Sites: the expanded label & locative media based cultural tourism

For this installation,  I looked at the label as a site for intervention. I expanded the "label" to fill one entire wall, displayed as a grid of text nailed to the white gallery wall. Inspired by my subject matter and the historic Protestant churches on the private New Haven "Commons", it was for me an allusion to Martin Luther's decision to nail his manifesto to the church door.

People loved this label and I wondered how many would have read this history were it presented in a different context?

VIEW LABEL TEXT HERE (2016 - for Clark University reinstallation)

My installation also included two videos running in a loop. One was a GPS video tour that was installed on a monitor and could be watched while on a Schwinn Exercise Bike installed in the gallery. Postwar abstraction for me includes relating Urban Renewal to the 1965 introduction of the first in-home exercise bikes designed to help you work hard, go no where, and see no one.

My video project asks: how can the new possibilities of GPS-based cultural tourism be used critically by artists? My project is a prototype for historically grounded, artist-driven conversations about, in this case, religious tolerance in America.

Since the 1990s, we have been at a turning point in how to talk about location, just as we were more than a century ago talking about time.  

Locative media is a new technology of the self. 

Locative media can become nothing more than the "stop and pop" digital cemetery of the twenty-first century. Or it can envision a new theater mediating the possibility of history and place.