9UNP0143SD_Ryan Griffis_WordPress

- I'm going to talk about the work of the Temporary Travel Office. A fictional, yet operational tourism agency, specializing in what we might call tactical tourism. I'll give a brief survey of the work of the travel office that will hopefully provide some definition for what that term might be. And if there's time, I'd also like to show the work of some other people who I think are working along these lines and in this arena. 

To start, I'd like to summarize some of the concepts that inform our work. Some specific ideas that we consider guiding principles. Gregory and the Florida Research Ensemble used the ancient Greek persona of Solon to identify an idea of the tourist traveler as knowledge producer rather than as simple consumer. Likewise, writer Diana Taylor and her work in Argentina during the so-called Dirty War of the 1970s and '80s called for the efforts of spect-actors in place of spectators. Both emphasized the importance of witnessing as a form being in the world. 

Art theorists work on networked art, including art and fluxes provided a critical lens through which to interpret the meaning of socially mediated and discursive forms of practice. Not unlike the more recently celebrated conceptions of relational aesthetics, or are more relevant to us Grant Kester's dialogic art, intimate bureaucracies described the use of bureaucratic language and forms for socially intimate networks. While sociopoetics describes a creation of social situations for poetic, as well as instrumental ends. Conceptions of haunted places and stories in reserve, speak to their oppressed cultural memories that lie under the surface of our daily lives. Recombinant and participatory theater discussed and practiced by critical art ensemble, and sub-rosa, among others, combines theatrical methods and techniques with other forms of disciplinary knowledge and production, creating audiences both within and outside of the performance space. Liminal leisure names those activities in which individuals are allowed, and allow themselves to act counter to conventional social norms and expectations. In other words leisure can be a socially transformative space as well as a normalizing and conservative one. And finally, situated social action and social knowing represent recognition of acting and knowing as socially inscribed and located. That knowledge is an inherently social material that is negotiated among agencies, and therefore subject to social factors that determine access more or less equitably. 

So I'll move now to a handful of actualized and proposed tours that the travel office has produced over the last couple of years, in which these principles can hopefully be seen at work. 

I'll begin with a project that occurred in 2004, in which the travel office was commissioned along with 12 others by the Center for New Media to visit the Lofoten Islands of Norway. They're just north of Arctic circle. We were asked to respond to the possibilities for media interventions in a context far from more conventionally considered urban centers. In other words, looking at places that aren't highly dense urban cities, in Europe primarily. It's known as a land of Vikings. These are children's drawings of Vikings in their Children's Museum. Whaling and fishing, oil rich lands, Death Metal. It's also known for its extreme landscape that's surrounded by water, which in the summer makes it quite a tourist paradise. But the winter is known to be pretty severe and inhospitable, and, of course, dark almost 24 hours a day. 

At the time of our visit, king crabs, seen as unnatural invaders from Russia had recently become a contentious topic, as they began interfering with the much-prized fishing industry there, and wrecking havoc on the ocean floor. 

The travel office's proposal unsuccessfully marketed to the Tourism Council of the Lofoten Islands of Norway was a kit for tourists encouraging the experience of Lofoten across its different, sometimes harsh seasons. This is a diagram of our proposal. The theme of the kit, taking a cue from the king crabs was invasive species. The kit provided handy items like an all-weather parka and a hat that could sport changeable nautical emergency flags, such as "I require assistance." The kit would have also have encouraged quote "locals" and "tourists" about what it means for people and other things to move through spaces where they're seen as not belonging. 

The definition of invasive species would have been printed on the parka, as you can see in the image in Norwegian, as well as other languages that are commonly spoken by tourists. And they would have been accompanied by pictures of king crabs, oil rigs and other unnatural residents. 

Also in 2004, we were working with anti-GMO, genetically modified organisms activists and others in Chicago. And we saw an opportunity for tourism in a space known as the Chicago technology park. The technology park is a 56-acre parcel within a larger 560-acre area called the Illinois Medical District, which is a semi-sovereign entity located within the Chicago's near west side. 

