The C5 Landscape Initiative exhibition opens Tuesday, May 24, at SF
Camerawork, and is open through June 25. In conjunction with the
exhibition, the Whitney Artport has commissioned a GPS Media Player
from the artists, which also goes online at the end of the month. The
exhibition is accompanied by an issue of Camerawork: A Journal of
Photographic Arts, featuring essays by curator Marisa S. Olson, Steve
Dietz, Christiane Paul, Marc Tuters, and others.

More information is below and online, at http://www.sfcamerawork.org.

The C5 Landscape Initiative

San Francisco Camerawork presents The C5 Landscape Initiative, an
exhibition featuring work by C5 Corporation, a new media collective
based in San Jose, California. The Landscape Initiative is the
culmination of three years of research and documentation of C5's
performative expeditions into the landscape through Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) and big data analyses. C5 is interested in
how people interact with data, and how data influences the way we
interact with our environment.

The exhibition will include media installations that blend innovative
uses of digital technologies to explore, navigate and map the
landscape on both sides of the globe. Presented through work generated
by database software developed by C5, this exhibition features digital
photographic prints, fabricated sculptural objects, 3D visualizations
and digital video. The exhibition will allow viewers to interact with
C5's expeditions, while exploring our relationships to the land in a
data driven world.

The C5 Landscape Initiative will present three bodies of work. The
Analogous Landscape: Rim of Fire tracks the ascent of volcanic
mountains along the Pacific Rim of Fire by two teams of C5
artists/researchers. The images generated are the results of their
2003 climbs of Mt. Shasta in California and their 2004 climb of Mt.
Fuji, Japan. The installation at Camerawork will explore the
relationships between these sites through computer graphic mapping of
the topographies and GPS navigation of the two mountains, as well as
documentation of the climbing experiences and processes of the
artists. It also will feature topographic 3-D sculptural models
fabricated in aluminum using the data collected through Digital
Elevation Mapping (DEM) visualization tools.

The Perfect View considers the attributes of "sublime" landscapes.
Using the latitude and longitude coordinates of locations submitted by
the geo-caching community, C5 went on a 13,000-mile motorcycle trek
around the U.S., moving from location to location, documenting the
sites visited. The exhibition will include photographs of seven sites
juxtaposed with their corresponding computer rendered topographies and
satellite images.

Throughout the world there are paths of significant historical,
cultural and strategic implication. One such intriguing path is the
Great Wall of China. The objective of The Other Path, the third
installation of The Landscape Initiative, is to locate and describe
the corresponding "other" of this significant path in the California
landscape. GPS data collected during C5's trek of the Great Wall was
used to help search matching data patterns collected on the China trek
to the most similar data model in the terrain in California. The
installation at Camerawork will include computer visualizations of the
path search, and photo/video documentation projected onto topographic
maps of China and California etched in glass.


The C5 GPS Media Player on the Whitney Museum of American Art:
Through a collaboration with the Whitney Museum's Artport site,
http://artport.whitney.org you will be able to access The C5 Landscape
Initiative GPS Media Player. The GPS Media Player creates an
implicit timeline and meta narratives for each of the Landscape
Initiative projects. It provides a means of documenting the projects
from their point of common inception, data and process.

C5 artists include: Steve Durie, Bruce Gardner, Amul Goswamy, Matt
Mays, Joel Slayton, Brett Stalbaum, Jack Toolin and Geri Wittig.

C5 Landscape Initiatives is curated by Marisa S. Olson with
organizational support from San Francisco Camerawork. Special thanks
to Steve Dietz, Christiane Paul, and Alexander Lloyd.

SF Camerawork is located at 1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA
Gallery Hours: 12-5 pm, Tuesday-Saturday
Gallery Admission is free.