Report From The Great Basin CLUI
Wendover Interpretive R&D Continues
The Auto Tour is a Ford Crown Victoria outfitted
with a new dashboard and touchscreen that guides visitors around
the area at Wendover.
CLUI photo
The CLUI Complex in Wendover, Utah, on the edge
of the salt flats, is up and running for another season, with
many projects taking place through November. Several new visitors
will be out this year or have been already, including sculptors
and photographers participating in the Wendover Residence Program,
which benefited from another round of generous support from the
National Endowment for the Arts. Some former residents, such as
Deborah Stratman, eTeam, Simparch, and Achim Mohne, are returning
to expand on the projects they started in previous seasons. “Wendover
is such a continuously compelling place that the Center is committed
to staying here forever,” said CLUI Program Manager Sarah
Simons.
Neither “smart” nor a “bike,”
the four-wheeled, six-passenger “smartbike” in the
shop at CLUI Wendover. CLUI photo
CLUI photo
“Smart” Car
and Bike Provide Interpretive Partner for Exploration
Richard Pell and Igor Vamos were out again to make some updates
and adjustments to the automated tour vehicle they designed over
the past few years. The vehicle is a standard American sedan that
has been altered to accommodate a touchscreen computer in its
dashboard that provides an interactive program about the Wendover
Airbase community. A map on the screen indicates the vehicle's
location as the car is driven around the airbase, and a collection
of dots on the map mark selected points of interest. As the car
approaches one of these dots, the name of the site is announced,
followed by a narrated description of the site, as well as images
and, in many cases, video commentary by the site’s owner
or representative. “Its kind of like the car is a mouse
and the land is a mousepad,” said Richard Pell, the programmer
for the car, who is a principal in the Institute for Applied Autonomy
and an art teacher at the University of Michigan. “You drive
around eating dots like an interpretive pacman.” The car,
housed in a garage built for it at the CLUI Residence Unit, is
available for guests to check out by appointment. Users leave
their drivers license as collateral.
At the same time the car was being updated this Spring, a team
from Municipal Workshop, an itinerent creative group led by Richard
Saxton, was in residence for a month working on a pedaled platform
for the auto-tour. They modified a four wheeled touring “bicycle,”
putting on a roof, cooler, and a power supply, and outfitting
it with a computer, screen, GPS device and speaker for the auto
tour system. The team also built a movable garage, so that the
bike could be deployed to other locations in the future. The garage,
an elegant modernist structure built out of pallets and other
bulk material, resembles an ATV trailer, with a ramp that allows
the bike to roll out the door. It also has a solar panel on the
roof that charges the tourbike’s interpretive system between
uses. While a few more technical issues are being worked out,
the bike should be available for visitors to use in the near future.
These two projects, along with many other creative uses of GPS,
will be featured at a GPS expo event, to be held on the Bonneville
Salt Flats in a year or so.
The Target Museum at Southbase, in Wendover.
CLUI photo by Steve Rowell
Target Museum Loans Work
to Display in Tate Modern, London
Though the Center has just started to develop some of the exhibits
around Wendover into the national American Land Museum Complex,
one site, the Target Museum, being readied at a large wooden building
at Southbase, has already had a provisional showing to a few visitors.
This initial exhibit looks at the paper shooting targets generally
used by police and other professional gun handlers in training
situations at shooting ranges, as well as live fire “hot
houses” and other scenario environments. Some of the paper
practice targets were removed from the display at Southbase and
loaned to the Tate Modern museum in London, part of an exhibit
prepared by the design/build team Simparch that has worked on
a number of projects in association with the Center. The Target
Museum will eventually have more displays about targets in the
USA, from paper targets used in shooting ranges to ground based
bulls-eye bombing targets.
“Land Arts and the American West”
students watch a presentation outside at the CLUI Residence Support
Unit screening area.
CLUI photo
Students at Wendover
In addition to people involved in CLUI projects at Wendover, the
participants in the Wendover Residence Program, and the visitors
passing through, students visit Wendover as part of field programs
based at colleges and universities around the country. This year
the Land Arts and the American West course, based out of the University
of Texas and the University of New Mexico, will again make a stop
at Wendover for a few days. This unusual field class spends most
of a semester traveling around the west, meeting with land artists,
writers, and others whose work is the landscape. The group visits
Marfa, Roden Crater, Lighning Field, the Very Large Array, Chaco
Canyon, and other art and landscape sites from Utah to Texas.
Last fall, a group of graduate students in the Curatorial Practice
Program at the California College of the Arts spent a week in
the Wendover area, led by Matthew Coolidge of the CLUI. The group
visited dozens of sites in the region, including the Bingham Pit,
the American Magnesium Corporation, and Dugway Proving Ground,
creating a collection of experiences and impressions about places
that was developed into presentations over the rest of semester.
The class, called “Nowhere” is intended to show how
to make something out of “nothing” and how “nothing”
doesn't really exist anyways.
Members of a curatorial practice program
class from the California College of the Arts consider the beauty
and potential implications presented by the abstract geometry
of a satellite image depicting the 40,000 acres of salt ponds
operated by the American Magnesium Corporation east of Wendover.
CLUI photo
Former prop plane prop now a theater about
Wendover as a film location.
CLUI photo
Jailbird Prop Plane Turned
into Theater
A flightless prop plane, left at the Wendover Airport after the
filming of Conair in 1996 was turned into a theater showing clips
of films shot in Wendover. The reel of ten or so Hollywood movies
that have been filmed here, including the ‘70s helicopter
chase movie Birds of Prey, the lofty‘80s sailing movie Wind,
and the ‘90s alien attack extravaganza Independence Day,
was edited by members of the CLUI, and is shown on a monitor in
the plane during special events, such as the annual airshow (lack
of electricity in the plane, located out of the way on the edge
of the flightline most of the time prevents the theater from being
a continuous attraction). Of course a clip from Conair itself
is featured in the program. “The sensation of watching a
scene in the same space where the scene was shot is conceptually
satisfying, and reaffirms the proximal relationship between filmspace
and ‘real’ space,” said Igor Vamos, a media
arts professor and CLUI Wendover program manager.
The photographic work of Wayne Barrar is
on view in Exhibit Hall 2.
CLUI photo
Residents Work on Display
The work of CLUI Wendover Residence Program Participants is visible
at several locations around the CLUI complex in Wendover, both
indoors and out. In Exhibit Hall One, the recommended first stop
for visitors, is a display by Paula Poole and Brett Stalbaum that
explores issues of place and displacement at the Center's Remote
Location, a landscape site 40 miles north of Wendover. In Exhibit
Hall Two, the photographs of Wayne Barrar are on display. All
display areas are open to the public and free of charge.
