About The Center
Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface. The Center embraces a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling the stated mission, employing conventional research and information processing methodology as well as nontraditional interpretive tools.
The organization was founded in 1994, and since that time it has produced over 30 exhibits on land use themes and regions, for public institutions all over the United States, as well as overseas. Public tours have been conducted in several states, and over ten books have been published by the CLUI. CLUI Archive photographs illustrate journals, popular magazines, and books by other publishers, and have been used in non-CLUI exhibitions, and acquired by art collectors.
The CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use - the many perspectives of the landscape - into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in "land use" debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources.
TOURS / EXHIBITS / PUBLICATIONS
The Lay of The Land NEWSLETTER
Land Use DATABASE / SUGGEST A SITE
The Center for Land Use Interpretation's Land Use Database is an on-line computer database of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States. It is a free public resource, designed to educate and inform the public about the function and form of the National landscape, a terrestrial system that has been altered to accommodate the complex demands of our society.
Wendover Residence Program
The Center has established a residence program at The Center's Wendover Complex, located in the desert town of Wendover, Utah. The program enables participants to live in Wendover and produce work related to the unique and inspiring geographic region, which includes the Great Salt Lake and its desert and salt-flat environs. During the course of the residency, participants are asked to produce work that explores themes related to the area, work which will then be exhibited.
Touring the archive, archiving the tour: image, text, and experience with the Center for Land Use Interpretation / by Sarah Kanouse
Art Journal / Summer, 2005
Whether the visitor steps in from the blazing sunshine of a Culver City sidewalk, thumbs open the cardstock cover of a slim booklet, takes a reclining seat on an air-conditioned bus, or types a few letters in a browser, her point of entry to the work of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) leads to an experience that defies the tidy categorizations of research, art, education, or tourism. An image greets her - an unremarkable image, an unromantic image, an image of land working, abandoned, or waiting to be put to work again. If she finds the image beautiful, the tourist gives way to researcher to find beauty in data: reconnaissance-style photos, soil, utility and irrigation maps, and snapshots of infrastructure. As she flips from page to page of her tour book or the online archive, shifts her focus from one image to another in the gallery, or gazes from the window at the changing landscape, the researcher again becomes a tourist, absorbing a carefully prepared text that dutifully explains what is being gazed upon in a way reminiscent of both tour guides and, paradoxically, the stalest of research and educational materials....
NOWHERE Class in Wendover w/CLUI
During the week-long guided project with Matthew Coolidge of the Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), the Curatorial Practice class looked at various sites (thinking of place and space as a "curatable" medium), to examine how curating is the construction of a point of view, and can be a creative process that makes something out of "nothing."
Matthew Coolidge is the Founder and Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, a non-profit art/research organization that employs a multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. He serves as a project director, photographer and curator for CLUI exhibitions, and has written several books published by the CLUI, including Back to the Bay: An Examination of the Shoreline of the San Francisco Bay Region (2001), and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (1996). He lectures widely in the United States and Europe on contemporary landscape matters, and is a faculty member in the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts, where he teaches a class about “nowhere”. Coolidge received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2004. (MA)
Steve Rowell
Playas, New Mexico: A Modern Ghost-town Braces for the Future
Steve Rowell of the CLUI has been documenting the town of Playas, and in particular the 230 homes slated for counter-terrorism training, creating a static, photographic index of this place that will, for the indefinite future, serve its role as a generic American suburb under simulated attack. A forthcoming exhibit is being planned using these and other materials. In March 2005, Rowell was involved in a residency program at the School of Architecture at Texas A&M in College Station, TX. There he worked with students to develop an exhibit on Playas, featuring photographs, video, an interactive map of the entire town, and an immersive virtual reality landscape using game and modeling software.
