Leila Nadir, Cary Peppermint – Project/Walk: Indeterminate Hikes

Project/Walk: Indeterminate Hikes
Leila Nadir, Cary Peppermint

Sun 27th 2.40pm – 3.00pm
Open Platform Stage & Berlin Mitte/ Tiergarten

http://www.ecoarttech.net/indeterminatehikes.html

Indeterminate Hikes (IH) is an Android app that transforms everyday landscapes into sites of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings. Generally devices of rapid communication and consumerism, smartphones are re-appropriated by IH as tools of environmental imagination and meditative wonder, renewing awareness of intertwining biological, cultural, and media ecologies and slowing us down at the same time.

The app works by importing the rhetoric of wilderness into virtually any place accessible by Google Maps and encouraging its users to treat these locales as spaces worthy of the attention accorded to sublime landscapes, such as canyons and gorges. This project extends from ecoarttech’s belief that ecological awareness must be based in the places that humans actually live, not just in relatively uninhabited natural spaces. We also believe it is essential that conversations about environmental sustainability and ecological management be democratized through the arts, and not only considered within a scientific context.

Indeterminate Hikes has been exhibited and performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smackmellon Gallery (NYC), Conflux Festival (NYC), M.I.T. Media Lab, and Woodstock Digital Media Festival. Originally designed to provide hikes for specific locals, Indeterminate Hikes has been updated and redesigned to provide hiking maps for any urban place on earth.

Image: Leila Nadir, Cary Peppermint