the
path more or less taken: steve dietz [part
two] [part one]
CASTLE
CRAGS, SHASTA COUNTY, 9:30 AM, SATURDAY, APRIL 9
After
a breakfast, we head over to the campground where Stalbaum is.
Wittig
hiked the Great Wall of China in the spring of 2004, collecting GPS data along
the way, and while it seems like a relatively straightforward matter, it has taken
almost a year just to find the Wall's "other path" in California. Using
a digital elevation map of California - with 2 billion data points - the task
was to match the elevation of beginning and end points and the distance between
them of each of eight segments of the Great Wall of China. As Stalbaum explains
the collaborative and iterative process:
"In
the current great wall search, we use the stdev of one landscape (China) to look
for a matching landscape (California) by finding the closest stdev. In the elevation
data set, stdev in less a measure of uncertainty as much as it is character. The
higher stdev goes, the rougher the terrain. So Amul's search finds similar topographic
areas. It literally gets us in the right area! The virtual hikers and some other
software I wrote find the start and end points within that area, and a track between
them that is similar to Geri's input tracks in China."
The
Mutianyu segment of the Wall, the one just outside Beijing that most tourists
go to, in California turns out to be just off the Pacific Crest Trail, which passes
nearby. The excitement of the C5 members is palpable.
Stalbaum
shows us two options on the map. We can drive to a part of the trail that is only
about 2 kilometers from the start point or we can hike about 7 kilometers from
the campground, "more like the C5 way."
C5
nominally is a very structured organization. Slayton is the President, every project
has a lead, and the support roles, while fluid, are designated. Wittig and Stalbaum
are the leads for the Other Path. But C5 is also an artist collective that relies
on collaboration and cooperation, so getting a decision made can veer between
iteratively procedural and simply going along with someone who is willing to take
action. It takes a while but through a combination of acquiescence and naive optimism,
we opt for the 7K approach.
We
drive up to a parking lot near the trailhead and Gardner pulls out a row of GPS
devices, synchs them, and ands them out like the quartermaster he is. It is cool
out and as others begin to put on warm hats and gloves, I realize how totally
unprepared I am. I'm sure it will warm up pretty quickly, but I hope that Slayton
and Johanson have some chow they will share with me. I have nada besides two quarts
of water. Neither does anyone else it seems. Wittig did the original hike in less
than a day, after all. How hard can it be?
We
head out. It is a beautiful, sunny day. The trees are bare, and snow is on the
ground. Paula thought she saw some snow flowers the day before. At first, everyone
is looking at their GPS device constantly; worrying about losing satellite coverage.
At every clearing, we all hold our GPS devices to the sky like fans at a Rolling
Stones concert - or a Sprint ad. Durie rigs a stick to dangle his GPS device over
his shoulder, fishing the airwaves for satellite transmissions. After about an
hour, people have begun to strip off their clothing, and we settle into a steady
pace.
I ask Stalbaum
about the route we will take once we reach the starting point. This was a big
topic of discussion at the Thursday evening session I attended and has been for
months. Basically, there are two options. From the start point, you can more or
less ignore elevation changes and follow the compass directions of Wittig's original
path. In other words, go 400 meters at 275 degrees, then go 500 meters at 250
degrees and so on. The problem is, of course, this could easily put you at the
foot of a cliff - or over one. It might have you fording streams in awkward places
or going through the middle of a dwelling. You never know.
The
other option is to choose a route between the start and the finish that most closely
matches the elevation points of Wittig's original path but ignores cardinal direction.
Stalbaum has developed a number of algorithms, which he calls virtual hikers,
to calculate this option. The particular algorithm he has used in this instance
is the "slope reduction hiker," which basically sets a maximum limit
for how steep the slope can be at any given point. The plan is to use this path
on the outward journey and consider using the "directional" path on
the return journey.
After
two hours people are not talking quite so much. It's 12:30, but we are only about
halfway there. We still have 3.7 kilometers to go. We decide to press on and eat
once we get there.
After
three hours, we are still three kilometers from the start point. The path to the
other path is not very direct. It's 1:30 and people are starting to do the calculations
in their heads. If we were there now, it would be three hours back, which only
leaves about two hours to do the actual hike before it gets dark. And we're not
there yet. Time for a snack.
For
the next hour, we seem to keep a constant distance from the start point. Essentially,
we are circling it at a lower elevation, waiting to commence our bushwhacking
climb up to it from the best possible point.
