Synopsis

Over the span of five months, San Diego-based artist Tim Schwartz will travel across America making week-long stops at historical societies, art institutions, and local archives to engage with communities and their archived pasts. In each location he will work with local archivists and historians to gather and represent data that is emblematic of their community. In so doing he will activate discussions focused on how the process of digitizing archives can energize stored information and at the same time, question what is lost in the process of digitizing archives.

The STAT-US mobile research laboratory will be the primary point of engagement with the public. This laboratory is a 22 foot 1957 Airstream trailer that has been converted into a research space. The laboratory will become an archive of all of the pieces produced, conversations recorded, and information gathered and created during this trip.

This project builds upon Schwartz’s previous work in exploring the relationship between information and culture. One previous piece, Command Center, uses antique analog gauges to visualize the prominence of specific terms from the New York Times archives (1851-2008), suggesting the cultural preoccupation of Americans at different points in history. Expressing historical trends in a physical form will be one of the techniques used inside STAT-US: over two hundred analog gauges installed in the trailer will enable the potential for expressing innumerable semantic and statistical relationships within communities. Geohistoriography is similar in content (the perspective of America as based on the New York Times archive) but is represented in distorted maps, whereby the scale of a country is directly proportional to the number of references that nation received in the New York Times. A similar mapping of information will be incorporated into the piece: custom maps and information visualizations will be produced for each community visited.

Locations (suggest a community here)

Roughly 20 locations across America will be visited between July 2010 and December 2010, engaging with a broad range of communities in terms of size and cultural heritage. The artist intends to work with places that are invested in their histories and have already made some sort of headway in the digitization of their data.