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Drawing_in_the_Media_Stream_Banff
Remote Easel Log: June 18, 2009
> 1st Location: edge of the Banff Center, in the tourist parking lot near the tourist overlook of the Bow River falls.
> Latitude: 51°10'2.22"N
> Longitude: 115°33'33.35"W
> Geographic location: Banff, Alberta, Canada
> Weather: big puffy parandalia clouds on a backdrop of spectral blue sky
Backpack
The day has come, after 5 months of planning, for the first drawing session out with the remote easel. I load my backpack with my old friend and worthy vessel, a G4 laptop (A.K.A., the Void), a webcam, a bright red Rogers USB wireless modem, otherwise known in these parts as the “Rocket Stick”, a portable hard drive, a Garmen eTrex hand-held GPS unit, documentation camera, cell phone, sketchbook, drawing pens, and sundry other items for remote location drawing and tapping into the 24/7 global media stream.
Remote Easel:
(a modified 19th century-style, Julian portable painter’s easel)
packed with a Wacom drawing tablet, carpenter’s plum bob, sketchbook, drawing instraments.
Packing now complete, it's ever onward to the first location. But before I hit the trail, I ask Kenny down the hall to take a photo of me before I make my first locative media hike into the highly controlled natural world of the Canadian Rockies. Note: these pre-hike photos were taken with an older digital camera that does not have the “smile recognition” feature that, when turned on, this feature will not allow the camera to take the picture until the subject smiles.
Remote Easel Log entry #1
OK, Roger NASA, we are go for throttle up.
Start GPS
Tie hiking boots tight
Adjust backpack and test the heft of the easel in my right hand
Sniff the air and remark to my nose that this is not San Diego air
Check strength and location of GPS satelittes above my head
Breaking News:
> In Iran, massive protests continue
over the rigged election and a much harsher crackdown
is expected tomorrow (June 19).
Click on image to see it full size.
> Canada’s day of recognition of the First Nation people
> NASA launches 2 unmanned probes to the moon.
I then head roughly eastward towards the Hoodoo trail head on the east side of the Banff Center campus. Just as I arrive on foot at the parking lot where tourists are dropped off to site see, a very very white tour bus pulls up and like proverbial digital clockwork, the tourist get off the bus and robotically extend their digital cameras with their heavy tourist arms and begin taking pictures on the move as they walk towards the viewing platform that overlooks the falls of the Bow River and the old Banff Springs hotel across the river.Click on image to see it full size.
As the digital camera gulping of the sites continues,
I am looking down at my GPS,
scoping my spot to set the remote ease,
wondering if a rogue wind might
blast up from any direction and knock the easel over
and in doing so spank my human butt for being so mediated.
Slowly, sureptitiously, I begin to get into the tourists' piectures around the viewing platform,
A nice, overly perfumed couple glances at my portable easel.
The setting sun illuminates the subject: nature and on cue the tourists begin to
Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
Then the driver of the tour bus snuffs out his cigarette and I imagine him saying with the regularity of a New York City traffic light, "Ok folks, let’s get back on the bus, we have a lot to see before the sun goes down.”
The tourist head back to the bus, robot arms still extended like rigormortus, still snapping geo tagged photos at a gluttonous pace, a pace that could only be sustained by a digital camera:
Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. click, click.
Then, like a gigantic butter frosting cake on wheels, the bus pulls away and chugs back onto the road, headed for the next sites to be digitally consumed.
It’s very quiet now, I am the only person here for the moment. The culture/nature buzz getting louder and louder in my mind as I begin setting up to draw.
> setting up easel on south side of parking lot--a girl rides happily by on a bicycle,
> a car load of Japanese tourists pull up in a rental car, get out for 3 minutes, look, leave
> unpack backpack, laying very delicate, vulnerable-looking equipment out onto the parking lot
> ponder the culture/nature collision again--Deleuze and Guattari readings on Smooth versus striated space from the morning still trying to settle into my mind, which feels drunk with the deep plunging views in all directions
> unfold easel legs, notice the familiar creeking and squeeking of the wooden easel parts
> hang plumbob from bottom of easel box
> when plumbob settles down, I mark the spot under its sharp point with a white tape cross,
like a surveyer’s dayglow spray paint mark, like a “you are here” X on a map.
> get a GPS reading, then write the latitude and longitude on the tape on the ground
> sniff the air, hallucinating, perhaps, that I smell a bear down the hillside. This gamy smell
remains the entire time I am there, so I am constantly aware of what I do not know is behind
me.
> lock the laptop into place on the easel, clamp the web cam onto the screen, plug in various
cables.
> boot up laptop, make an internet connection with the “Rocket Stick”, log onto “logmein.com to
control local easel back at my studio in the JPL building at Banff,
> successful connection to local easel! Yes, I say to myself and the hallucinated bear behind me, “We are go for throttleup, NASA”. “Roger, go for throttleup, Tbone."
> Now controlling the local easel laptop with the remote easel laptop, I open skype on the local easel
The Drawing of sulfer mountain begins. I have the image of the riot police in my mind as a tour bus rounds the bend and unloads another load of robotic-armed tourist. The happy girl on the yellow bike rides by again.
I am thinking of the two probes to the Moon NASA has launched and when they might get there to start probing, perhaps the mechanical footprint the Chinese have left there recently with their probe.
I finish the drawing.
Pack all the gear back up.
Hike back up the hill to my studio, and check out the local easel, which has not failed me.
Skype is still on, web cam still looking at the south wall of my studio with the pictures of Barack Obama standing in front of the Sphinx. There is kind of spooky presence in the studio that the remotely controlled easel has created.
I make some final touches to the drawing done on the remote easel out at the first site, adding myself into the picture.
I wait in my mind for the big frosted cake bus to role through my mind. The riot policeman beating the young man in front of Teran University is like a persistant after image that will not go away.
Click on image to see it full size.
The sun goes down at 10 P.M. here. The 24/7 Media Stream streams on in my sleep. What next?
Daniel Belasco Rogers emailed me this quote today:
The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it.
Michel de Certeau, (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. (Steven Rendall. Trans.) p.93