So that's sort of the loop in the distance by the lake. Sitting near the University of Illinois-Chicago and a former site of many of the city's public housing projects, the area is designed to serve as an incubator for start-up Biotech companies, pulling from a combination of city, state and federal funding, the Technology Park is one way that Chicago is attempting to compete for a piece of the new economy represented by biotechnologies. It's also a location in which we can see the material and literally concrete manifestations of biotechnology. 

Sorry, this is getting away from me. 

So we saw a connection between the ideology of transgenics, or the process of transferring DNA from one organism to another. The history of eugenics and the spatial restructuring that was occurring in the Technology Park. 

We called this connection spatial eugenics, where public resources such as housing and hospitals, serving low-income residents are eliminated to make way for the smooth funneling of resources to profitable, private interests. These are images from a guided tour that we conducted in 2004 of the park. 

We ended up with a distributable audio tour and guide, some of the peripheral materials are seen here. The audio wove together three narratives, linking the larger questions of biotechnology to those of urban redevelopment and the specifics of the Chicago Technology Park itself. 

This was distributed as a free CD and booklet that you can see in the bottom right, as well as a downloadable Web package and pod cast. 

Our interest in the relationships between broader ideological and philosophical world views and the often mundane realities of space, led us to our next series of tours that are also still ongoing, titled, "Parking Public." Parking Public developed out of research into open space in Hollywood and Los Angeles, which happens to have quite a bit of land devoted to surface parking, but little relatively speaking to parks. 

Our interests quickly turned to a broader view of parking within the United States. A view that ran counter to the dominant understanding of parking as a mostly unplanned and rather unfortunate byproduct of American automobility. Parking lots seen in the context of historical urban planning and real estate concerns, appeared to function as sites of storage for the immaterial ideals of capital, as much as for the material storage of cars. 

In Brooklyn, for example, one can look at the geography of parking, differentiated by municipal city lots, which are represented by the blue arrows, and privately-owned and operated lots, indicated by the red teardrop markers. 

Currently in New York City, as in many cities around the country, both private and public parking lots are being cashed in for the construction of condos and multi-use structures. 

In the small city of Champaign, Illinois, where the travel office is currently based, the flipping of city-owned land as a cheap and largely subsidized land bank for developers many of whom are also city officials is extremely present. These municipal lots, mostly built by the cities between the '40s and '70s on land acquired by purchase in eminent domain were attempts to keep the downtown viable in the post-war flight of capital to the suburbs. 

Now, with concepts like new urbanism and the paradigm of an information economy driven by urban dwelling creative classes, those lots are being redeveloped by successors to interests that created the lots in the first place. Like this former municipal parking lot, now under construction as a site for luxury condos, offices, and retail store fronts. 

Using maps and other narrative devices, we lead guided tours, attempting to bring the more difficult-to-see geographies into the concrete spaces of parking. In an attempt to construct spatial narrative and polemic about the social production of parking spaces. This is a tour that we gave on historic Spring Street in downtown LA, which was once known as the "Wall Street of the West." 

Here, we're looking at a former privately-owned parking lot that's now the site of a future Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum that will also have a retail complex. As part of that tour, we produced a guide booklet for people to take a self-guided tour. These are some pages of that, showing the parking lot on the left, and on the right, showing a digital rendering of what the building will look like when it's there. This site was a focal point of an ongoing battle between historic preservationists and speculative developers who were championing the Madame Tussaud's building. However, both still imagined Hollywood as a space to be consumed, and so both fight against things like more social services in the area. 

They have just have different aesthetic ideas of what consumption should look like. 

In 2006, we were not asked to serve as tourism consultants for the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve. The Timucuan Preserve is a 46,000-acre collection of parks, trails, wilderness areas, historic landmarks and education centers, managed and operated by a partnership between national and state park services, the City of Jacksonville and 300 private entities, with the National Park Service operating less than a quarter of that space. It was signed into law by President Reagan in '88 and is mostly situated in the sprawling city of Jacksonville, which is the largest city geographically speaking in the United States. This is the Preserve headquarters, where we're not working. 

In our role as non-resident consultants we have created a report outlining what we see as opportunity for the preserve to expand both its historical and ecological boundaries by contaminating itself, so to speak. This report presents this opportunity in narrative form, and includes two concrete proposals for action. We began our residency by asking what was being preserved. What is the preserve preserving? And to give you an idea of what we think it is, the following video, we think represents the current official narrative of the preserve in 15 seconds. 

