#tool development

As starting point for our tool development we therefore chose a series of short stories from Sam Shepard's book "Cruising Paradise"  to map our storyscapes with.

For further reading on how we applied Bakhtin's approach please go here. Vol 02, pg 30

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On a political level these "natures" remain heavily debated as ideologies that are stabilized and destabilized by social power relations. How a particular landscape actually reflects the way users also define themselves hints to the complexities involved Ecological studies of interest to our approach therefore include landscapes as shareholders of many conflicting economies. Cultural narcissism, as Christopher Lasch emphasised for consumer culture, is one one of them. The focus we are therefore particularly interested in is how popular culture plays in to these economies, ideologies and spheres of environmental use and identification in everyday life. How are our environments produced and what does our experience of them rely on? What are most contemporary landscape-natures made up of, who are their stakeholders and what are their means of design?

The starting point we chose to explore these questions were our favored relationships to landscapes. The first assignment we followed in our workshop Nr 01 was to build a landscape design practice dedicated to explore this relationship and to develop designs for by using narrative tools that we introduced them to in the beginning.

The second assignment was to participate in Steve Rowell's practice of land use interpretation and develop a landmark for the first successful teleportation experiment outside a laboratory executed under the Danube in Vienna 2004 by the Austrian Institute of Quantum Physics.

Methodically the first workshop featured a bottom up approach  that challenged students to explore the narrative topography that their own spatial experience was constructed by.

The "bottom up" approach describes the course of exploration. At the beginning students did not necessarily know what larger cultural contexts and debates their given landscape attraction was participating in. Identifying them as the terrain they could script their practice, role and mission in for target audiences was our goal. 

Methodically the second workshop could be described as "top down approach". Context and debates were provided and opened for workshop participation. Challenging landscape relations implicit in the practice of quantum physics however had to be appropriated by the students to realize speculatively comprehendable deep time landmark designs for future generations.

In both cases narratives were applied to develop contextual settings for creative acts using varrying explorative strategies within a narrative topography. 

To spread the word we drove through the whole Hi-Desert area and posted our flyers on public black boards, distributed them in front of the big malls and put an ad in the local newspaper. We hang posters on village billboards and store fronts and handed out flyers around the area.

Soon people started to call and a few days later the first interviews took place. We chose to set up our casting booth in the backyard of the local pizza place in Joshua Tree, a place that is called Pie for the People. The interviews took around one and a half hours each and people shared a wide range of stories, some came for the prospective money, others wanted their life  to be turned into a movie, others made up complex storylines while others were sent by their friends. What they told us about was about everyday life, work, science, politics, fiction, movies, dreams, the news and sometimes riddled with conspiracy theories and urban legends.

After days of intense listening we had recorded around abundant stories and hours of audio material to choose from.

Apart from the casting call a second strategy to grasp a wide spectrum of underlying narratives was to ask people we met and found particularly interesting during our day to day outings to sit down with us and share their stories.

Tarique arrived from Kabul where he works for TOLO TV and produces a Docu-Series about the Afghan police force. He also wrote about his experience including the big move from Los Angeles to Kabul, from student to working life in the Landscape magazine.

 In the workshop he taught us the main timeline-structure and dramaturgy that is applied in almost any Hollywood movie, regardless of the genre and that seems almost like a universal scheme.

We learned about the relationship between plot, location, protagonist, motive, quest and goal.

We looked at film scripts, their formal requirements, how space translates into text, about postcard scenes, how props and characters are displayed in a text, what scenes do look like on paper and how actions are expressed in letters.

Finally, we also got an express-intro of basic screen writing software like Final Draft or Celtex and started to practice writing little scenes.