This is a Project in which I collected some data and I used it to play with and to discuss various issues of navigation, perception, and storytelling. The data I used was wind speed data which was sampled throughout the playa. I walked 10 miles (had planned 14.3 miles) with a gps device, an anemometer (a windspeed measuring device), my pad of paper, and a whole lot of water. The expanse that I walked was mind bending, especially since I had the theme song for My Neighbor Totoro stuck in my mind the whole time. The grid that you see to your right is the path I mapped out along the playa in black. Each dot along the path is 300 meters apart. The red grid was constructed for the areas that would be represented by each point of data. The journey was incredibly eventful, many times my calculations almost led me off the playa, there were giant red ants near the grandstand, there were weird fluffy bugs that floated across the playa. There was a small bush that was probably feeling very lonely. There were large bushes that grew in trails that looked like green buffalo (name inspired by Mandy). There was broken glass and broken plates and mud that had slid over other mud. There were rocks that had slid on the mud, and there were footprints that had slid on the mud. However despite all this, the only damage I sustained was a lost contact, which brought me to end my journey prematurely. The wind was very fussy that day. To the north and the northern center of the playa wind speeds were practically null, until I started walking again and then they picked up. Near the center of the playa there were some high winds that came from the east consistently. towards the south wind came from the direction of one of two valleys. And towards the very south I have no idea what the wind speeds were, but I have interpolated the data such that I believe the wind would probably still be blowing at about the same rate and the directions as from those data points immediately north of them.

What I was doing was staring at a gps device trying to walk in a perfectly straight line (and generally failing). I would stop when I remembered that I needed to measure a point, walk back about 100ft and then take my little anemometer out. I would take a range over about 20 sec (if there was no wind for a whole minute I would give up) and record the high speed and the low speed. Then I would look at the little piece of pink string attached to measure the direction of the winds with the gps device (probably accurate to about 30 degrees using my method). After measuring, I would then start walking again and the wind would suddenly pick up and then I'd try to get another reading.

Once I got this data, I ate some delicious carne asada fajitas, cooked marshmallows, watched James run away from a kangaroo rat, and slept on the hardest ground I have ever felt in my life. Then we drove back and I started working on a simulation that would use the data I collected from Racetrack Playa to create a visually interesting and playful piece. All the creatures of my simulated playa were inspired by the seminar in one way or another.

My first plan for my simulation was to create flowers for the playa, which was inspired by a computer science grad student after I told him that vector fields weren't really all that interesting. I liked the idea of flowers because they could incorporate wind into the way in which their pods navigated. Also I thought adding vegetation would become a good basis for a small ecosystem I could build. Plus I liked the contradiction of adding flowers to a place that is made up of dirt. Quite impressive dirt that does very creative things that normal dirt would not even think of, but only dirt nonetheless. Next came the buffalo, and because buffalo eat vegetation then they will naturally have to eat the flowers in order to stay alive (and to keep the flowers from spawning too much). The green buffalo were based on what vegetation did manage to survive in the playa. Which were buffalo sized and shaped bushes, that seem to have been traveling in a pack much like buffalo do. In fact you could say they were even moving, if you consider myself a stationary point of reference, which I felt like no matter how fast I walked. Some say in my simulation my buffalo look like slugs. One might also suggest that these bushes could also be said to look like giant slugs. Buffalo or slugs, it is hard to say for sure.

So to prevent the overpopulation of buffalo I decided upon a third species, the giant spider. The giant spider represents many of my experiences in the desert. For example, the giant spider represents how I read the first chapter of The Ultimate Desert Handbook and decided that desert is not my prefered biome at all. And although I did not see any tarantulas or larger arachnids, they definitely represent insects that were present in the desert, which were too large for me to squish. (My squishing limit is 4cm.) Now I made these spiders work together as a cognitive group, which is not exactly how spiders work in reality, it's more like how ants work, but I felt it was ludicroous enough to work so I did it.

So now you know what I was doing out there, I feel that you are sufficiently prepared to see the simulation in all it's glory as well as read the reasons why I did this insane thing that generally gives me weird looks from strangers.

the simulation | the paper