(no audio)

So the preserve provides educational services through the processes of reenactment, conservation and preservation using artifacts, models, didactic signage and historic documents, or replicas of such things. 

The primary historical focus of the preserve is the military battles between European colonial forces, primarily between the French and the Spanish, during the 16th century. and eventually the English and the United States. 

Fort Caroline is a speculative model of the French fort built in 1953. Based on drawing and journal accounts, whose authenticity is now in dispute, and is not to scale nor at a verifiable location. The real fort is the regarded as the first established settlement by European colonists in the future United States. Park Service officials call the display the Fort Caroline Exhibit, since it is neither a preserved artifact nor an accurate model. 

The Rebeau Monument, a concrete pillar, commissioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution in the 1920s, has been moved twice since its creation, once due to the site of the large and still operational Mayport Naval Station. 

It's supposed to be a replica of an obelisk left by the French colonist John Rebeau, claiming the land for France. But much like the Fort, this monument was fabricated using etchings by a Dutch publisher as a reference, and which you can see in the top right. That publisher is now believed to have fabricated a good number of images supposedly produced by Jacques Lemoine, a French artist and colonist. An actual pillar has never been found. 

The namesakes of the preserves, the Timucua, are positioned as inevitable losers in a clash of civilizations, that can be explained in terms of religion and technology as this recreated Timucuan hut illustrates. 

And while the preserve includes within its bounds a preserved 18th century plantation home, Kingsley Plantation, its narratives end with the European naturalization of North America into a white-controlled space, a United States into which others may assimilate. And where more modern narratives are allowed to enter our social imaginary, it is only through the development of a white sense of environmental stewardship and preservation. 

Where preservation equals the creation of a spectacular and ocular vision of nature that relegates discussions of land use by Timucuans and cast-offs of oyster shells and U.S. preservation policies. 

We found that preserve is protecting conquests by using nature as a barrier between its constructed histories and ecologies, and those histories and ecologies that reveal the ongoing reality of the conquest. While the violent histories of conquest deeply mark the myths of those living around the preserve, like this subdivision, Spanish Point, such history is only moving in any directional manner colonial history allowed to seep out, while its post-colonial present is prevented from entering inside. 

So we propose an expanded view of the Battle for La Florida. One that didn't stop in the 19th century, or assume that white conquests stopped with the death of Timucua or the end of the Civil War. We start this expanded tour at the mythic beginnings of contemporary Jacksonville, the St. John's River, or the River of May, as it was supposedly named by the French, and a formally shallow crossing point used by the Timucua, and later by the Spanish and English as part of a trading route. 

This marker notes the location of the river crossing that would become the beginning of Kings Road and a keystone in Jacksonville's developments. 

This central location in Jacksonville, known as Hemming's Square, which is literally just around the corner from the previous marker. It's the symbolic spatial center of the city government, and is dense with historical recognition and representation, like this marker for a 1960 civil right's demonstration. 

This nearby intersection, the site of an NAACP-sponsored sit-in at a local department store, that was discussed at a previous marker, would become the site of another demonstration by NAACP youth in 1964, on a day referred to as Axe Handle Saturday, because of the violence with which whites reacted, beating demonstrators with axe handles, appropriated from nearby hardware stores. 

Also in Hemming's Square, the Kings Road historic marker, which was also erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution in the '20s, points to the early importance of the road and the symbolic myths of Jacksonville. 

Following this historic route north through the city where it splits and becomes New Kings Road, one finds a small section designated as Johnnie Mae Chappelle Memorial Parkway. 

This used to be known as Picketville, the town, it's now incorporated as part of Jacksonville. Chappelle was murdered while walking near this stretch of road in 1964 by four young white men wanting to find some way to participate in the fight against black freedom that was happening in downtown. The parkway was legally dedicated by the state legislature in 2005. But the case in which only one of the killers was convicted and sentenced to three years, has never been re-opened despite the work of Chappelle's family and appeals from civic leaders. 

