UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

SANTA CRUZ

GO AS A RIVERCommunity Through Cinema; Cinema Through Community

A thesis paper submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Fine Arts

in

Digital Arts and New Media

by

Danielle Williamson

June 2014

Copyright © by

Danielle Williamson

2014

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DEDICATION

for the San Lorenzo River

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my committee: Soraya Murray, Elizabeth Stephens, and John Jota Leaños.

With additional thanks to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Warren Sack, Felicia Rice, Kristin G. Erikson, Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison, Shelby Graham, The Guerrilla Drive in Theater, The Santa Cruz Pedicab Collective, Nathan Ober, Jana Bolotin, and everyone who participated in the project from the interviews to the set up of the event.

This project was made possible by the following funding sources: The Art Dean's Excellence Award and the Florence French Scholarship

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication …............................................................................................................................................iii

Acknowledgement …...............................................................................................................................iv

Table of Contents …..................................................................................................................................v

List of Figures …......................................................................................................................................vi

List of Appendices …..............................................................................................................................vii

Introduction …...........................................................................................................................................1

Theoretical Foregrounding …....................................................................................................................5

Methods and Procedures ….....................................................................................................................21

Audience Reception & Future Plans …...................................................................................................28

Conclusion …..........................................................................................................................................33

Works Cited ….........................................................................................................................................35

Appendices …..........................................................................................................................................37

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone. Image from The Tate ...........................................8

Figure 2: Documentation of Shimon Attie's Sites Unseen from his website …......................................13

Figure 3: Early sketch of tablet/pedicab interface …...............................................................................23

Figure 4: The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk still from the Cardiff's website................................................24

Figure 5: Go As a River premiere event underneath the Soquel Ave. Bridge, Santa Cruz, CA. Image by Lyle Troxell ….........................................................................................................................................28

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LIST OF APPENDECIES

Appendix A: Early Proposal …...............................................................................................................38

Appendix B: Sample Questionnaire ........................................................................................................39

Appendix C: Rejection email for event permit from Santa Cruz City …................................................40

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event, the falling action in pursuit of resolution, is seen through secondary screenings in other

locations, documentation, and an online presence via a version of the film, segments of interviews, and

photographs.

Go As a River has always focused on the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz, California, because

it can stand as a symbol of the water issues that the city is facing locally. At the time that the piece was

first being researched and prototyped, there were plans to build a desalination facility. Wanting to

explore this more, the piece became a way to understand the complexities of water usage. There are

other reasons to focus on The San Lorezno River too. At a surface level, of course, it is proximal to the

area where the art piece was being constructed. Knowing that the piece would address water as an

environmental concern, it seemed only appropriate to do something local. Having a local subject could

open up the possibility of translating to the global, that one river stands for many, that this specific

body of water represents water issues on a grander scale.

Looking deeper at the San Lorenzo specifically, it was also an attractive subject because of how

unique a river it is and how it has shaped Santa Cruz as a city. The river currently divides the East from

the West, each with their own personalities. The West has a more residential feel to it, with beach

access;whereas, the East side is home to the downtown area, wharf, and more residencies along the

cliffs. It is also interesting to note that in this specific community, one can actually see the river

converge with the ocean. It is important to see this body of water transform from one defined thing

(“this is the river”) to the gray area where it mixes with another defined thing (“this is the ocean”). For

the birds, the folks who call the river home, the passersby, and everyone who uses the water from the

San Lorenzo for their survival: to go as a river is to constantly be moving and changing while at the

same time still retaining cohesion.

The challenge comes when the systems that are used to organize and control nature for

production and profit of resources impede that entity as it would otherwise naturally be. These ideas

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will be laid out in more detail later on in the paper. There has been a long history of controlling the San

Lorenzo River and in late the 1950's the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers worked to place levees along

the banks of the river as a means to control flooding. The floods were devastating to the downtown area

throughout the mid 1800s and into the 1950s, which was the result of the Army Corps coming in with

the levees (santacruzpl.org). While that may be the case, one must also consider what control of the

river does to the overall health of that body of water. By preventing it from curving and flowing

organically, it is not able to act as it naturally would. Additionally, the levees obstruct the view of the

river, often rendering it invisible to the community. One interviewee of the project said, upon first

moving here, “I didn't even know there was a river there...it's just so disconnected”. While the levees

uphold the safety of the downtown area by preventing it from being flooded, it does not necessarily

uphold the wellness and sight-lines of the river. By bringing people along the banks of the San Lorenzo

River and having the visuals of Go As a River hyper-focus on a small portion of that body of water, the

invisible is made more visible.