Sarah Simons
The Radon Baths: Old Montana Mine Shafts Furnished as Radioactive Health Spas
More CLUI Bus Tours Into the Desert: This Time it Was North, Out to Barstow and Beyond
Diversions & Dislocations: California's Owens Valley
Loop Feedback Loop: The Big Picture of Traffic Control In Los Angeles
Erik Knutzen
First CLUI Touchscreen Kiosk Deployed
A Visit to the Rainbow Gathering
Dutch Crater on Hold
& FRIENDS....
Jane Wolff / Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta
Jane Wolff began her career as a landscape and urban designer in the San Francisco Bay Area, where her project experience ranged from private gardens to urban design guidelines for the Main Post of the Presidio of San Francisco. Before her appointment at Washington University, she taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts and at Ohio State University's Knowlton School of Architecture. She is the author of Delta Primer, a book designed to educate diverse audiences about the contested landscape of the California Delta.
Her research deals with the hybrid landscapes produced by natural process and cultural intervention. Her study topics have included the architecture of the Finnish railway system, the history of land reclamation in the Netherlands, and the reconstructed landscapes of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Her work has been supported by two Fulbright Scholarships, a Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, and grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the LEF Foundation, and the Great Valley Center.
Jane wolff Delves Into The Delta
Kazys Varnelis
Kazys Varnelis is a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication's "Networked Publics" program.
Kazys teaches the History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He is a founding principal of the non-profit architectural collective AUDC and occasionally works with the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Kazys's teaching and research explores contemporary architecture, late modernism, architecture and capitalism, and the impact of recent changes in telecommunications and demographics on the contemporary city.
AUDC / Architecture - Urbanism - Design - Collaborative
AUDC uses the tools of architecture to research the role of the individual and the community in the contemporary urban environment. AUDC constructs realities not objects. Underscoring our work is a belief in finding ways of bringing people together. We define our practice by adhering to a system of core values that instill all our work with integrity and meaning.
Love: Envisioning communities – even if dispersed - based on caring, sharing, and belonging.
Beauty: To set an example for people to rise to.
Ethics: To instill, by demonstration, a way of acting, to demonstrate integrity.
Abstraction: To create a background that allows individuals to define identities amidst the infinite possibilities of contemporary life.
Tandem Surfing the Third Wave: AUDC & The Disappearance of Architecture / Ryan Griffis interviews AUDC
Julia Christensen / Big Box Reuse
Julia Christensen is an artist from Kentucky. Her work treads on the thin line between art and research. She also likes to tread on most of the thin lines between various media, between the electronic and the non-electronic, and between audience and performer.
Julia has taught and lectured across academic fields, in departments of art and art history, electronic/digital media, architecture, law, and information technology. Currently she is a lecturer at Stanford University in the Experimental Media Arts division, and a member of the Core facutly at the California College of the Arts. Julia received her BA in Integrated Art from Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. She received her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA in Electronic Arts at the iEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
Julia is currently investigating the rebuilding efforts that are taking place in the U.S. Gulf Coast region after the tragic hurricanes of 2005. Her land use explorations began with the project How Communities are Reusing the Big Box, an on-going project that began in January of 2004. This research has manifested itself through digital photography, digital video and audio, along with live presentations that Julia is giving throughout the country. She developed a project web site, www.bigboxreuse.com, that provides a hub to communities throughout the world that are involved in individual reuse endeavors, as well as creating an accessible database of various reuse sites. Julia lectures extensively, and has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation since the beginning of the research.
Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design
Founded in 1987, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting innovative art, architecture, design, and urbanism that takes this city as a laboratory. The Forum plays a vital role among architecture organizations nationally and internationally by initiating, presenting, and debating architectural and urbanistic speculations about Los Angeles.