On the other end of Kings road, about 100-kilometers to the south is St. Augustine, the oldest continually occupied European city in contemporary North America. From here, the Spanish would drive out the French shortly after their arrival and maintain control of Florida during two extensive eras. The Castillo de San Marcos, a Spanish fort built in 1672, that you can see in the background, is the only 17th century fort in North America. 

And in the 19th century, it was used by the U.S. military as a prison camp during the Seminole and Plains Indian wars. Now it's a prime tourist destination, operated by the National Park Service. 

Just north of the fort is the Nombre de Dios Mission, speculated to be the birth place of Juan Alonso Cabale, the last reported Timucuan who died in mid-18th century in Cuba after the Spanish ceded the territory of Florida to the English. This fact is not part of the tourist narrative celebrated at the mission. 

St. Augustine was also the site of intense civil rights struggles in the early '60s. An area dentist and organizer named Robert Hailing even tried unsuccessfully in 1963 to petition the White House not to recognize the 400th Anniversary of St. Augustine, linking the colonial past and then present struggles for black freedom. Hailing would be key in organizing demonstrations of 1964 that would play a major role in the passing of the Civil Rights Act soon after. 

Organized swim-ins in the ocean, as well as in hotel pools culminated in an infamous incident in which hotel owner, James Brock, poured acid on protesters at the Monson Motor Lodge in 1964. The lodge is now the Hilton, St. Augustine Historic Bayfront Hotel 

So our first concrete proposal following our research is the creation of a new trail, tentatively titled the Guanabacoa Trail The trail would be an 800km elevated boardwalk that extends from south eastern edge of the preserve to Guanabacoa, Cuba, which is now mostly known as a suburb of Havana. The boardwalk would utilize an existing observation tower, not far from Fort Caroline. 

On the Florida side, signage would inform visitors of the last known Timucuan, Juan Alonso Cabale's death in Guanacaboa, Cuba. The boardwalk would end with no means to descend in Guanabacoa, where the one mile section of Johnnie Mae Chappelle Memorial Parkway would be re-created. Signage on the platform would tell the story of Chappelle's death and its relationship to the civil rights struggle in Jacksonville. 

These are some sculptural renderings of the proposal that were on display in Jacksonville the end of 2005, beginning of 2006. 

For a second proposal, we think there are opportunities for combining the spatial histories of north Florida's civil rights black liberation struggles with contemporary struggles over land use and environmental justice. Taking into consideration how land has not just been the setting for military conquest, but has been used as an implement and tool for a continuing kind of conquest of Florida. 

The concerns of ecological preservation visible in the Timucuan Preserve intersect with the histories of civil rights as we've documented. 

Between the Cow Ford site, the origin of Kings Road and the Johnnie Mae Chappell Memorial Parkway on the top left, is an area dense with evidence of this land use war and ongoing clash of civilizations. 

Eight toxic ash sites can be found in an area here under 43 square miles, adding up to more than 261 acres of ash contaminated land. Incinerators were used to burn solid waste here, where the ash deposited on site and at dumps from 1890 until the '60s. 

Rather than valuable cultural and historical artifacts from another time and culture, excavations at these sites reveal artifacts of chemical and social toxicity. 

The proposal is for the creation of what we call an Ash Site Annex that would add 43 square miles to the preserve and would be governed using the principles of environmental reparations and community preservation districts. Put forward by environmental justice scholars and advocates where the residents and community stakeholders would be given further power to determine the use and regulation of the land. This would utilize a unique aspect of the Timucuan Preserve, that it is not governed by a single city or state entity but by social principles of preservation. 

Didactic materials, school programs, interactive and roadside exhibits and tours would be created with members of the community. 

Who would govern how funds and resources would be allocated and what the relationship would be between it and the rest of the preserve. As an initial implementation, we're working on a creation of a cell phone based audio tour of the Annex that could easily be updated and serve as a sounding board and feedback mechanism for residents and tourists. 

So the last tour that I'll present is also ongoing, as was the project in Florida, and looked at the spaces of contemporary Olympic games and the international organization that runs them. 

