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Now — Eden’s Edge Blog

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Landscape Magazine

To document our research and proceedings of the project, but also to create a platform to communicate outside of our team, we planned to publish a magazine throughout the course of the project.

During the first phase of research we came across J.B.Jackson's publication project Landscape. Jackson, a self-educated cultural landscape theorist , in his publication shifted  attention to surveying vernacular landscapes. He published the first volume  in 1951.

We find the idea to look for a Modern Vernacular landscape inspiring and see our own project in this tradition of thought.

For the first volume, it seems Jackson not only did the layout and graphical work all by himself, but also did he write the contributions himself taking on a wide range of different voices and topics.

Read more about J.B. Jackson here:  http://issuu.com/EdensEdge/docs/landscape_1/3

Sharing this aim to create a polyphonic spectrum of voices and ideas on landscape we decided to reissue three more issues of Landscape magazine as part of the Eden's Edge project.

See the results here: http://edens-edge.org/products/

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Preparing the Test Shoot

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So here we are in our studio. While waiting for night to fall we set up the dedolights and prepare the desert model for filming.

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Location scouting for the test shoot

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How To Map A Narrative

How to map the plot?

We understand storytelling as fundamental to human experience and thus it also plays a formative role in the interpretation of the environment. In his work Bakhtin reveals the inseperability of plot and place within narratives. He calls this the chrontope, the time-space-relation within a story that constitutes the story’s genre and creates its spatial meanings.

With this capacity it is a promising tool of investigation and analysis, that can be used to explore and design spaces, which we were set out to do:

So after translating our casted stories into filmscripts, we explored their  underlying chronotopes and motives. Our goal was to map out storyspecific plot and place relations and stage them in a lot with the outlines of a standard cinemascope format for the production of our short films.

This included different variations ranging from mapping out story geographies, as routes of movements to zones of themed space depicting time volumes within a story. On a more abstract level we conceptualized the genre specific movements of protagonists as geometrical forms.  These were more concerned with measurable space which is one way of interpreting the chronotope. Then we proceeded on to a more hermeneutical understanding as we focused on the stories leading motives. Accordingly we created  lot designs that took on roles within each storyteller's favored desert engagement and allowed others to participate in them. In this interpretation the sites opened up new opportunities of interaction and formed an entry to participate in desert life.  

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Model Building

thrillscapes, toyscapes, mediascapes, adventurescapes, crimescapes, sportscapes, bikerscapes, hikerscapes, hipsterscapes, psychoscapes, artscapes, filmscapes, gamescapes etc.

The idea of building a desert model is about tracking the deja-vu experience down which takes us into Hollywood studios.

To relate our approach  to the technologies of the film industry we  start building a model of the desert landscape to produce a sense of evidence: not of nature but of its experience. 

Instead of digging for bones we meet the anthropologist on set and look up tel # in the directory of filmsetbuilder to collaborate with: checking out the dumpsters behind the filmstudios for a chunk of Wonder Valley.

The site. The props. The list of words: water trucks, helicopter soundscape, house trailers, horse trailers, wooden shacks, painted sale signs, screech owl road, twilight drive, calexico ave., homestaed cabins, bleached wood, geodesic huts, dry lake beds, sprinklers, aluminum airplanes, creosote bushes, 5pm shade, telegraph poles, rubber, fenced in dogs, water barrels, scrap yards, camouflage murrials, the worm farm ...

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Studio Exhibition

to test the idea and tech for our upcoming show in Los Angeles we participated in an exhibition in Vienna's state studio program (Bundesatelier-Ausstellung/Westbahnstr.). There we presented our first short-film of a landmark-prototype for a real life story.

The gallery space displayed three video projections showing three processes involved in our spatial production. They were cast from the ceiling onto 3 screen-boards placed in a symmetrical order slightly over ground.

This was supplemented by a soundscape of an interview we had conducted with a resident of the Mojave Desert. It was representative for a series of interviews we had selected to produce landmarks from.

Projection 01 showed the film script being written (animated script) that was based on the interview and transferred it into the format of a short screenplay.

Projection 02 displayed a landmark on a desert lot that had been generated from the story in the script. It was charged with the story's content and filmed from a 90 foot aerial view. Its projection on the ground reproduced the lot in cinemascope ratio.

In projection 03 the same lot appeared, hoewever, staged with a house on it. In its five minute scene the desert resident comes out of the house and presents the landmark to the audience as she tells her story.

The piece was received well and attracted special interest about the relation reality and fiction had. Questions were raised about the authenticity of the story and how the intermedial translations were processed:

How, for instance, the 90 minute interview was turned into a 5 minute monologue?  How the landmark was generated from script? Why the  aerial view was chosen to film the scene and what the significance of the particular height was about?  And why, in this interpretation, the homestead act partitioned the historical "land for free" in a grid of cinemascope ratio?

