Feb 25, 2010

Desert Die

The "Desert Die" sculptural way-finding device is almost for the ready! This beautiful sculpture is a combination of a book and way-finding device. It has an audio component, with text written by Jared Stanley. The device was designed and fabricated by Matthew Hebert.  I designed the illustrative panels. Go cnc/craft!


You can find it as of March 6 at the Wonder Valley location of Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map


The Desert Die is an interactive sculptural way-finding device that interrogates how language mediates landscape. The Desert Die subverts the notion of stationary wayside interpretive literature, and instead uses the visual and verbal vocabulary of interpretive literature against its original intention to orient the spectator within the landscape. In typical wayside literature, the marker formalizes the viewer's experience into a one-point perspective; in The Desert Die we add an additional five perspectives on any given point; in this way, we investigate how an object can limit and manipulate experience in the landscape. The piece is a six-sided die, approximately 1' square in size, and rests on a pedestal. The die is constructed of steel, with milled aluminum placards bolted to each side. Each placard features an engraving of an imaginary element of a desert landscape. Each time the die is "rolled," a switch within the die will trigger an audio recording of a poetic/interpretive text describing an imaginary site, and not necessarily the site in which the Desert Die is located. The project is collaboration between Jared Stanley, Gabie Strong, and Matthew Hebert.  The Desert Die will be installed temporarily in the Wonder Valley area on March 6 as part of the greater Mapping the Desert event.


Here's a sneak of the panel drawings.












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Jan 22, 2010

Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map


















More photographs from this excursion into the hinterland can be found at my Flickr collections page

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Still life with bombs


Untitled
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong



Untitled, 2009
16 x 20" digital chromogenic print

From the series, "Photographs of Mock Theaters of War, As Means to Generate Conscientious Objection."

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Satan the Brotherhood


Satan the Brotherhood
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong


Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong
Untitled (F'd Up Road, Wonder Valley, CA), 2009
16 x 20" digital chromogenic print

Part of a series

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Views


Views
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong


Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong
Untitled (F'd Up Road, Wonder Valley, CA), 2009
16 x 20" digital chromogenic print

Part of a series

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Junkspace


Junkspace
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong


Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong
Untitled (F'd Up Road, Wonder Valley, CA), 2009
16 x 20" digital chromogenic print

Part of a series

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Untitled


Untitled
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong


Prototype for War

Untitled, 2009
16 x 20" digital chromogenic print

From the series, "Photographs of Mock Theaters of War, As Means to Generate Conscientious Objection."

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Dec 6, 2009

Goodbye Analog Television


Goodbye Analog Television
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong

Goodbye Analog Television, 2009
8 x 10" digital chromogenic print

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Pool


Pool
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong

Pool, 2009
16 x 20" digital chromogenic print

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End Is Near


gstrong3031_sm
Originally uploaded by Gabie Strong

End Is Near, 2009
8 x 10" digital chromogenic print

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Jul 21, 2009

"Speculative Economies"



Corporate Vapors, 2009
Light Jet photograph, 20 x 30"




Untitled (argon), 2009
Light Jet photograph, 20 x 24"




It's the new you, 2009
Light Jet photograph, 30 x 48"




Green, 2009
Light Jet photograph, 20 x 30"




New You (II), 2009
Light Jet photograph, 20 x 30"


"Speculative Economies" is a new photographic work in development. Stay tuned!

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Apr 18, 2009

Battery



Gabie Strong
Battery (BCN-127, Whites Point, California, 1942), 2008
C-print mounted to Dibond, framed
30" x 40"





Gabie Strong
"What Makes a Man Start Fires?"
(BCN-127, Whites Point, California, 1942)
, 2008
Light Jet photograph mounted to Dibond, framed
48" x 60"

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Jun 28, 2008

Untitled, 2008

Untitled silent Super 8 film from 2008, featuring abandoned Military Industrial-Complex site located in the northern Mojave desert of Southern California.

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Jan 16, 2006

Visual violation upon virtual landscapes - Claudette Glass, 2005-2006



2005-2006, Gabie Strong
Video excerpt.

Sound by Steve Kim, Richard Medina, Joey Morris, Ron Russell, David Scott Stone.
Recorded by Joe Potts. Arranged and mixed by Gabie Strong.
Featuring the Los Angeles landscape, Stacey Thomas, and Amiee Lee.
Production help and support from Ellen Donnelly, Steve Kim and Jens Jonason.