In their book Energizing Water: Flowform Technology and the Power of Nature, Jochen

Schwuchow , John Wilkes and Iain Trousdell recall Masaru Emoto’s research on water’s memory. They

write that “…[his] findings support the idea that water reflects human consciousness, and that it is

capable of storing and transmitting information”, which Go As a River attempts to play off by

transmitting ideas through the visual and aural representation of the San Lorenzo River (1). It is

through these conversations by the river, around the river, and about the river that one's own

connections to the water can be illuminated to urge others to take see at as more that just a body of

water that is used to pump through our sewers and drains. It is the lifeblood of Santa Cruz.

The idea of community is crucial to this piece as it attempts to network groups of people who

all wish to come together through the common thread of the San Lorenzo River. Within the context of

this piece, community can be defined as a group of like-minded people who live near the river or are

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affiliated with the campus (as an example) who come together in support of one another and of a

specific idea. In this paper, community is used in different ways: one being the aforementioned

definition, the other talking about the established Santa Cruz community as a greater whole. By having

conversations and events and other such gatherings that focus on the river, Go As a River makes a

community: a network of people who are also connecting to the river, speaking about the river, and

otherwise putting energy towards it (even if in small increments). People such as students who may

have only a little knowledge of the river because of their removal from downtown or folks at the San

Lorenzo River Alliance, the Pedicab Collective, and town hall all do consider the river through their

own means. Go As a River is an attempt to bring all of those groups together who already have

common goals and interests to continue to put their energy into the San Lorenzo. A big change will not

happen in one night, but what people will take with them are the conversations and sense of unity that

the piece works to create.

In these efforts, the goals of the piece are made known. The success of which can only be

determined through the lasting conversations and future actions that can be made to make the river and

water supply better. To bring people's attention to the river as mediated through a meditative,

immersive video environment, to bring other people together to talk about the river, collectively as a

means to encourage community (as it has been defined), and to create an experience for people that

goes beyond their typical conception of the cinema.

This project was a personal stretch for my own talents, as it was a topic I had yet to address in

any of my previous work. However, through a growing, personal connection to the river as a healing

entity and as something that is just as much a part of me as it is of Santa Cruz, the stretch was worth it

if it meant attempting to bring more attention and care to the river. This was also an opportunity to

really delve into ideas and concepts in cinema that have been of interest to me in the past.

The San Lorenzo's unique history, the people that have surrounded the river over the years, and

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now, new personal perspectives on the river have made it an ideal topic to discuss many different

theoretical contexts. Those theories are that of cinematic spaces and audience spectatorship and

perception, ideas and concepts from social practice art, as well as the roots of the project, the

environmental politics and water statistics. The river stands both for itself as a body of water and as a

symbol which represents our comings together. Without the river, without water, we would not exist.

II. Theoretical Foregrounding

The theories that served as the driving forces for Go As a River stem from three different

branches of interest: that of cinema and the cinematic experience , that of social engagement practice,

and that of environmental politics. Consider the cinematic experience like the means through which

one access the plants, as the leaves; the social practice is the stem that supports the leaves, and the

environmental concepts of the piece are the roots that nourish and drive the content. In its attempts to

merge all three of these topics, the piece pushes the idea of the cinema as a means to make community,

while engaging with the local public to discuss very pressing environmental concerns in relation not

just to California’s water supply, but to the planet as a whole.

How do moviegoers, cinema enthusiasts, people looking to escape their daily lives, and others

who engage with film, experience cinema in communal spaces such as the movie hall? With increasing

numbers of people accessing films on their personal computers and iPads, how does the already

individual experience of watching a movie change in light of this technology? What Go As a River

attempts to subvert is the individualization or isolation of this modern technology by juxtaposing the

subjective experience of watching a film with a communal event that generates a more shared

experience that people then later talk about. Further, what makes it different from, say, a

drive-in-theater is the site specificity of the film to the river with the specific goal of bringing people to

the very thing with which they are engaging with through cinema.

