ARTISTS BECOMING MONITORIAL CITIZENS
Beyond its land use database, CLUI programs unleash media's potential to create new forms of citizenship, including the monitorial citizen.
Its residencies for new media artists and activists invite them to experiment with new ways of activating "public space." Ralph Rugoff, curator and arts writer, describes how CLUI invites monitorial citizenship:
“A largely volunteer outfit with contributors from across the country, independently researching and investigating and producing new materials about land use and its interpretation, the Center has continued to develop in unpredictable directions …Distributing the fruits of this open-source research in myriad forms … the Center eschews any central voice of authority. It presents no master narrative that demands an exclusive path of action. Its politics, if they can be described in such terms, are indirect and elusive. They evade conventional forms by refusing to embrace recognizable 'positions'—positions that easily become reified postures that can be targeted and dismissed. …Of course, what we do with the awareness it provokes is up to each of us in the end, but on its own the Center is already evolving tools that can transform the way we think—not only about politics, but about the very ground beneath us."
Ralph Rugoff, “Circling the Center,” from Overlook: Exploring the internal fringes of America with The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Metropolis Books, New York, 2006
In Spring, 2007, smudge (a media-based art collaboration between Liz Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse) experienced first-hand CLUI's experiment in monitorial citizenship. We took up residency, as media artists, in a transformed quonset hut at an abandoned airforce base. Its story includes preparation for dropping the atomic bombs in WWII. The hut, now known as "Clean Livin'" is part of what director Matt Coolidge calls CLUI's "big social experiment."
We see it as an experiment in monitorial citizenship.
Now a studio for visiting artists, "Clean Livin'" inserts artists into Wendover Utah's WWII military base that continues as a site of target practice and occasional military training. It puts the military into close proximity with artists. It activates and explores "the internal fringes of America" by creating a site where citizens from wildly divergent life experiences and habitual preferences brush past one another, coming nose to nose across vast fissures of history, beliefs, economics, politics, social location.
The design and renovation of the Quonset hut into Clean Livin' is a project of SIMPARCH. Architects Steve Badgett and Matthew Lynch call it a "conceptual live/work site.” It is a self-contained work/exhibition space that provides "all the amenities for living/working without being tainted by the use of a non-renewable, subtractive energy supply. It will be curious to see what kind of production might come from a facility like this," SIMPARCH says.
Clean Livin’ is located in the desert where Nevada and Utah meet. Its surroundings have been used for rocket testing, hazardous waste disposal, and other military practices. SIMPARCH says its intention is to “re-inhabit this site of egregious energy use in a way contrary to its original purpose. This place, as well as other military facilities, was a nodule of very intense activity that shaped the destiny of this society and the planet."
While in residence at Clean Livin’, we "thought experimentally" as media producers/designers about what it felt like to be becoming "monitorial citizens." CLUI's residency placed us within a carefully designed convergence of human and natural forces. We inhabited an exquisitely concentrated zone of contact. Clean Livin's footprint is an apex of crossed, polarized, divided, and supposedly “out of relation” forces that shape physical and visual space, history, economies, social exchanges, natural environment, culture. To us, it felt as if these forces were flowing through Clean Livin’s porous container. The architecture of Clean Livin’ draws them in, then puts them into creative relation to one another in ways that are at once life-sustaining, ironic, and playful.
This is a living space as nonviolent, creative-zone-of-contact--a space designed to create desires and invent skills needed for citizens to imagine, innovate, and respond differently.
While in residence, we wrote in our blog:
"We humans face urgent environmental challenges and opportunities that are global in scale. To meet them, we will need to perform unprecedented feats of imagination, innovation, and responsiveness to each other and to the environment. The most powerful, urgent, and necessary action we can take as humans and as media designers: to expose our bodies and imaginations directly to sites and moments at which natural and human spheres of intensity come vividly and critically into play. To pause at the apex. To feel the reality of relation. To make and create responsively there.
Clean Livin’s gift to artist-citizens is that it provides us with the means to sustain our focus on and at the apex. From here, we can embody and (re)imagine these spheres of intensity in fluid, vivid relationality."
-smudge
Several days into our residency, we started to think of Clean Livin as a “limit case:” an intense point where natural and built forces mutually contaminate as they play out to their most extreme forms, levels, and junctures.
We began to use media to materialize, in the form of mediated image-sensations, our experiences of encountering natural and built forces at moments when they reach their "limits" and pass into something else. As monitorial citizens, we offered these image-sensations to others in the form of a set of postcards called From the Limits. Instead of documenting a destination, the postcards signal multiple social-political-natural forces and events that are in the midst of unfolding. We wanted them to carry the charge of unexpected moments that we lived ... moments that, to us, call upon citizens to perform extraordinary acts of human creativity. Our postcards are published online, by polar inertia journal—another project that uses media to create opportunities for monitorial citizenship:
polar inertia journal is an outlet and a resource for ongoing research into the networks that define the contemporary city. The Journal began with the idea that an understanding of the urban condition requires immersion into the technologies and instruments that have molded the growth and image of the city. Using Los Angeles as a primary research laboratory, polar inertia works under the belief that by exploring an documenting the infrastructure and land use patterns we can begin to understand the contemporary and future city. The research in the journal provides a basis from which to explore the potential for alternative proposals for urban development informed from the daily realities of the city. -M. Yarnow, editor at large, Yuma, AZ
