P r e / a m b l e: A 2 day festival of Art and Psychogeography NOVEMBER 1 & 2, 2003 Home Festival Overview Participating Artists Schedule of Events About Join the Mailing List Contact PRESENTED BY: Western Front Upgrade 2.0 Special Airplane Kate Armstrong Year Zero One OTHER LINKS: What is Psychogeography? Algorithmic Psychogeography Guy Debord's Theory of the Derive Why Psychogeography? Social Fiction Glowlab Psychogeography.net	John (Craig) Freeman in Collaboration with Greg Ulmer and the Florida Research Ensemble T A L K : Imaging Place: Psychogeography in the Electrate Age Western Front Date: Sunday, November 2, 2003 Time: 3 pm Imaging Place is a documentary virtual reality method, which uses a combination of panoramic photography and digital video to investigate place. It use psychogeography and the methods and ideas of the French Situationists as a point of departure. Although the method borrows freely from the traditions of documentary still photography and filmmaking, the Imaging Place method departs from those traditions by using the emerging nonlinear narrative structures made possible by new interactive technologies and telecommunication apparatuses. It is exhibited primarily in alternative art exhibition spaces, museums and over the Internet. The work is projected up to nine by twelve feet in a darkened space with a podium and a mouse placed in the center of the space, which allows the audience to navigate throughout the project. When it is activated by the click of a mouse, the project leads the user from global satellite and vertical aerial perspectives to virtual reality scenes on the ground. The user can then navigate throughout an immersive virtual digital video space. Rather than the linear structures of the novel or cinema, this new form allows the story to unfold in a meandering labyrinth of discovery and associations. The goal of the Imaging Place method is to document sites of cultural significance, which for political, social, economic or environmental reasons are under duress, at risk of destruction or undergoing substantial changes. This includes historic sites as well as sites of living culture which are being displaced by globalization and the collapse of industrial modernism. Imaging Place is designed to accommodate interdisciplinary collaboration conducted across institutions and over distances. It uses new technology to bring disparate bodies of knowledge together through the investigation and documentation of place. The method attempts to bridge the gaps in understanding that exist between esoteric disciplines that have developed as a result of academic and industrial specialization. The technological tools are now available for bringing the work of experts together without sacrificing the depth and dimension of specialized knowledge and to connect the abstraction of highly specialized thinking with the visceral experiences of people on the ground. In addition to providing a form for the generation, dissemination and accumulation of interdisciplinary research and artistic production, the Imaging Place method provides a model strategy for collaboration. John (Craig) Freeman will demonstrate a portion of the Imaging Place project in order to facilitate a discussion as to what forms pschogeography might take in the era of emerging information technology and global telecommunication. BIO: Artist and educator John Craig Freeman uses digital technologies to produce alternative forms of art that call into question the function of art and its institutions as well as the role of artists within our culture. His work in documentary virtual reality is made up of projected virtual reality environments that lead the user from global satellite perspectives to virtual reality scenes on the ground. As the user explores these virtual scenes, the story of the place unfolds in a nonlinear media montage. Recognizing the need to integrate the work of a variety of experts, Freeman has adopted strategies of project based interdisciplinary collaboration. The most recent work titled Imaging Place draws on the expertise of cultural theorists, architects, historians, scientist and community leaders. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at The Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary, Canada, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, the Photographers Gallery in London, the Center for Experimental and Perceptual Art (CEPA) in Buffalo, Mobius in Boston, the Ambrosino Gallery in Miami and the Friends of Photographyps Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco. In 1992 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been published in Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, Exposure, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harpers and Der Spiegel. Lucy Lippard cites Freemanps work in her book =The Lure of the Local=, as does Margot Lovejoy in her book =Postmodern Currents=. Freeman began his academic career in the early 1990s in San Diego where he lectured at the University Of California San Diego for three and a half years. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida from 1994 to 1999, where he coordinated the Photography Area. From 1999 to 2002 he ran the digital media art curriculum as an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston. Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. Imaging Place