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Breaking away from a “normal” viewing atmosphere, Go As a River is intentionally meant to

allow anyone who sees the light from afar to join in and watch. The space is public, and should be used

as such. The cinematic space has been most prominently thought of in its association to movie theaters,

which is a very specific mediation of an image to an audience. This space of viewing and “such

viewing customs customize industrially produced pleasures. Breaking into and breaking up the film,

they [Breton and Vache] upset the set patterns that plot the established moral, political and aesthetic

orders of the entertainment form”, which can serve to challenge what other ways one could think about

cinematic space (p. 198, “Possessive, Pensieve, and Posessed”, Victor Burgin). The audience of Go As

a River has no control over when they see a specific image, but the film is a loop, so at the same time,

they have the power, the choice to engage and disengage at any point. While an iPad or personal

computer would allow a similar freedom that Breton and Vache explore when touring the many theater

houses, it is separating the person from the space, which helps largely if not wholly contributes to the

person's experience of that film.

Typically, there is a straight-forward relationship between the audience and the screen. There is

an understanding that when the lights go down in the theater, a machine will make images dance across

the silver fabric and each person will settle in and face the moving pictures. Philosopher Stanley Cavall

brings to the table that, “the audience in a theater can be defined as those to whom the actors are

present while they are not present to the actors. But movies allow the audience to be mechanically

absent” (Film/Cinema/Movie in Film Theory and Criticism, 305). In a strict theater setting it makes

sense to say that one would not be able to enter within the frame but it may be different in other

cinematic endeavors. What is interesting with Go As a River in relation to this quote is that there is no

one acting in this film, only voices that are addressing the interviewee and the river. The audience

becomes privy to these voices while also being in front of a simulated (or past) version of the river as

well as the river itself. There is a mix of mediated material based on the real and the actual river,

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happening all at once.

While people still do attend theaters to watch new movies, another option made available (and

more popularized) over the past few years is the instant online rental. One is familiar with the theater

screen and what it means to sit in a theater, but “now that one can 'enter' a virtual three-dimensional

space, viewing flat images projected on a screen is no longer the only option. There is an understanding

of the new(er), often solitary experience of home viewing. This becomes more and more about

communal viewing experiences versus private viewings on personal computers and home

entertainment systems. Going to the cinema takes place on the theater's time and not one's own. It is

also a shared time where in the movie goers are set to abide by the times of the bathroom lines, the

ticket counter and refreshments all before the trailers begin. With instant movie watching from a

personal computer, one can sit in their pajamas and screen a recent flick at 3:00am. The piece along the

river happened over a specific time and place, true, but it is also a means to generate a conversation in

that specific time and place. It is important to bring folks together in this particular period of time

because the urgency of water issues and the sincere need for people to feel more connected to their

resources is extremely pressing. Go As a River takes place within this context because there is no more

time to wait to discuss it in the future; those discussions should already be taking place. In addition to

being a platform to challenge space in relation to the cinematic experience, the project also utilizes

other artists and film theorist's ideas to convey feelings or to generate that cinematic experience.

The actual event of the projection, which took place on April 12th, 2014, aside from being

rooted in some understanding of social practice work, uses projection light, which hits a reflective

surface and trickles onto the ground to entice the participants into a physical interaction between the

light and those participants. Rather than an audience merely looking at a screen, they actually become

part of that projection environment much in the same way one might discuss Anthony McCall’s work.

While it may seem contradictory to the kind of work that McCall made, media theorist Mark Hansen

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also discusses perception and environment in his writings on new media, which will be discussed

further on in this paper. With this in mind, Go As a River sets out to have the bodily experience of

projected light and sound resonate in a way that continues to stir conversations about the severe and

pressing issues of water.

Coming from a predominantly film-based artistic background, much of the work that I make is

inspired by film and cinema as it could be applied in broader terms (not just limited to the inside of a

theater). The work described below ranges from the more formal properties of the cinema to the visual

aesthetics of film.

Figure 1 : Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone. Image from The Tate.