Delerious LA / research and essays on landscape, urbanism and architecture by ALAN A LOOMIS
The Los Angeles River: Past, Present, and Possibilities
As the title "Past, Present, and Possibilities" implies, this exhibit explores the history and potential futures of the Los Angeles River. However, since the agenda of this exploration is to suggest regional urban design strategies, the research documented here examines not just the river bed but the entire river basin. The larger perspective provided by the watershed illuminates problems and leads to conclusions that cannot be addressed if one remains at the riverbank. In the process of this examination, the exhibit creates a point of intersection for the various organizations interested in the river's future, agencies responsible for watershed management, and the sources of on-line information necessary to understand the river's condition and evaluate different possibilities for its development. By providing a public clearinghouse of information on the river, the exhibit aims to create an informed citizenry and expand the current discussion surrounding the future of the Los Angeles River as an urban place.
Sean Dockray
Sean Dockray is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work includes interactive installations, video, writing, architecture, radio broadcasts, data visualization, performative lectures, and computer programming. With a focus on social systems, time, and impermanence, Dockray’s practice often emphasizes an active, critical engagement with technology. He is a member of the research group the Institute for Advanced Architecture, one of the directors of Telic Arts Exchange, a media art gallery, and a partner of the newly formed design collaborative MARKET. Between a BSE in Civil Engineering and Architecture from Princeton University and an MFA from UCLA (Design|Media Arts), Dockray worked for Plumb Design in New York and consulted for a variety of cultural producers including Laura Kurgan Architecture, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Not a Cornfield public artwork, and the Milosevic trial video archive. Presently, he lectures at the Department of Design | Media Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles and writes for various publications on art, culture, and design.
Blocking All Lanes: Sig-Alerts, detection loops, and the management of traffic
Sean Dockray, Steve Rowell, & Fiona Whitton
Cabinet Magazine / Spring 2005
Chris Kahle
Chris researches the Los Angeles urban landscape, parks, and open space. He's worked in GIS before and now is moving into the realm of cultural geography. He has conducted qualitative research in Paris studying citizen participation in urban land transformation efforts to create parks. Now he is developing a dissertation proposal to compare these processes in Paris parks and Los Angeles parks along the LA River. On the side, he is curating a show at LA's Municipal Art Gallery, "Genius Loci," showcasing art works about LA that incorporate cartographic methods/modes/designs as well as historic pictorial maps of the city - the show opened in Feb 2002 at SciArc in downtown LA. He has held an NSF Sustainable Cities Program Fellowship, a USC Tyler Environmental Scholarship, and was a USC Presidential Fellow.
Lize Mogel
Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography, distributing and inserting cartographic projects into public space. Recent work asks viewers to become active producers of their local landscape. She also works with the radio collaborative neuroTransmitter, and is currently an Architecture/Urban Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Open House at the Nevada Test Site
Kitt Peak, Arizona
Zelig Kurland / Civil Affairs: Scenes from Oregon's Budget Impasse
The term "public space" brings to mind beloved showcases of civic pride and community life: schools, libraries, parks, plazas, Main Street.
Behind the scenes there is the space of government agencies and publicly-supported services that strive to facilitate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when there are needs that cannot be met by the private sector alone.
Faced with declining tax revenues at the beginning of this decade, the majority of states cut services—especially health care—to reduce their spending. Massacusetts stopped health coverage for 36,000 people. Tennessee ended coverage for 208,000 residents. And so on.
Ewan Branda
I am an architect and software designer currently working on a Ph.D. in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. My work deals with epistemologies of information technolology in architectural history and theory. I'm particularly interested in new modes of urban and landscape representation latent in emerging information technology paradigms such as location aware computing. My current research is on information media and the origins of the archaeological park in the 19th century.
Angela Loughry
Angela Loughry’s academic and professional activities explore of the natural/urban interface in the contemporary city. As a recent transplant to Los Angeles, she finds the city to be an extraordinary laboratory for this exploration. She engages this urban laboratory whenever possible through research, teaching and practice. Her research activities focus on local land uses that reveal the interaction of the natural and the man-made. Independently and partnered with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) she researches such phenomena as dams, view sheds, and water systems and their effects on the urban fabric of Los Angeles. At Woodbury, this examination extends into the classroom through contemporary issues seminars that explore the landscape of Los Angeles and design studios driven by a deep interaction with site. She furthers this examination with speculative design projects. Her most recent project, which examined parking surfaces, was a finalist in several design competitions.