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Lot Design

The idea we explored was to collect life stories of desert residents and map their geographies on desert lots like a personal landmark.

It could then form a conversation piece for visitors to enter the story. The resident could guide them through it and walk the lot to tell the story by which the landscpes of the surroundings are included

This could be filmed from a birds eye view and be put online.  A large series of them could then form a large patchwork of storyscapes and form a narrative demography of desert life.

In the course of our explorations, however, we changed the idea for the site design. Their abstract maps seemed too representional and would keep the visitor in the role of a passive spectator. So we decided to write a script that includes the visitor to participate in the story. In the film the resident will talk to the audience about the purpose and use of the lot design.

To determine a storyspecific role for the site we follow Bakhtin's method to identify the story's central motive. Then we rescript the story to import a site (chronotope) that serves this motive and provides the environment and plot for the resident and visitor to interact.

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Scripts

The approach we decided on is to focus on screen writing as one of the most powerful tools of spatial interpretation within contemporary cultures. So to transform the stories we collected into film scripts we invited screen writer Tarique who taught us the basics of screen writing in a two week workshop.

We started with techniques of Hollywood drama to transform our stories into scripts. We developed premises, wrote up synopsis, changed endings, shifted paragraphs as we followed a seven point structure  which formed the strict framework of our experimental approach. This way we appropriated the basics of screen writing before we broke loose into sampling a number of alternative patterns using counter strategies. This allowed us to  return to less dramatized versions of the stories we had scripted and became the monologues for our voice actors.

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TEST SHOOT

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Film shoot test, Vienna. Yesterday Petra filmed us from a top view on a bluescreen. Next step will be to also do this with the model of the lot in our studio. In a procedure of postproduction we will then key ourselves into the model.

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Story Processing

The stories we heard in our story casting form the base for our prospective lot design of the short movies we are planning to produce within the coming months. We had many hours of recorded material and also story sources that arose from our day to day encounters during our desert stay.

Most of the people at the casting had told us a wide range of experiences that amounted to a patchwork of life episodes rather than one stringent story.

So we started the process of a wide-ranging editing process with partially transcribing, partially reconstructing and partially added fictional aspects to the stories in approximation to what we heard. We picked parts of what seemed particularly appealing to our spatial focus, rearranged timelines and developed a dialogic imagination simultaneously reading and rewriting not only the stories we heard, but also assigned potential fictionalized backgrounds and motifs to our storytellers.

Contextualizing the evolving stories by investigating predominant regimes, ways of land use, timelines or symbolic spaces we are also trying to explore larger contexts, environments and course of belonging by including cultural, anthropological and psychological studies, which are supplemented by our own interpretations and cliches of understanding.

The stories that emerged can be seen – like the landscape itself – as a palimpsest of layers of text and attributed by the many different authors and ways of knowledge and exposed to a continuous process of rewriting and reinterpretation.

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Enacting

The day came where we finally were ready to do a test shoot with an actor named Tyler. We had sent him one of the scripts we were working on the last weeks. I assumed that he would arrive and we could immediately start with our test shoot. But Tyler wanted some background information to be able to enter the character telling the story.

He came up with this story that I was the main character's son who tells his father, who has been in the military all his life, that he does not want to join the military but go to pastry school instead.

Then we walked on stage (which was our kitchen) and after a short moment of silence Tyler started to act and as he spoke to me I really got scared of him like a jung boy rising up against his strict and authoritarian father. That was a thrilling moment.

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Test Shoot

The questions we needed to answer to design the "storyscapes" were quite concrete like: How does the length of the spoken word relate to the distances in space that the actor has to cover? How does the sand drawing interact with the actor's role? Does it resonate the actors story and experience of the place?

How does the piece communicate the site to the audience? How does the performance work as film format to portray the desert with? Is it fit to standardize and  produce a narrative demography? What about the soundscape?  Which sounds will portray the landscape on film?  And what have we not thought of ?

So we invited an actor from Los Angeles to join our explorations and relate an exemplary script to the testsite we had prepared on Parker Rd., in Wonder Valley. The abandoned house onsite served as improvised studio and shelter. The month of May was almost over and temperatures were rising fast.

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MELON HEADS

Some props from a video shoot for a Sibley’s song at the Palm’s Bar.

See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs870c7epq0

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Partial Solar Eclipse

Today is the first annular solar eclipse visible in the U.S. in nearly 18 years, according to NASA, and it will be more than 10 years before another solar eclipse is visible in the mainland U.S., National Geographic reports.

Star gazing is popular in Joshua Tree and we join residents in the Community Park. See also: Joshua Tree Astronomy Arts Theater