McCall's Line Describing a Cone is a cinematic experience in which the audience engages with

the light that is being projected from across the room. Imagine a strip of black film leader being pulled

through the gate of the projector at 24 frames per second while, slowly, a white line is being etched out

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onto the film. As the line grows, one sees that it is making the shape of the circle. Now add fog to the

room. In 3D real space, the line that is being drawn on the strip of film makes a cone. It is this tactile

experience where the film confronts the audience that is inseparable from a celluloid screening. It is

hard to actually explain the experience of walking through light and fog, of entering into the world

within the frame, but film historian Gerald Mast speaks of film mechanically moving through a frame

in that, “the insistence on projection has certain theoretical advantages. First, it clearly distinguishes

cinema from a live theatrical performance, on the one hand, and from television on the other...The fact

that film is projected also means that it will be perceived and received as a series of different kinds of

successions...these differences produce the reduced clarity, subtlety, luminosity, density, and (for the

present anyway) size of the television image” (Film/Cinema/Movie in Film Theory and Criticism, 300).

There is something remarkable in that perception of the large projected image on a screen that has a

wholly different presence than that of a television screen. The light of the movie projection consumes

the viewer and for the time being, that viewer choses to ignore that what is being consumed is a series

of images moving through a projector. Comparatively, there are the audiences of the early days of

cinema who had no suspension of disbelief but rather thought that the image they were viewing was

real. The prime example used, of course, is the audience members of the Lumière film The Arrival of a

Train at La Ciotat.. As the train approved the foreground of the frame, members of the audience

actually fled from their seats for fear of the train crashing in to the theater. For these reasons, one can

argue the sincere weight of the presence of the screen.

One could argue that the experience of cinema, with regard to McCall's work, actually takes

place between the projector and the projected. Rather than just watching something on a screen the

cinema is actually happening all around the viewer. McCall explains this when talking about his piece

Long Film for Four Projectors, where “there is a field created by the film. It surrounds the visitor. As

long as you are in the room, you are within the film” (Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and

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Related Works, 38).

It may seem to be in opposition to what McCall's work has done, but I want to draw a line

between his ideas and those of Hansen's. In his book on new media, Hansen discusses at length an art

piece titled skulls, a series of sculptural objects (skulls) that were digitally manipulated and later cast

into mutated shapes that neither look organic nor able to be resolved in the viewer's mind. Hansen uses

this example to explain the “bodily spacing or the production of space within the body” (New

Philosophy for New Media, 205). In this way, skulls is experienced within the body; the image of the

skulls resolved within oneself instead of externally.

Hansen may then be suggesting that the piece was trying to make the invisible process of the

digital a visible, tangible experience that is obtained through the body much in the way that Go As a

River works to make the river more visible through both the video projection and proximity of the

piece to the river itself. To combine McCall (whose work engulfs its audience) and Hansen for the

understanding of this piece would be to say that the piece is drawing the viewer in with light

projections while also inciting a response within the body by knowing the proximity of the river to the

projected image of itself. For Hansen, “we do not experience the image in the space between it and our

eye...; and to the extent that we are thus 'placed' into the space of the image”, the experience is

happening within oneself, amid a shared space of other viewers (New Philosophy for New Media, 202).

The involuntary reaction of feeling a work within the body may also be a difficult thing to sit

with if one were wanting to dominate a specific environment. In this way, Go As a River could work to

be seen as something that not everyone would understand, fore to connect with the river, it must be

experienced both externally and internally, at a deeper level. McCall's body of work has in fact been the

driving force for Go As a River. With the explicit intention to bring people together into an environment

to ponder a specific topic, Go As a River uses the inherent attractiveness of projected light to draw

people to the screen.

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In a similar vein that McCall’s work provides the experience both of cinematic data and of light

as a form of sculpture, the river event draws people to it to be consumed in the image of the river, while

it is projected underneath a bridge that is directly beside the very thing the projection is referencing.

For example, at the Bloom event, many people were directly in the beam of the projection light,

causing their shadow to appear within the image of the river. This seems like an explicitly symbolic

gesture of one's own interactions with the river. By engaging with a projection of the river, audience

members are asserting their own bodies into a representation of the very thing they wish to talk about,

know more about, and discuss. A projected image is not given meaning by itself. It is the audience’s

willingness to engage with--to be standing in between the projector and the projected, asserting

significance onto the image from within their own minds--that produces the experience.

