Mapping Meaning: 2014

MAPPING MEANING: 2014

Location: Canyonlands Research Center

http://canyonlandsresearchcenter.org

Source: National Park Maps

abcBLITZ (Biology)

Sylvia Torti and Linda Wiener

The Challenge of Scale

If ‘land is the text’ how do we read our surrounding and create meaning around a place that is multidimensional? Our exercise is a response to that question and is intended to enable non-specialists to see the world through an ecological lens, to move outside their comfort zones, learn new techniques, and teach others what they have learned.

Photo: Trudi Lynn Smith

abcBLITZ (biology)

Sylvia Torti and Linda Wiener

Objectives:

“In these exercises, we provide participants with a set of basic observational tools so that they learn to engage the world as ecologists do, prompting them to experience and experiment with using ‘ecology’ as a lens for asking about and understanding place.”

Photo: Trudi Lynn Smith

April Bojorquez: Edible Explorations of the Colorado Plateau

In this session Mapping Meaning participants discussed the history of native ecologies and then went on an exploration to identify and collect edible plants of the Colorado Plateau. This culminated with a culinary experience connecting participants to food practices that exist outside of industrial agricultural systems and offering another lens for how we approach social and environmental ecologies.

http://www.desertartlab.com

Photo: Trudi Lynn Smith

Magdalena Sandoval Donahue

In this session Magdalena discussed "Field Play" a geologic field application she has been developing with John Donahue that creates immersive and interactive field trips.

http://www.think-ubiquitous.com

Photo: Trudi Lynn Smith

Cave Springs Trail

Source: Canyonlands Natural History Association

abcBLITZ (Cultural)

In this session participants hiked the Cave Springs Trail in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. This scenic area includes several important cultural and archaeological sites such as a historic cowboy camp with an open-air cooking area as well as Ancestral Pueblo pictographs. During this cultural blitz participants were introduced to regional issues relating to intersections and conflicts between cowboy, Native American and government (National Park) cultures.

Ancestral Puebloan Pictographs

Cowboy Camp

Photo: Sharon Mansur

Photo: Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle

Photo: Sharon Mansur

abcBLITZ (Aesthetic)

Aesthetic blitz: Walking with Pictures
Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle and Trudi Lynn Smith

In this session participants received images printed on postcard-sized cards, and writing/sketching tools. Participants were then asked to keep field notes – written or sketched or both – overlaid on the images provided, or like in a postcard on the back.

Photo: Trudi Lynn Smith

“The images given to participants fall into two camps: some are the expected, the on-the-way phenomena, the non-odd actuality, the frozen moment, the historical. Others are stranger, unfamiliar, related by conventions other than spatial (i.e. naming)...The images are to be used to compare and contrast with the experience on the ground. Will we only see that which we know? Will we know that which we don’t see?”

Photo: Trudi Lynn Smith

Postcard: Magdalena Sandoval Donahue

“Faced with the awesome spread and alienness of a newly settled continent, people wielded cameras as a way of taking possession of the places they visited. Kodak put signs at the entrances of many towns listing what to photograph. Signs marked the places in national parks where visitors should stand with their cameras.” Susan Sontag (1990 edition, p.65)

Performance: Sharon Mansur and Toni Wynn

Photo: Sree Sinha

Performance: Sharon Mansur and Toni Wynn

Photo: Toni Wynn

Photo: Sarah Kanouse

Portable Camera Obscura, Trudi Lynn Smith

A camera obscura is a lightproof room with a small hole or simple lens on one side that projects the world outside, inside onto the walls of the room. Viewers enter the tent to see the view and participate in that photographic moment. Slightly removed from the outside world, but still a part of it – sounds permeate through the tent walls, there is ground under foot, and the breeze stirs the image projecting on the wall – the setting providing ideal ground to think about technology, representation, and viewing as well as the notions of in between or otherwise, liminal spaces and ecotones.

Photo: Krista Caballero

Portable Camera Obscura, Trudi Lynn Smith

Photo: Trudi Lynn Smith

Mapping Meaning Interns

Returning from 2012, Mapping Meaning couldn’t happen without them!

Photo: Sharon Mansur

The third Mapping Meaning focused on the development of an abcBLITZ.

The term “BioBlitz” was first coined in 1996 by U.S. National Park Service naturalist Susan Rudy and is used to describe an intense period of biological surveying. Generally occurring over a 24-hour period, a BioBlitz aims to record as many species of plants, animals, microbes, fungi, and other organisms as possible within a designated area.

Mapping Meaning 2014 utilized the concept of a BioBlitz as a model for thinking about what it means to holistically “experience”, “assess”, “know” and “teach” place. The group expanded this model to create an abcBLITZ, where abc stands for arts, biology and culture, as well as the metaphorical building blocks of “life/language.” In essence, the abcBLITZ is a focused way to think about interdisciplinary pedagogy — recognizing not only the importance of biodiversity but also the cultural and artistic histories central to any holistic understanding of a place.

Overarching questions:

How do we create alternative models that are imaginative enough to be open and easily adapted to local environments?
If "land is the text” how do we read our surrounding and create meaning around a place that is multidimensional? How do we translate that meaning so it is transformative, rather than simply enlightening?

2014 Workshop Schedule