Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries
info - artists - the diaries

Please note: the diaries require a broadband connection, the macromedia flash plugin and is best viewed at 1024 x 768.


Welcome to the live data diaries, part of a larger multimedia installation, Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, now on exhibit at Transport Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. 5 March 05 thru 16 April 05.

Feature Project for March 2005 at NYC Whitney Artport.

About the live project:
Drawing from live, micro-seismic measurements of peak ground velocity, peak ground accceleration and spectral response, we compile hourly updates into number sequences that, in turn, 'crash' into an archived seismic database from a recent quake. At seismically active zones in central California from Carrizo Plains, called the Cadillac of San Andreas Fault geomorphology, about 150 miles north of Los Angeles, to nearby Parkfield, where a 6.0 quake on September 28, 2004 has delivered a rich trove of geomorphologic data, the diaries are a live communication from a continuously active seismic landscape.

Like fragmentary pages from a cinematic notebook, the data crash triggers Flash movies in which sound, text and visual narratives put the intangible, intimate and local sense of place, up against the sublime big data reality of the continuous seismic activity in California imagined as a darker take on the romantic American western landscape. Conceptually, the current data's reach into the past changes the archive from a static resource to an uncanny future array: layers of fiction trigger from the disturbances, much like the way human memory reconfigures itself after shock.

Field notes in a subliminal world, the Diaries record active tectonic traces of a geologic diary within the shifting terrain of human remembrance and amnesia. On location in California, Christina McPhee produces the new media / online diaries in collaboration with writer Jeremy Hight and information designer Sindee Nakatani. For more information on the Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, please go to www.christinamcphee.net and www.transportgallery.com .

About the artists:

Christina McPhee creates works that imply abandonment and clarity at the edge of disappearance, amnesia, and the uncanny. Her installations become performances that instantiate artifacts of memory within the landscape of their own echoes. She develops technologically nuanced topographies in net art, installation, performance, painting and photography. Her work has been shown in exhibitions, festivals, and electronic media archives around the world, including Cybersonica/Convergence at the ICA New Media Center, London; California Museum of Photography; back_up/Lounge|lab at Bauhaus-University Weimar; Victoria Film Festival, Victoria, BC; FILE Sao Paulo, and Digital Arts and Culture at RMIT Melbourne. Her writing on phenomenology, trauma and memory in electronic art and architecture includes "Net Baroque" in Life in the Ruins: A CTheory Reader, edited by Marilouise and Arthur Kroker (2004) and "Aphasia/Parrhesia" for drunkenboat dot com (2005) and naxsmash dot net.

Jeremy Hight is a new media writer who collaborated on a pioneering GPS driven locative media work , 34N118W , a participant-driven exploration of layers of time and memory in downtown LA (2002-2003). He lives and works in Los Angeles. He will be presenting in the "Art of Stories" conference at M.I.T May 6-8 2005. His paper "Narrative Archaeology" is studied in universities worldwide.

Sindee Nakatani is a code designer and Japanese linguist in the San Francisco Bay Area whose focus has been translation and semantics in information technologies.




We are proud supporters of the Verizon Fios community