Teri Rueb
Studio
50 Porter Road
Cambridge, MA 02140
U.S.A.
http://www.terirueb.net/choregraph/index.html

The Choreography of Everyday Movement envisions, as a topographical mapping, the culturally inscribed nature of our everyday travels. Using GPS, the project seeks to render visible our movement through the built environment of the city, revealing socio-political and poetic patterns of traffic flow through the urban body. In these drawings we see images as often as we detect the privileging of one route over another, the concentration of movement through particular neighborhoods, and the repetition and variation of a traveler’s movement over time.

The Choreography of Everyday Movement takes process and performance as the subject of the work. As a live element, participants are tracked with global positioning satellite receivers as they move about the city. The trail of each participant’s movement is transposed into visual terms as a dynamic drawing generated in real-time wirelessly over the Internet. Drawings are then archived and presented for viewing in a three-dimensional format. Each journey is printed on acetate, registered against prior journeys, and sandwiched between stacked 1/2” plates of glass. The stacks of glass grow taller over time with the addition of subsequent drawings, thus creating an expanding “z-axis” through which the viewer can observe changes in the movement of each traveler over time. The performance of the piece requires no special expertise. Dancer/pedestrian, performer/spectator, artist/non-artist each is equally capable of participating in the making of the work.

It was presented in the project gallery of SIGGRAPH 2002, San Antonio, US.

Artist Biography

Teri Rueb
Teri Rueb’s work explores the relationship between sound, space and human movement to explore issues of architecture and urbanism, landscape and the body and sonic and acoustic space. She has used locative media in her work since 1996 when she created one of the first GPS-based interactive media works, Trace, at Banff Center for the Arts (premiered in 1999). Since then she has continued to create large-scale cellular and GPS-based works including Open City (1999), The Choreography of Everyday Movement (2001 – 2003), Drift (2004), and Itinerant (2005).

The space of frequencies and wavelengths including light and sound as used in radio, satellite, and wireless data transmission is known as Hertzian space. A fluid space of overlapping fields and frequencies, Hertzian space is characterized by connectedness as opposed to the discrete boundaries and territories suggested by physical architecture and visually-oriented constructions of space. Sound, too, has this quality, suggesting a space of permeable boundaries and continuous flows.

In her work Hertzian space and sound become both medium and metaphor for imagining alternative constructions of space, movement, and subjectivity. Like a sonic snow, each work temporarily transforms the physical and social landscape, offering a space for an alternative kind of movement, interaction, play and discovery.

She is interested in engaging interactions that privilege non-goal oriented and less self-conscious behaviors that slip seamlessly into the spaces of the everyday. She specifically uses sound, rather than visual media, in order to allow people to be firstly immersed in their immediate landscape, allowing a relationship to form between body, sound, and space. Teri is also inspired by literature including peripatetic traditions, the contrast between oral and literate modes, and early 20th century modern literature employing stream-of-consciousness and internal monologue. She is currently exploring the intimate sound delivered in headphones as a means of blurring boundaries between sound, space and subjectivity through an internal monologue that unfolds as participants walk through Boston Common and surrounding neighborhoods.