Guest Speaker: Teri Rueb

On Friday, ACCAD hosted a very special guest speaker, Teri Rueb (terirueb.net). So I thought I would write a little about her, her work, and what I learned from her presentation. It is not everyday you encounter a scholar with a PhD from Harvard! BIO (mostly excerpted from her web site): Teri Rueb is an artist whose work engages digital, architectural and traditional media and modes of production. Her most recent project, “Elsewhere : Anderswo” is currently on exhibit across two sites in Northern Germany, The Edith Russ Site for Media Art (Oldenburg) and the Springhornhof Kunstverein (Neuenkirchen). Another recent project "Core Sample", received a 2008 Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in the Digital Musics category. Rueb has pioneered the form of GPS-based interactive installations and is the recipient of numerous grants and commissions from international institutions including the Edith Russ Site for New Media, The Banff Center for the Arts, the Boston ICA, Artslink, Turbulence.org, and various State Arts Councils. She has lectured and presented her work worldwide at venues including Ars Electronica, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Transmediale, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma Museum, and IRCAM. She recently completed her doctoral degree at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where her research addressed constructions of landscape and subjectivity in mobile network culture. Rueb is Professor of Media Study at the Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo (State University of New York). She also mentioned she did her undergrad at Carnegie Mellon and earned her Master's from New York University. She served as Associate Professor (with tenure) and Department Head of the graduate Department of Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where she was one of two founding faculty members of the department from 2004-2009. WHAT I GATHERED FROM HER WORK AND PRESENTATION (from my notes... this is my interpretation): Teri Rueb's work is concerned with cartography and spacial representation. Her work begins with an invitation to explore; she does this with sound overlay. Her experiences come into being through sound in her projects. She also spoke about how places have agency, and her work is concerned with discovering this agency. She is interested in the aesthetic and the kinesthetic qualities of GPS in site specific work. Her 2004 piece, Drift allows people to walk along tidal flats in Northern Germany (the Watten Sea). When tides are low, the area can be explored and sounds play in response to the explorer's movements - sounds are nested in areas of concentric circles. Viewers of her project carry a custom P.C. device, with java code that plays the sounds. She noted that the process of creating this project included lots of walking and programming, as well as adjusting things by small increments. She is influenced and sensitized to Cartesian maps and specific qualities of the landscape, fed into the perception of space. She was trained traditionally as a sculptor and painter, and went back and thought about landscape as something you produce. Richard Serra and Robert Smithson are some of her artist influences. She spoke about how sound, site and movements of the body become part of her work. She also is influenced by feminist Elizabeth Grosz. Grosz stated that the meaning of geography is cartographic, and based on specific coordinates, while the meaning of landscape is perceived and experiential. This is very apparent in the works she presented. CORE is a piece located on Spectacle Island, near Boston. This island was originally a landfill, and conservation efforts have more recently converted the island into a park. As viewers traverse to different topographic levels/heights on the island, the sound the viewers hear changes from sea level to the atmosphere, or the highest topographic level of the island. The audio consists of ambient sounds and spoken word, organic and inorganic sounds, as well as sounds of the past, present and future. In congruence with this piece, a soil sample or core sample of the island was on display at the Boston ICA Gallery. This is a sound sculpture and the different sounds play as viewers walk by each level of core sample. The two sites exist dialogically.

Elswhere : Anderswo was created during a residency in Oldenburg park. Its central themes revolve around the alienation we feel when we travel. She juxtaposes the German landscape with sounds that derive culturally from the West (In her video, I heard sounds from the movie soundrack from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as well as sounds and melodies from Western music). Unlike CORE, she did not take into account the history of the site in this piece, but rather the juxtaposition was the focus to communicate the feeling of alienation. No places with names, 2012 is a site-specific work located in Española near Santa Fe, NM dealing with the concept of wilderness and the re-appropriation of place and wilderness. Specifically, viewers at the Institute of American Indian Arts can traverse the landscape outside and hear sounds; some are spoken interviews of native Navajo and other tribe members who speak of the Long Walk and other cultural aspects of Navajo history and life. The Long Walk was essentially a seldom-mentioned genocide that occurred in the 1860s during colonization of North America. The Navajo were forced off of their land and it decimated their sheep, crops and their overall population, and the site of the Institute of American Indian Arts is now built along the same path of the Long Walk. This project illuminated the fact that the wilderness/landscape is not devoid of rich cultural history just because there are no markers for it on a map. In actuality there is a dialog that is seldom heard, and this project illuminates the voices of the Navajo where a cultural and geographical re-appropriation has existed (She points this out by showing the map of the Española valley with names in Spanish, Tewa, and English). During the question and answer period, Teri talked about how with the advent of new technology, she has less control over her hardware and no longer loans out computers/GPS devices for her works. She wrote an application for her works that can be accessed on cell phones and smartphones. This doesn't always work to her advantage because her goal is to suspend viewers of her work in a focused experience, and people get distracted by their phones such as phone calls, notifcations, etc. People also use their own earbuds, which doesn't always get the greatest sound quality. The advantages of using an application however, makes her work free and accessible. For her next possible project, Teri spoke about how she might work with sound more interactively; perhaps by having people walk around in a space and playing with how their proximity to one another affects the sounds they are hearing. Overall it was an interesting presentation, as her design work is a little different from those I have seen. Her work is very academic and seems to stand at a higher intellectual level than most - I appreciated that. However, at times, it was a little difficult to understand quite what she meant in her presentation. Although my work follows along a different vein, it was wonderful to hear from a designer with a very different viewpoint and different methods on approaching her work and process of creation.