After
four hours, we decide we have reached the best possible point to bushwhack to
the start point. It parallels a stream, which the start point is next to. It's
2:30. Someone suggests that now that we know where the start point is, we should
head back so we don't get caught in the dark and then return in the morning -
via the shorter route. But we're only 500 meters away, let's give it a bit longer.
"Making it" is a powerful undertow, pulling us up as much as anything
we consciously decide at this point.
Up
we climb. And up. We're only 350 meters away. It's slippery shale but at least
no manzanita. Then there is manzanita. Gardner, who bikes competitively, runs
on ahead like a gazelle. At 3:00, we're only 330 meters away. Learned discussions
about being within the margin of error of the GPS calculations begin in jest at
first, but with increasing seriousness. We stop. We get out photographs of the
Wall in China and hold them up to the landscape. Looks pretty good. Then a barely
audible "I see it!" is heard from Slayton, who has gone on ahead. We
decide to give ourselves till 3:30 and keep going. At 3:30 we're within 300 meters.
We can definitely see the ridge that the other path would traverse. We're definitely
within the margin of error now. We're definitely tired. It's definitely getting
late.
The plan
had been to do a field mediation at the end of the trip, but there is no time
for that. We seal an army surplus ammo box with wax. Inside is a flash drive with
texts by C5 about The Other Path and The C5 Landscape Initiative, which we leave
behind as a kind of "theory cache" for thirsting future hikers, intentional
or otherwise, of the Great Wall of China in California. Everyone documents the
documents cache.
We
eat lots of chocolate and head down. Significant amount of time is spent on our
butts. Even Sam, the Lab pup, chickens out at one point, and Slayton has to climb
back up after him and push him over an edge to get him to come down.
Eventually,
about 5:00 we reach the trail. Gardner dunks his head in the river and gets a
Mr. Misty headache. The rest of us just want to get going. We take the "short"
route return, figuring that walking on the road in the dark will be better than
walking along the trail. We make it to a parking lot, and Gardner and Toolin are
sent on ahead to get a car to pick us up. At least that's the plan. By chance,
someone with a pickup is finishing his walk and offers to drive us all to our
cars. No hesitation. Yes! Thanks. Driving along, exhausted but happy, it's hard
to imagine what it would have been like to walk the remaining 3 miles, even if
on tarmac. We tumble out of the pickup and into our cars and immediately head
into town for some food.
FIELD
MEDIATION, DUNSMUIR LODGE, 10:00 PM, SATURDAY, APRIL 9
After
dinner, after a couple of beers, we're back in the lodge. Everyone is dog-tired,
including the dog, but they decide to hold their field mediation. The group reads
papers, which are philosophical discussions of big data and the sublime and the
short path versus the long path. They are provocative and provide context for
what we have done - which is the intent. There is supportive but probing discussion
of each paper. To me, it's a remarkable testament that we have just done something
much more than a hike. I quote briefly from each.
Stalbaum
reads "Field mediation text, Great Wall Mutainyu Trek."
"Interpretively,
we may extract from all of this that the pursuit of information is the pursuit
of the beautiful and that the pursuit of data - such as the limitless quantities
now being produced by the big data disciplines of the earth sciences, astronomy,
and biology - is the pursuit of the sublime. Information, which by definition
must be processed from data, shows the symmetry, proportion, and congruity that
can be found in a data set. Beauty tells us something with clarity and a certain
force, it leads to knowledge. Data, by contrast is the less visible representational
form that controls ever more of our existence today; it is large and overwhelming
to the senses, and we are entailed by it. The former implies a resting point for
understanding as moments of clarity and truth, the later implies an impulse for
exploration and new data collection, an always moving desire to stir things up
and create new problems to face. How artists implement their forms of expression
between information and data, and the transitory positions between them as they
transform in infinite recursion, is the aesthetic issue of our time. Data processed
into information raises questions that lead recursively to more data collection
and processing. The cycle of the differentiation and dedifferentiation, beauty
and sublime, information and data, and even Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of
territorialized and deterritorialized, represent a framework in which to engage
with data as expansion toward the sublime."
Toolin
reads "The Paradox of Indeterminacy in the Age of Reason," picking up
the theme of the sublime and applying it to The Perfect View project.
"Indeterminacy
is a central feature in the Perfect View. For myself who made the cross-country
trek via a route that was determined by others, being therefore inherently filled
with the unknown. (Talking with some of the site contributors about their Geocache
explorations, I noted that this same element of adventure, seeing someplace for
the first time, was one of their main motivations. And for Perfect View as an
artwork: it aggravates the conventions of art. While using traditional photography
to document and exhibit the sublime sites, Perfect View is a monumental, performative
land art piece that required the collaboration of heretofore strangers."
