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Screen Still from Roderick Coover's Canyonlands (Interactive) at www.unknownterritories.org
Canyonlands |
Quite an amazing well-designed site! I have never seen one so expansive and completely detailed account as to the rapid changes in the arid American West and how they affected the delicate natural balance of the deserts.
It goes on and on like a documentary film. Keep clicking
and you discover how the site is full of surprises....
ABOUT UNKNOWN TERRITORIES
Unknown Territories combines linear and interactive cinema
in a non-traditional documentary about environmental conditions of the desert
American West. Unknown Territories creates paths among mythic and actual
landscapes shaped by development, park preservation and dams.
The initial concepts were developed through a series of
river trips and hikes in the desert southwest, including explorations with
poet, scholar and river-guide, Lance Newman, who joined the Canyonlands
portion of the project as co-producer and co-writer.
The project crosses history -- beginning with how John
Wesley Powell pictured the arid West for an expanding nation, contrasting this
with Edward Abbey's books depicting an environmental vision gone wrong, and arriving
at perspectives upon desert conditions of our time, with special attention
given to relationships between science, use and artistic imagination.
The project allowed for an exploration of kinesthetic
experiences (walking, path-making, interactivity) and lyrical, visual
techniques (mapping, montages, animation, long takes) that are taken up in a
discussion about walking deserts between Larry McCaffery, Lance Newman, Hikmet
Loe and Roderick Coover.
In looking at relationships between digital interface and
spatial practices the project asks, how do interactive formats expand ways to
understand how places are imagined, encountered, represented and re-imagined?
The original interactive approach offers viewers something unique in cinema:
choice-making.
A virtual environment draws viewers into a film editor's process
of weaving materials together. The materials are organized in modules on topics
such as discovery and native land use, water use, the uranium boom, and the
marketing of nature. The modules combine to make longer works -- short
documentaries aligned on maps in installation form and feature works for cinema
and DVD.
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