It is the intention of the piece to bring people from Santa Cruz to understand the river in a new

light through the aforementioned experiences. Go As a River’s cinematic aspects are taking their cue

from what Gene Youngblood describes as synaesthetic cinema in his book Expanded Cinema. While

using narrative techniques to convey messages from the audio interviews, the piece itself is not a work

of narrative. Because it attempts to create an experience through the movement of light and key points

of sound, it fits in with what Youngblood defines as synaesthetic cinema:

The fundamental subject of synaesthetic cinema -- forces and energies-- cannot be photographed. It’s not what we’re seeing so much as the process and effect of seeing: that is, the phenomenon of experience itself, which exists only in the viewer. Synaesthetic cinema abandons traditional narrative because events in reality do not move in linear fashion. It abandons common notions of ‘style’ because there is no style in nature. It is concerned less with facts than with metaphysics, and there is no fact that is not also metaphysical. One cannot photograph metaphysical forces. One cannot even ‘represent’ them. One can, however, actually evoke them in the inarticulate conscious of the viewer” (97).

Therefore, Go As a River is not a straight forward narrative, but a collection of voices that come out of

the mumble of sounds and mix with the imagery of rippling water to stir up the feelings and generate

associations to the river. The river must be felt through the piece in order for the audience to have

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feelings about it. Additionally, by looping the close up video of the San Lorenzo, the intent is to cause

people to meditate on the imagery and sound to go beyond a feasible storyline and deeper into multiple

histories and emotions that the river holds.

In more general terms, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s films have influenced the aesthetics

of my own work for years. Most notable in his work are his extreme long, singular takes, usually of

landscapes with small actions taking place within and outside of the frame. Through these shots,

viewers are pulled in by the initial beauty of the scene, but remain within the frame because of the

subtleties noticed through the pacing of the shot. These takes sometimes push the limits of attention

and boredom, but intentionally so. Consider, for example, one of the final shots of The Sacrifice. This

1986 film shows the anxiety that a particular family goes through when under the weight of nuclear

war. The lead character, Alexander, struggles and pleads to give up everything he owns in order to

reverse the violence of the war. Through a series of events, the patriarch's home burns down. The shot

of the burning house is framed so that it remains in the background while Alexander and his family

waver between either side of the frame. The camera slowly pans left or right to follow their

movements. This shot lasts for about the length of one roll of film. To carry on watching it in an almost

painful length allows us the audience time to feel the anguish and loss of the characters.

This cinematic device is something that ends up in my work a lot. I like to push those limits of

boredom to get people to look beyond what they are seeing on one level and to allow the imagery

produced to sink into them. Therefore, by having a single shot of the rippling river, the piece gives the

viewers an opportunity to go beyond the surface of the water (so to speak) and become a part of the

stories that are being presented from within the piece. The world has become far too automated and so

quick that people do not always provide themselves the time to process. It is precisely for this reason

that Go As a River uses one slow take of the river. By extending the shot and looping it over and over

again, there is more time for one to get lost in their thoughts and enter into a more contemplative state.

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Michael Snow is a structuralist filmmaker whose work greatly influenced Go As a River for his

ability to bring people's attention to a space through the screen. Here, one examines Youngblood 's

analysis of Snow's work, where he writes writes: “[synaesthetic cinema] can function as a conditioning

force to unite us with the living present, not separate us from it.” (Expanded Cinema, 82) Using

Wavelength as an example, one sees a static shot of a room that, over time, is changing and having

different people and things interacting with it. And over that time frame, the camera is slowly zooming

in to eventually focus on a picture of the ocean which is situated on the other side of the room. If it is

an effect of synaesthetic cinema to keep the viewer in the present, Snow's piece does so by referencing

the same space over time, within the time frame of the film. Go As a River shares similar qualities in

that it can both allow its viewers to be taken to a different time and place, while also situating them in

the present, underneath a bridge, alongside the San Lorenzo. When one engages with the piece they are

met with a cacophony of sound and a slowly moving, solitary shot of water from the San Lorenzo

River). Over time, the water can be used to meditate and hone in on the words being spoken, while still

constantly being a visual reminder that the focus is on the river.

Figure 2: Documentation of Shimon Attie's Sites Unseen from his website.

