CLUI touchscreen at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. CLUI photo

Another CLUI touchscreen kiosk was deployed in February to the Southern California School of Architecture (SCI-Arc), as part of an exhibit about alternate mapping approaches to the City of Los Angeles. The exhibit, called Genius Loci, was curated by CLUI members Lize Mogel and Chris Kahle, who had teamed up to produce the exhibit for the Municipal Art Gallery of Los Angeles. Genius Loci is a conceptual geographic term that translates as “spirit of a place.”

The kiosk’s program, created by the CLUI’s programming wizard Steve Rowell, featured a touchscreen map, connected to images and text about components of the City of Los Angeles that extend far into the landscape beyond the city. The title for the program was 15 Los Angeles Places and their Distance from the Hyperion Treatment Plant.

A symposium was held at SCI-Arc as part of the exhibit, with presentations by geographers Denis Cosgrove, Denis Wood, Glen Creason, and Morgan Yates, the map archivist at the Southern California Automobile Club, as well as Valarie Tevere, Norman Klein, Eddo Stern, Jason Brown, and Gustavo LeClerc. Matthew Coolidge represented the CLUI at the symposium, as he often does, until this function too can be replaced by an interactive device.