William Fox
William L. Fox is a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. His numerous nonfiction books rely upon fieldwork with artists and scientists in extreme environments to provide the narratives through which he conducts his investigations.
Fox was born in San Diego and attended Claremont McKenna College. He has edited several literary magazines and presses, among them the West Coast Poetry Review, and worked as a consulting editor for university presses, as well as being the former director of the poetry program at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
In the visual arts, Fox has exhibited text works in more than two dozen group and solo exhibitions in seven countries, served as the Associate Director of the Nevada Museum of Art, and then as the visual arts and architecture critic for the Reno Gazette-Journal newspaper.
In late 1979 he went to work at the Nevada Arts Council, first as the Coordinator of the Artists-in-Residence Program, then Deputy Director, and in 1984 Executive Director, a post he held until leaving in 1993 to write full time.
Fox has published poems, articles, reviews, and essays in more than seventy magazines, has had fourteen collections of poetry published in three countries, and has written eight nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape. He has taught rockclimbing at the University of Nevada, as well as led treks in the Himalaya.
In 2001-02 he spent two-and-a-half months in the Antarctic with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Program. Fox has also worked as a team member of NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project, which tests methods of exploring Mars on Devon Island in [the Canadian High Arctic.] He was a visiting scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, has twice been a Lannan Foundation writer-in-residence, and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty
In his new collection of essays, William L. Fox combines eloquent storytelling and engaging scholarship to examine why and how humans are compelled to leave their imprints on the most extreme lands—the dry lake beds of the arid earth.
Polar Program: Antarctic 1
The Center’s Polar Program exhibited its first public presentation in September, a project developed with the writer William Fox, who spent the last austral summer on Antarctica conducting research for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the CLUI. The exhibit, entitled Antarctic 1: Views Along Antarctica’s First Highway, opened in September 2002, featuring images from several photographers, with text captions by William Fox. Focusing on the places along the continents only real road, unofficially named “Antarctic 1,” the program examines the mechanisms and infrastructure of life-support and research that take place throughout this remote and inhospitable “continent of science.”
Deborah Stratman
Deborah Stratman is an award-winning filmmaker and artist based in Chicago. She received her M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts and her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1990 she has completed more than a dozen film projects, both on sixteen-millimeter film and on video. These works have been shown at international film festivals—including the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, and the Vienna International Film Festival in Austria—and at art institutions such as the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Wendover Residence Program - Deborah Stratman
Deborah Stratman was a resident in 2002, and made subsequent visits in 2003, and 2004 to complete her project. While in Wendover, she engaged in a project called Power/Exchange, which involved the erection of a 50 foot tall radio tower of her design, and the distribution of a booklet at vending boxes throughout the region.
Bill Brown / DreamWhipZine
You can take Bill Brown out of Texas, but you can’t take the Texas out of Bill Brown. His films are vast and expansive and take you on a road trip across the back roads of forgotten places. From his award winning Confederation Park, which carefully depicts an aimless American kid setting out across the Trans-Canada Highway, to Buffalo Common, which observes the dismantling of nuclear missile silos across North Dakota, Bill’s films blur the difference between documentary and personal filmmaking and create a time-capsule of the subtle changes of the North American landscape. His films have won many awards and screened at nearly every film festival on the planet, he has received both Rockefeller and Creative Capital grants, and in November 2003, the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of his work. His ‘turn-ons’ include blimps, elevated trains, and vegan bratwurst, but the steady tug of time passing and Hummers leave him less excited.
Wendover Residence Program - Bill Brown
Bill Brown was a resident in 2004. while in Wendover, he constructed the "Railbike," a tandem bicycle with an outrigger, that he used for exploring and documenting the abandoned railroads of the area. The Railbike remains at CLUI Wendover as a resource for current and future residents.