Wittig
reads "Prepared chance: data driven landscape exploration" and leaves
us with the "moral" of the trip.
"These
types of big data generation with the goal of finding meaningful data signals
in the chaos through relational processing have a long tradition in the C5 approach
to discovery. With C5_s explorations of defining the Other Path, which entail
processes derived from taking originating data from remote space-time events and
transposing them onto large data sets and ultimately generating corollary space-time
events, perhaps the inversion of Pasteur might even be taken to another logical
conclusion: the mind favors prepared chance."
Mays
reads "Dimensionality in Locative Media,"
"In
'The User Illusion,' the Danish writer Tor Norretranders discusses the bias towards
the straight line in modern Western civilization. The straight and deterministic
path contains less information than the meander of nature. "A raindrop's
path down a mountain is very difficult to describe." Traversing the Other
Path does not yield a straight line. Instead, walking down the path we can turn
left or right if the virtual and actual path affords it. Accepting or resisting
the path generates information."
Around
11;59 pm, Slayton closes with his thoughts on "Semantic Segmentation: Short
paths/long paths."
"In
the midst of real definitions, we continual seek something definite. Where are
we? How do I get there from here? Inevitably the answer lies in a precessions
of relations that provides an acceptable definition to the problem at hand. Determining
what leads to what is the demeanor of the short path, every point/line an analogy
of not only the previous point/line but all segments of which it is a class. As
a segment the short path is like a paragraph in a great run on sentence. Go here,
go there, go around that, go back.. move, stop, start, faster, slower. Similar
to a Turing machine this embedded potential behavior of the path and its potential
for scaling of the event exists within universal formal system of inflections,
a path grammar."
Shortly
after midnight, physically and intellectually exhausted, we turn in.
THE
PATH MORE OR LESS TAKEN
Robert
Frost's famous poem, "The Road Not Taken," is primarily remembered for
its declaration of an alternative autonomy.
"Two
roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,"
This
could equally be said of the route C5 has taken over the past eight years, since
its inception. And yet the poem is also the story of a binary logic. Of either/or.
"Two
roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both"
The
C5 Landscape Initiative is about both/and. It is about using one experience to
generate an other, analogous, one. "It is unexplored terrain, and exploration
has always been its own justification." (Stalbaum)
MINNEAPOLIS,
MONDAY, APRIL 11
It
is only on Monday, when the data we have returned with are preliminarily analyzed,
that we truly comprehend that 7K is how the crow flies. Walking along the switchbacks
of the mountain made it 14K traveled, which does not include an additional 10
kilometers of just going up and down - 10K of elevation change over the course
of the hike. No wonder my legs are tired. It's not every day you get to hike the
Great Wall of China.
Wittig
informs me that there will be another attempt at "Mutianyu Other Path virtual
hiker trek." But while there was a kind of "summit-itis" at the
end of our day, a real desire to make it to the exact start point, there is also
an experienced acceptance of the day's events. We have more or less traveled the
other path of the Great Wall of China. It was an experiment and now there are
a lot more data to be crunched. Another experiment will be formulated. It is enough.
It is good.
Back
to part one.
_______________________________________
I
want to thank all the members of C5 for their generosity and their openness in
allowing me to embed with them. All quotations are from the C5 website and conversations
and e-mail correspondence with individual members during March and April 2005.
Steve
Dietz is director of the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival
of Art on the Edge and the former curator of new media at the Walker Art Center.
A
version of this essay is published by sfCamerawork, May 2005.
_______________________________________
URLs
sf
Camerawork
http://www.sfcamerawork.org/exhibitions.html
The
Path More Or Less Taken
http://www.yproductions.com/writing/archives/000707.html
The
C5 Landscape Initiative
http://www.c5corp.com/projects/landscape/index.shtml
The
Other Path
http://www.c5corp.com/projects/otherpath/index.shtml
The
C5 Landscape Initiative GPS Media Viewer
http://www.sfcamerawork.org/exhibitions/C5
Whitney
Artport
http://www.whitney.org/artport/
16
Sessions
http://gallery9.walkerart.org/bookmark.html?id=10592&type=object&bookmark=1
Radio
Controlled Surveillance Probes
http://www.c5corp.com/projects/rcsp/index.shtml
--
Steve Dietz
Director, ZeroOne: The Network
Director, ISEA2006 Symposium
+
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu
: August 5-13, 2006
stevedietz[at]yproductions[dot]com
AIM: WebWalkAbout
http://www.yproductions.com