Another visual artist working with projections is Shimon Attie, whose work is important for the

politics and cultural historicism it brings up. It is important and applicable to Go As a River as a

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starting point for considering alternative methods of projection. Attie’s Sites Unseen is conceptually

very different from Go As a River, but formally comparable. To project on to public spaces such as

former ghetto/Nazi-occupied buildings and rivers, Attie is making the invisible histories of

Jews-in-hiding visible, so as not to forget that past. While never projecting on the water, Go As a River

instead projects an image of the San Lorenzo river in a public space to call attention to it. Attie's water

projections did not seem to be an appropriate fit for this particular piece because it recalled to much

about the loss of refugees and displaced persons; a topic that the river piece did not intend to bring up.

The river may be in severe danger, but is still surviving and will probably outlast humans, should this

race not manage to dry it up. Additionally, it did not make much sense to project the river onto itself,

but rather, by slightly displacing the river onto a surface, it again reinforces the attention towards the

river. This work, like McCall's Line Describing a Cone helped me consider that the cinema or

cinematic experience need not only take place on the silver screen of a movie theater. Inspired by other

means of bringing people together for a specific social, political, or environmental discussions, the

practice of social engagement art was something that steered some of the approaches in this

installation's process.

Taking from the movement of social practice or socially-engaged art making, Go As a River was

largely sculpted as a means to create a platform for the community to speak about the river and greater

water issues, rather than have one outsider artist discuss their own personal feelings on the matter. The

piece is not just the projection on a bridge, but also the process of having conversations with

community members, the research put into the project, the film, the event itself, its life beyond the

event through secondary events, and an online presence.

Two large players in this social practice world, Tom Finkelpearl of the Queens Museum and

Beverly Naidus, an educator at the University of Washington, influenced much of the way the research

came together for this portion of the project. Naidus writes on her own methodologies in explaining

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and spreading the ideas of social practice art to others. In her book, Arts for Change she defines this

practice through it’s connection to community, that: “at the roots of its meaning, engagement means

connection, so we can first understand this kind of art as one that is about connecting the pieces,

connecting people with their feelings, their pasts, their dreams, and each other...” (4). Finkelpearl’s

work is mostly in Queens, New York. His discussions about public art talk about a need or an attempt at

different ways of having dialogue specifically geared towards change (What We Made, 114).

The approaches taken in Go As a River were a series of methods that included talking to people

in the community and hosting an event intended to spark dialogue. Finkelpearl, here, says, “for artists

like Navjot, or Park Fiction in Hamburg, there really isn’t a point at which we can arrest the process

instantiated in their projects, set it apart, and say ‘Okay, here’s the work of art’” to which there is some

connection to the river piece because of those methods which were used to create it (What We Made,

114).

Through this process, it became clear that what was actually being gained was a physical, tactile

experience or connection to other people. If one major critique of these large systems of environmental

organization (man made) is that they are separating people from nature, a tangible user experience is

required to bring people back to the environment. By having personal conversations with people both

in the interview process as well as the projection event, “part of the appeal of collaborative practice

could be the non-virtual aspect of it. Actually sitting down and talking to people live, in person, is an

integral aspect of almost all socially interactive and collaborative work” (What We Made, 114). By

sitting and interviewing people about the river, by hosting events in which people physically engage

with the river and with light that also references the river, it makes sense to define the piece in part by

its associations and likeness to social practice work. That's not to say that this piece is necessarily social

practice art, but that it takes heavily from those methods and ideas. Go As a River is simultaneously

attempting to discuss the environmental concerns underlaying the San Lorenzo River, while also doing

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so through its discussion of the cinema and cinematic spaces.

There is no hiding the fact that this planet is very quickly running out of a fresh, potable water

sources. Many of the problem-solving techniques of the past, which aimed to garner greater raw

materials and other resources, are showing to be more destructive than a life without those greater

amounts of materials. Lewis Mumford the historian,critic, and writer whose work focused a lot on

urbanization, delivers these ideas in a very cut and dry way by saying that “even the immediate price is

heavy; for the system is so far from being under effective human direction that it may poison us

wholesale to provide us with food or exterminate us to provide national security, before we can enjoy

its promised goods” (“Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”, 7).

Companies mass-producing goods through artificial means, such as Monsanto, or those building

desalination facilities are operating under a short-term time frame. They are only looking at a timeline

that focuses on the near future for what will generate the most profit. This food company is a primary

example because, in one attempt to provide more food to more people, it is also creating a precedent for

what the quality of food in America is, while literally poisoning other crops in the meantime.

