Paula Levine: The Wall
Title:
- The Wall
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Artist Statement:
Locative media, wireless and networked systems are actively expanding our cartographic imagination through the proliferation of portable devices allowing space-based exchange of information and experiences. Coupled with new cartographic technologies and the web, TheWall engages with emerging new spatial vernaculars to convey the impact of a 15-mile segment of the security/barrier wall currently being built in the West Bank, upon selected U.S. and Canadian cities. Like trade routes that residually altered the cultures and communities through which they passed, TheWall similarly colours local, familiar experiences and memories as the structure’s impact shadows its trajectory upon local communities and lives
Composed of a website, a series of mapped overlays and individually designed locative walks, TheWall is underway with the first overlay upon San Francisco and the locative walk in development.
TheWall is the second in a series called Shadows from another place (http:// shadowsfromanotherplace.net) which uses cartographic interventions, Global Positioning System coordinates, maps, city sites and the web to translate and represent the impact of political or cultural traumas – such as wars or shifts in borders and territorial boundaries – that take place in one location, upon another. The first in the series, San Francisco <-> Baghdad collapsed distinctions between ‘foreign’ or ‘domestic,’ creating a hybrid space that erased the safety of geographic distance and portrayed the impact of the first U.S. invasion of Baghdad in March, 2003, in local terms/on local ground.
