WILDERNESS COLLIDER is a poetic, generative internet art installation that collects digital data produced by people who use our Indeterminate Hikes+ app and mashes this info up into a moving-image collage. A live web app, WILDERNESS COLLIDER scrapes IH+ data instantaneously, as soon as an indeterminate hike occurs anywhere in the world, and produces a real-time ‘kaleidoscope’ or urban-wilderness images from across the planet and across moments in time. The visual effect is wild and poetic, reinventing what we usually think of as wilderness, encouraging gallery visitors to go on their own hikes, and creating a web of global interconnections that span natural and urban locales. The video below documents WILDERNESS COLLIDER’s projection on Warehouse Gallery’s south facade in Syracuse, NY, made possible through a collaboration with Urban Video Project:
Our projects weave into one another, like an ecological web, and WILDERNESS COLLIDER is often installed alongside our Basecamp.exe, which includes our Fir Tree Combinators, a performance or group hike led by our Indeterminate Hikes+ iPhone/Android hiking app, and our re-purposed, wooden, shipping-palette chairs, which reference natural and industrial histories. Wilderness Collider is part of an interconnected network of new media, participatory eco-artworks, all of which seek to foster study and observation of the diverse ecological landscape of twenty-first-century life.
Because WILDERNESS COLLIDER is a live, generative, data-driven installation, it will never manifest the same way twice. As a live web app, it can be previewed directly at www.ecoarttech.org/ih-collider. An alternative way to view how the app functions is through this documentary video, which captured what the Collider looked like at one particular moment in 2012 after scraping Indeterminate Hikes data:
Support: Wilderness Collider 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 The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes (www.NYSCA.org / www.eARTS.org). Exhibitions: It has been exhibited at the following venues as part of Basecamp.exe: ART ENVIRONMENT ACTION!, Parsons the New School for Design, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, curated by Radhika Subramaniam, NYC, Oct. 2012 / WILDERNESS 24/7, Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University, curated by Anja Chavez, Syracuse, NY, Nov.–Dec. 2012 (solo exhibition) / USABLE EARTH, Esther Klein Gallery, University City Science Center, curated by Kristen Neville Taylor, Philadelphia, June 2015 / BASECAMP.EXE, 319 Scholes, curated by Igal Nassima + Lindsay Howard, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY, June 2012 (solo exhibition).