Igor Vamos
Igor Vamos lives in Albany, New York and teaches video and media arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in nearby Troy. His work takes the form of strategic interventions in public sites and electronic networks, and experimental films that borrow from the conventions of the documentary. Since the early nineties, his various interventions, created in collaboration with such activist groups as ®TMark or Yes Men, have met with critical acclaim in the electronic and print media. His skill in staging public-art events and attracting media coverage guarantee his projects a vast audience, far exceeding the normal scope of contemporary art. Since Vamos creates the majority of his projects as an anonymous member of activist groups, it is difficult to determine his exact contribution. [MORE]
A Higher Plain: The Rajneesh Ranch Revisited
Have You Ever Navigated the Erie Canal?
Arecibo, Puerto Rico: A Giant Ear Built Onto the Earth
Melinda Stone
A filmmaker, curator, and teacher, Stone has produced over twenty films and videos, as well as numerous outdoor cinematic productions. Stone has a deep affinity for the American West and road travel; the subjectivity of her work often extends from historic research and the mining of cultural conditions found immediately in the land. Stone’s whimsical sensibility and romanticism surface in her ongoing interest in amateur productions and experimental screening practices, which often incorporate live music and participatory sing-alongs. Her site-related outdoor film events are always generous in spirit, evoking an awareness of the landscape and merging real time with the experience of the moving image. These events have taken place in locales such as Hunters Point (Sink or Swim, 2001) and Piru, California (Fleur Power, 1998). Her most ambitious screening event, The California Tour, was presented at drive-in theaters located throughout the state during the spring and summer of 2003. For this roving multivenue presentation, Stone curated footage submitted by amateur filmmakers under the pretense that it was “about California” and projected selections onto large screens of both abandoned and operating drive-ins for locals.
Stone’s commissioned Rambling in Repose, 2005, is a lounging environment, furnished with recliners, walls adorned by film club awards, and shelves lined with trophies. A monitor provides the opportunity for viewers to select DVD-transferred 16 mm films made by San Franciscan amateur filmmakers from a playlist. The films depict past moments of leisure recorded by amateurs in and around San Francisco since the 1950s. The selection includes Tuneful Wings (a fantasy-like, backyard avian adventure shot on Twin Peaks); Moods of a City (a 1970s group production that reflects the city in the 1970s); a film that looks at life at Hunters Point; a short by an Italian filmmaker, Sal Tufo, set in his family’s local restaurant; and a travelogue recorded by Bucky the Antelope while on his jet-setting adventures.
Stone received a BA in speech communication and journalism from Humboldt State University in 1989, a MS in communication from San Diego State University in 1992, and a PhD in communication from the University of California, San Diego, in 2003. Her PhD dissertation focused on American amateur cinema clubs, a pastime that Stone considers demonstrates true love of the media. She is currently assistant professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco. Stone is also one of the founders and current director of film projects for the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City, California.
Suggested Photo Spot Project
Media Artists Melinda Stone and Igor Vamos initiated and executed the Photo Spot Project for The Center, installing over 50 "Suggested Photo Spot" signs at selected sites from coast to coast. Sights designated as a "Suggested Photo Spot" include the tailings pile of a copper mine and the waste water treatment facility for the Kodak company's headquarters. But the spots are not selected simply according to the function of facilities or land uses at the site. The criteria for selecting the Spots primarily relate to tourist photography issues, based on visual and aesthetics considerations, and a sense of what might be "photogenic". "In most cases, you have to be there to fully get it", says Stone, "the pictures we take of the Photo Spots represent just one aspect of the site, but the project is really about the interaction of viewers with each location".
Angola Prison and Prison Museum
Land Arts of the American West
Land Arts of the American West is an interdisciplinary, studio-based, field study program that investigates the overlay of land arts practices from pre-contact times to the contemporary era. The program has been formed around the following goals:
Land Arts investigates the spectrum of site interventions from pre-contact Native American to contemporary Euro-American cultures.
Land Arts provides students with direct physical contact with the sites under study.