This series of tours is being undertaken with Sarah Ross, and Illinois-based artist and activist. Currently, our focus is on North America with sites such as the 1976 games in Montreal, where the potential for the games to actually be profitable to a city was first put to the test. It failed spectacularly, as did the architecture, depending on who you talk to. 

The 1968 games held in Mexico City became historic for several reasons, most notably because of the symbolic gesture of solidarity with black power movements by John Carlos and Tommie Smith, two Olympic runners who won the Gold and Bronze medals, for which they were expelled from Olympic village. And some of you may have seen the image of them standing with their hands up and gloves on. It's also known for the Tlatelolco Massacre, in which over 300 students and others protesting economic and political inequities were gunned by down the police in the Plaza of the Three Cultures. That's a medium-sized memorial to that massacre, that's that big sort of stone slab. 

Our first tour, as part of touring Olympia, will be of Exposition Park in Los Angeles, which is the site of the 1932 and 1984 games. Both games are historic for how they managed to create an unprecedented amount of privatization in their operation of the games, something previously considered antithetical to the Olympic spirit. 

They actually had to rewrite some rules and regulations for how Olympics could be run because of how LA insisted on managing the games. 

In 1932, private interests formed civic booster organizations to appropriate land upon which to build the first Olympic Village. In 1984, these interests converged again to produce the first real success story of the Olympics as a profitable tool for urban development. For some reason, they have a big grass field on the right that they don't want people to play soccer on, which is kind of ironic since it's an Olympic stadium. 

So we produced an audio tour that we're actually giving in mid-March that takes place in a fictionalized near-future where international protest has led to the destruction of the Olympic movement. Exposition Park is utilized as a backdrop, a memorial to the Olympics due to its role as the site of the last Olympic games in 2020. 

So I'll end presentation of this tour with a short audio clip from that tour. 
- Even prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympiad, cities have grappled with the burden of expensive and difficult-to-use mega-stadiums and surplus accommodations. When bidding, cities did not or could not rely on private funding, they employed other methods of creative economics. For instance, $75 million of the U.S. government went to build the 1964 Lake Placid Olympic Village to the specifications of a federal prison. After the games were over, the structure was handed over to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. 

But more common was the practice of turning public resources into private ones. The Olympics were an urban planning tool far more swift and effective than the old tactics of economic restructuring or wholesale buyouts of a community. And despite the major failures and financial losses, bidding for the Olympics became more and more fierce. 

Montreal faced a 30-year debt, the Sydney and Athens Olympiad cost respectively two and four times what those cities' publics were told. The potential to command international attention and income from television rights, and the ability to fast-track building plans with little to no community input, made hosting the Olympics a centerpiece to any consumption-based landscape. 

But the seduction of Olympia held over the globe began to wane in the face of the disasters it left for many in its wake. 
- That bit about the Olympic accommodations being built to the specifications of a prison in New York is true, which is a very odd and strange story. 

So, I cut out a few things to leave time for this, because I think it's important to look at the work of other people who are doing work along some of the similar lines, but some importantly different. So I wanted to look at what I consider fellow travelers among this kind of work. This first project is called Invisible Five, which is produced in 2005 by Amy Balkin and Kim Stringfellow, a sound artist named Tim Halbur, in an environmental organization called Green Action. 

It's an audio tour produced specifically for driving along I-5 between San Diego and San Francisco. And it tells and looks specifically at narratives related to environmental justice and ecological degradation that's kind of invisible right off the highway. So they sort of used their audio tour to point to these invisible, to drivers anyway, situations. 

You can also download this from their Web site, as well as purchase it as a CD. 

A group called Free Soil that's an international collective of artists and designers, as some of you may know, if you're designers, as Future Farmers. It's a lot of the same people involved. It produced what's called a Toxic Tour of Silicon Valley for a new media festival called Isaiah, in San Jose, in 2006. The tour included stops at some of the many Superfund sites in the area related to the production of computers, as well as to locations where groups are working on remediation solutions to that toxicity, and also met with figures from the History of Computing Counterculture, and the sort of relationship between psychedelia and computing and its origins. This is their biofuel bus that they used for the tour. 

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is an organization with locations in Los Angeles, Windover Utah, Troy, New York and the Mojave Desert in California. 

