corporate
documentarian. He rode his motorcycle 13,000 miles to document The Perfect View,
one of The C5 Landscape Initiative projects about the nature of the contemporary
sublime.
Amul
Goswamy, an Apple Engineer/Scientist who joined C5 in late 2003, is introverted
like an engineer - until the right topic comes up, like the role of elegance in
code writing - and looks how you might imagine Fez from That 70s Show growing
up into Matthew Barney. He is a vested Associate Partner and working with Stalbaum
he found "a pattern of squares in the CA landscape whose standard deviation
of elevation matched those of the data points of the path of the Great Wall of
China." He also created a software platform to match media objects with GPS
coordinates based on time/date stamps.
Steve
Durie is a self-described "upper-middle child in the current family of eight,
who finds himself taking a negotiator's role at times and at times is one of several
competing class clowns and playful players." He led development of the GUI
being used to display data and media documentation in the sf Camerawork exhibition.
Later
in the evening, Matt Mays arrives with Gardner. He has only been on board since
November 2004, and this is his first Landscape Initiative event. He seems young
enough to be almost any precocious kid in a movie about the future. Matthew Broderick
in War Games. He is the acting Chief Legal Officer.
Bruce
Gardner, besides his Alias persona, handles most of C5's sysadmin functions as
well as acting as quartermaster for C5 gadgets.
Brett
Stalbaum is camping with his wife Paula nearby. He reminds me of Radar from Mash,
but the group thinks of him as former California governor and current Oakland
mayor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown. What everyone likes to say is that he
is the designated meal, if things go really badly. Stalbaum developed various
"hiker" algorithms to get from Point A to Point B, so if we don't make
it, it is sort of his fault, I guess. It would be a pity though. His enthusiasm
and knowledge is iinfectious.
In
the field: part two.
