Through a series of walking tours, INDETERMINATE HIKES+ mobile media app transforms everyday landscapes into sites of psychogeographical diversity and wild happenings. IH+ re-appropriates smartphones, which are generally used for rapid communication and consumerism, and turns them into tools of alternative mappings, environmental imagination, and meditative wonder. The app works by importing the rhetoric of wilderness into virtually any place accessible by Google Maps and encourages participants to treat these locales as spaces worthy of the sort of attention accorded to sublime landscapes, such as canyons and waterfalls. The app can be experienced in two ways: as a participatory public event led by the artists, potentially alongside our Basecamp.exe installation, or as a self-guided excursion taken by a hiker equipped with a smartphone. Along the way, hikers text, tweet, and snap images in response to their surroundings. Indeterminate Hikes+ was originally conceived for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2010 exhibition “Undercurrents,” curated by Independent Studies Program Curatorial Fellows.
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Exhibitions: IDEAS City, New Museum of Art, NYC, curated by and collaborating with Julia Kaganskiy of #ArtsTech / Museo y Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain, in collaboration with Joya: Arte y Ecología / MIT Media Lab, as part of Upgrade! Boston, curated by Jo-Ann Green of New Radio & Performing Arts, Inc. / “L.A.Re.Play,” at U.C.L.A. Design Media Arts Gallery, curated by Hana Iverson and Mimi Sheller / Conflux Festival, NYC, curated by Christina Ray / 319 Scholes, Brooklyn, during Bushwick Open Studios, curated by Igal Nassima and Lindsay Howard / Woodstock Digital Media Festival, curated by Joe McKay / “Art, Environment, Action!,” curated by Radhika Subramaniam, Parsons The New School for Design, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, NYC / “Wilderness 24/7,” solo exhibition at Syracuse University’s Warehouse Gallery, curated by Anja Chavez / Re-new Digital Arts Festival 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark / “Tactile Media” Hondakin Festival, at AlhóndigaBilbao, Bilbao, Spain, curated by Zaramari Urban Ecology, in collaboration with Joya: Arte y Ecología / “Machine Wilderness,” International Symposium on Electronic Art 2012, Albuquerque, New Mexico / The Feast, NYC, where we collaborated with renowned physicist Geoffrey West.
Selected Online Press: Hyperallergic / ArtSlant / Creator’s Project / Furtherfield / Syracuse New Times / New York Post / NYFA Current / VisualMAG / UTNE Reader Blog / EcoSalon / GRID Magazine / EcoMedia Studies / Artcards
Support: Indeterminate Hikes is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds grant program, administered by Wave Farm. Additional support and funding: New York Foundation for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, University of Rochester, and Joya: Arte y Ecología. Software development: Polina Koronkevich.