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Jan 15, 2006

Visual violation upon virtual landscapes

       In attempt to qualify the everyday stuff around us, we have become dependent upon the photographic image to represent our technological and cultural achievements. This suggests that collectively we acquiesce to the role of the operator and subjugate landscape to that of object. We have become accustomed to violating landscape through the framing of the camera. Simultaneously, we exploit landscape through architecture and war, by means required for land-use, site work, and geographic domination. This development is malignant, rendered as a slow moving violation, anaesthetized to the point of banality. Landscape is living simulacrum, materialized by Architecture into latent form. The problem is, however, that we tend not to see it.  We need a new device for landscape projection.
     My intent has been to exploit the violation of landscape made available through the gaze of the camera's eye and executed through architecture.
    To understand the violation of visuality, one must examine not only Barthes's logic of the camera Operator, the Subject being photographed and the Spectacle of the photograph, but also how the material and technological components of the camera enable this violation.
  The materiality of glass in the camera lens allows for focusing of the subject, rendering it as object. It also acts as a physical barrier in architecture--say a storefront window--to separate space but simultaneously allow for visual connections.
   The lens refracts the light energy projected from the subject as an apparition on the film within the camera body. The image formed is a simulacrum; a fake, a representation of the subject being photographed. When light passes through the camera body and exposes the silver of film, a representation is made visible.
 Mirrored glass on skyscrapers acts very similarly within the context of landscape. In this situation, the mirrored skin of the skyscraper reflects the sky and other buildings. This suggests that the building itself produces copies of other buildings like a spectrum of landscape eidolon.
 If, as I believe, architecture is the physically violent component of the camera's violation of landscape, then is it possible to translate this formation of the simulacrum into intervention through the materiality of the camera apparatus? If so, what kind of experience is created through this exploitation? By exploring materials inherent to the photographic process, the intervention becomes clear through the use of film. By using architectural techniques of site work and analysis, and through exchanging "study models" for "models," I began a series of staged simulacrums in landscape.
 These experiments, designed to give experience like catoptric devices, forms abstracted images of the environment, mixing the virtual and reality of everyday life.
 Film allows for the reflection and refraction of light energy like an architectural prism, rendering new landscape.
 By combining theories and practices together, I have created a series of cinematic interventions in concrete islands. These images are used as tools for mapping the real and virtual landscapes pictured within the latent image. The mappings suggest an unknown landscape sitting within our collective reality; a multitude of other spaces exist without us seeing them directly. Through this process I am staging an occupation in landscape.
  My use of the term virtual landscape suggests a cognitively recognizable place that escapes our conventions of time, space and site. In this thesis, I am suggesting that the transformation of subject to object in the spectrum does not just simply end at the formation of the latent image. The transformation continues in the virtual space mapped through the materials shared by architecture and photography. The virtual space is the space of transgression; it is the undefined, vague and ambivalent landscape we cannot fully see nor thus control. Like the JG Ballard novel suggests, the hallucinogenic landscape subjects us to madness. A wonderland seen through the looking glass…


- G. Strong, January 2006






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Nov 29, 2005

Vision Machines


Architectural prisms set at human scale. Set in the landscape as a field condition, users can interact with the prisms like a voyeur in cinema.

Click on the images to expand the view.




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Nov 23, 2005

Andromeda Strain

Sep 5, 2005

Car Club

Car Club is an installation consisting of single channel video with synchronized slide show, mirror ball, colored lights, and drawings. The video projection and paper drawings are collaged works describing the architectural spaces of the Women's club including the garage, lounge, Ruscha pools, and gardens. The narration consists of the different voices of the women's club, situated in Elysian Valley, each voice describing the activities taking place within the club.


Installation view (light projections)



Car Club
(still 1)


Car Club (still 2)


Car Club (still 3)


Car Club
(still 4)

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May 9, 2005

Motel, Restaurant, Truck Stop, Saloon

Architecture proposal for Owens Valley: Motel, Restaurant, Truck Stop, Saloon.


Truck Stop detail (Jake's Chocolate Grinder)


Motel detail, 1'= 1/16"



Motel detail


Motel detail


Motel detail




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