The project I undertook in Death Valley was a site specific performance resulting in a temporary installation on the floor of Racetrack Playa, near the “grandstand.” I had ten volunteers (all fellow artists) each take a piece of neon pink nylon cording approximately twenty feet in length and lay it between the mud cracks on the ground in whatever manner they chose. All of the participants were arranged in a circle, shoulder-to-shoulder, facing outward and were told that they may proceed to lay down their string. They were informed that they may work together or independently and that there were no limits on time or design when it came to laying the paths of their string. I found the resulting pattern to be very beautiful and very intriguing. In this essay I will discuss not only the aesthetics of the piece, but also the cognitive function of communication that informs it. I will discuss the patterns of interaction as well as the patterns made in the resulting installation.
The idea for this project came out of a desire to explore the navigation of Racetrack Playa in a form not tied to its famous sliding rocks. I decided to explore the possibilities of the smaller pathways consisting of the fissures dissecting the layer of dried mud on the surface of the playa. The problems of navigation and computation were presented to me and I worked with this idea of navigating the cracks in the ground as a sort of microcosm of the whole playa. What came out of this project was more than I had originally expected. It is an important and illuminating side effect to an event which was first planned as a strictly aesthetic experience. What resulted was an experiment of cultural navigation and computation.
When I told my group of volunteers that they were free to communicate in any way they saw fit, I was curious to witness the resulting performance. As it turned out, there was quite a bit of communication, but it was not as much collaboration as it was conversation. There was a discussion about grade school crafts and such other undocumented side conversations. I wondered if anyone would work together and intertwine strings or make an iconic pattern with their strings. In the end only two people decided to cross paths with their strings. All of the other participants stayed isolated from one another. There was, however, an interesting grouping that showed itself in the photographic documentation. The men and women seem to have sequestered themselves into separate groups. I am sure that this is at least partly a result of the haphazard organization at the beginning of the project and the outnumbering of men by women seven to three. Regardless of organization or lack thereof, the males and females had distinct traits in the way they laid their string. The men’s patterns were not very intricate, but were focused on extending outward from their starting point. The women’s patterns tended not to reach outward from the center of the circle very far, but were more intricate in their structure. This is where a more critical analysis of my performance comes in.
As preparation for this endeavor I read from Edwin Hutchins’s Cognition in the Wild. In chapter five Hutchins discusses Linguistic Determinism. This term means, “When so called noncognitive tasks are organized in such a way that subjects can use the structure of their language as a mediating resource in organizing task performance, then language structures thought.” (Hutchins, 232). In this case, the language being used can be seen as the cultural construct of gender. He also talks about people in a shared physical environment trusting each other more than those outside of their same situation. The performance space of Racetrack Playa is indeed an isolated space and the situation in which these performers were placed is equally isolated. The behaviors of the performers there is, like the cracks in the surface mud, a microcosm of individuals isolated from the real world. In this environment, the members of my performance group trust each other and are able to play out their socially imposed roles without fear of contradiction or being ostracized. In this way we are able to see the differences in behavior that subtly influence the overall pattern of the installation. The questions about gender stereotypes appear when the final result of the performance is analyzed. Are men more influenced to strike out and explore while women are relegated to a fairly confined space? Are women encouraged to nurture their artistic sensibilities while men are forced into more “manly” hobbies? These questions are pure speculation and have not come from concrete data about the performance and installation other than the photographs taken at the time. Despite all of the questions and inferences, the real heart of this project is its job as a temporary installation.
The pattern of the strings, a sort of sunburst, could only be photographed
as a complete unit from above. The problem there is that the string was
so small, the pattern virtually disappeared from above. As a result, I could
only photograph each string on its own, or near its neighboring string.
This solidifies the performance and installation as a collaboration of individuals.
Each brought his or her experiences to this unique moment and created a
unique system of navigation. The beauty of the project is its complex simplicity.
There are no intrusive elements to mar the surface of the playa or its appearance,
only ten pink strings tucked purposefully into its cracks. The strings wind
their way through an arbitrary system of navigation, carried out through
human computation. They form a loose web, only touching on rare occasions.
They are like arms, some reaching, some recoiling, and some embracing. The
cords stand independent from one another and only intersect by the decision
of the participants. I did not tie the strings together in at central starting
point but rather let the group interaction be the core that united the strings.
This mimics the fact that we are never literally tied together, but always
share groups of cohabitation.