They create exhibitions, publications and guided tours of socially-shaped landscapes, such as the Owen's Valley which is just north of LA, and where over half of that city's drinking water is piped from. So here, they're taking a group of tourists to look at one of these pipes that moves that water. 

A British group, art and research group, called Platform, produced a project called And While London Burns. Among their many other projects, which is an operatic audio tour that takes tourists through a fictional narrative that links concerns about climate change to the corporate spaces of London's financial district. So you would be listening to a fictional narrative set in some not-quite-defined near future. A scenario in which the story is happening in the spaces that you're walking through, and different things happen to the characters that are happening in the same spaces that you're occupying. 

Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen conducts some of his field research into the work of secret military programs with small groups, taking them out into these spaces while he's doing some of his research. Taking note that while these programs may be secret, they have to exist somewhere, there's an actual landscape on which their situated. He ends up with pictures like this, that are of these sort of secret, off-the-radar map, territories, and bases. 
- I was reading about that project that he takes those photographs from five miles away sometimes? 

- Yeah, he has several sort of telescopes that he's worked into photographic lenses, basically, to produce them. He's also taken some video by hooking a video camera up to the same sort of telescopes. 

An Italian collective of architects, designers geographers and people doing many other kinds of work and research, known as Multiplicity, uses the form of a road trip in their project called The Road Map, to document the disparity and mobility that comes along with the possession of either a Palestinian passport or an Israeli passport. So this is a map, for example, of their road trip that shows with the Israeli passport they were able to traverse the same distance in just over an hour, where on the right, it took them a little over-- or just under six hours, because of checkpoints and various other things. 

So that's what I have. I wanted to thank everybody for coming and listening to me. Also, I can take any questions or anything you might have either about the projects that I showed by others and about my own projects as the Temporary Travel Office. Thanks. 
(applause)
 Any questions? 

- I have a question. 
- Sure. 
- Do you think of this work as activist work? Do you view yourself as an activist? 
- The short answer would be no, in terms of this work, no. In other capacities, I work with people who are activists, and there are other activities that I take part in that I might consider more politically directed, I guess. But this work in particular, I don't consider an activist practice. Yeah? 
- How do you get people to take your tours, or how do you take a tour if you want to take a tour? 
- That's a good question. 

Generally, the tours are organized through some sort of other larger, overarching event. So it might be a conference. It might be some kind of festival of some kind, either art related or media related, and so they're put into a program as part of those events. Sometimes, there are smaller tours. And I might just be traveling, and know a core group of people that would be interested and could gather other people together, and they happen informally. But generally, where there are people that I just don't know personally, or aren't friends of friends, they're part of some other larger series of events, so they're advertised as part of those events. Yeah? 
- Are they officially, actually part of those events, or do you just kind of insert them, you know, guerilla style? 
- Right. Well, they've been part of, the events that generally they're a part of having something happen guerilla style would be something that usually would be encouraged anyway, but they've generally been sort of an official part of the program, except for when they do happen informally sometimes. 

If there happens to be some kind of event that I think they'll be critical mass of people interested, then sometimes they'll be organized more ad hoc. Yeah? 
- I'm curious about what you said about not seeing yourself as an activist. Do you see this work as something that points to things more, and activism goes a step beyond that pointing, or what's the kind-- what's the line for you? 
- Yeah, that's somewhat of a difficult thing to answer. But I think to try to put it succinctly, the sort of strict definition of activist's activities that have a boundary that, where you can say this is an activist activity, is somewhat problematic for me, personally. In that, a lot of what we do in our daily lives are politically charged activities, just by the nature of what they are. So in that sense, I look at this more as a specific investigation into topics that I'm interested in, that are also things that might direct where I would become more active in a politically directed sense. But they're also, I think aesthetic investigations that have to allow for things that aren't politically directed in a specific way, so even though they have a subject matter, and a theme, and content that's easy for people to locate and pinpoint as "political" or charged in a specific sense, they have at least for me, a certain openness. And that I don't necessarily have a pre-defined outcome that I'm trying to, let's say, get a certain kind of legislation through. 

But at the same time, they are going to be directed by my political motivations.