Land Arts is a studio-based program that requires students to work in the field in direct response to site-specific conditions and provocations.
Land Arts asserts that an interdisciplinary discourse (art, architecture, and design) is essential to a full apprehension of the meaning of these sites.
Land Arts is dedicated to the idea that cultural expressions are influenced by place.
Land Arts contends that students educated in the universities of the Southwestern United States should be cognizant of the human interventions in this landscape across time and cultures.
Land Arts hinges on bringing Art and Design together in ways that extend beyond the notion of “art in the landscape” or the “documentation of the landscape.” By placing students both in the landscape, and between disciplines, the program provides a space where the boundaries between these disciplines become as tenuous as the boundaries in the landscape itself. Living on the land for weeks at a time, moving through the landscape in seamless experience and working directly in the environment students develop skills of perception and analysis unattainable in a classroom setting.
Assembling a diverse group of students and faculty from different institutions and disciplinary backgrounds is critical to the foundation of Land Arts. Bringing individuals from different geographic and cultural backgrounds together provides a space of inquiry for questions of the individual and the environment. Bill Gilbert, Professor of Art, at the University of New Mexico, and Chris Taylor, Assistant Professor of Design, at the University of Texas at Austin jointly direct the program. Course offerings and curricular structure are integrated jointly into the respective programs (disciplines) and capitalize on the strengths of an interdisciplinary inquiry.
Polar Inertia Journal
Armed with a laptop computer and increasingly aging Winnebago, our editor-in-chief Marcel E. Yarnow has brought together artists and writers who can tell the story which has been ignored by all others. It is the story of the highway, mobile home, fast food chain, suburbanite, truck stop and industrialized landscape, which characterize our growing nomadic culture. Polar Inertia is interested in your feedback, and contributions are encouraged, we accept short stories, photography, and essays dealing with personal experiences from all edges of nomadic and popular culture.
Polar Inertia journal is an outlet and a resource for on going research into the networks that define the contemporary city. The journal began with the idea that an understanding of the conditions of post war urbanism 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 and 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.
Museum of Jurassic Technology
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.
MOISTURE / Claude Willey & Deena Capparelli
MOISTURE is an experimental research project undertaken by a Los Angeles-based artist collective. Focused on developing location-sensitive structures for the collection, retention, and use/re-use of water in the Mojave Desert, the collective are invested in creating microclimates within one of the driest desert regions on the planet.
Since the winter of 2002, the evolving project has developed into an annual research program centered on Harper Dry Lake, near Hinkley, California. The current phase of the program involves the design and construction of functional sculptural objects, installed in relation to the ground, and the hydrologic matrix of the region. All individual components and larger collaborative projects are to be seen as puzzle-pieces aiding in the long-range understanding of this unique closed-basin.
The Harper Basin is a distinct drainage basin within the Mojave Desert, and as an exhausted agricultural area, with a large dry lake at its bottom, its history and present condition is emblematic of modern human development in desert regions. The MOISTURE collective intend to establish a prolonged presence in this Harper Basin, working both with and against the region’s changing water cycles.
Invisible Trajectories: Accidental Attributes of Two Moving Bodies: Unique Circumstances and Reconstructed Journeys in the California Inland Empire
etc. etc. etc. etc.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation is maintained by a dedicated staff and volunteer base including (but not limited to):
A-Z: Lisa Boulanger, Ewan Branda, Molly Brubaker, Matthew Coolidge, Mark Curtin, Sean Dockray, John Fitchen, Heather Frazar, Jennifer Gabrys, Chris Kahle, Michael Kassner, Erik Knutzen, Mathias Kolehmainen, Zelig Kurland, Carrie Lincourt, Ben Loescher, Angela Loughry, Suzanna Mast, Ryan McKinley, Lize Mogel, Richard Pell, John Reed, Steve Rowell, Sarah Simons, Melinda Stone, Dave Vamos, Igor Vamos, Kazys Varnelis, Fiona Whitton.