A similar comparison could be made with a desalination facility. Short-term goals for said

facility would be to bring in more water to a city, keeping the cost of water low (or at the very least at

the same cost that it is now), and possibly attracting a greater population to that city. However, in the

long run, that facility is also drawing energy to produce water and maintain itself. As is compiled by

editors Cooley, Gleick, Wolff in Desalination, With a Grain of Salt -- A California Perspective , “the

potential benefits of ocean desalination are great, but the economic, cultural, and environmental costs

of wide commercialization remain high. In many parts of the world, alternatives can provide the same

freshwater benefits of ocean desalination at far lower economic and environmental costs. These

alternatives include treating low-quality local water sources, encouraging regional water transfers,

improving conservation and efficiency, accelerating wastewater recycling and reuse, and implementing

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smart land-use planning” (1-2). A temporary solution does not fix the larger issue that there is still

going to be a lack of water outside of a desalination facility. The system as a whole needs to be

reconsidered if actual changes were to happen.

System such as the massive sets of pipes that make up the plumbing for water distribution, were

put into place to provide greater ease to people. However, it does seem that there is a certain point

when a lack of transparency in that system and the removal of the person from the system begins to

lose sight of its original intention or become so inefficient that it actually does more harm in the long

run. Perhaps more abrupt and direct are Mumford's thoughts, wherein he considers “our great physical

transformations [to] have been affected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human

personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and makes

control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence”

(“Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”, 6). By separating the human from the system we have set

into place to organize nature for ourselves and are no longer part of that process. Through this, it

becomes more difficult for people to relate to the resources being received. Therefore, Go As a River,

through the cinematic experience, brings humans back to the (re)source that they have been removed

from by placing them beside one of the very sources that they receive water from daily, through a

system far removed from the human hand.

What becomes clearer in doing this research, is that it is very difficult to separate the economy

from the environmental issues. The issue is already complex, as it is intertwined with so many other

moving pieces, such class, profit of capital, and competition. These are driving forces for the choices

that those in positions of power make on our systems and bring so many others into positions of

helplessness. City officials are thinking about how to bring more commerce to the place they work, but

one must again be questioning what the cost of that commerce is. In fact, it seems almost that it could

benefit large companies and parts of the government to require more water to be brought to a certain

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place. At least, according to Cynthia Barnett, author of Blue Revolution, “Federal policies make it

profitable to grow thirsty crops in water-stressed places, the Sacramento-San Joaquin and Arkansas

Deltas being only two of them... Federal water schemes, from the Central Valley Project in California

to the Central and Southern Florida Project, are agricultural subsidies, too, just like farm credit, export

promotions, and university extension services” (86).

A desalination facility would, on the one hand, bring in more water to a location where aquifers

are being stretched to their limits, with risk of saltwater intrusion, where an uncharacteristically long

drought season is simply not providing the city with enough water supply. It bring more water to the

city of Santa Cruz, when it desperately needs it, by way of extracting ocean water from the Monterey

Bay.

At first glance, this may be conceived as a good way to meet the demands of the city's water

needs. If there is water in the ocean, it could be used to make a own supply of this essential resource.

However, in the long run, there are many issues that suggest desalination might not be the best way of

obtaining water. One of these facilities would not be that energy intensive, in fact, “the theoretical

minimum amount of energy required to remove salt from a liter of seawater using RO is around 2.8

kilojoules (or around 3 kilowatt-hours per thousand gallons…). Even the most efficient plants now

operating use as little as 4 times the theoretical minimum;some use up to 25 times the theoretical

minimum” (Desalination, With a Grain of Salt, 42). While this may be true, it is still creating more new

buildings that require additional energy to power and taking from another ecosystem to support that of

Santa Cruz.

Also tied to the debate of a desal facility in Santa Cruz is the expansion of Upper Campus at UC

Santa Cruz. This plan would create more buildings to accommodate the growing population of the

school which would in turn add revenue for the school. The problem here involves so many complex

and interwoven things, but for sake of argument, a rising population to this area would require an even

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higher demand still for water. The water argument starts to look cyclical in this regard, for a high

population needs a greater quantity of water, which brings a larger population of people. Barnett adds,

“that just-add-more-water approach to making energy has not changed in more than a hundred years.

But it can’t last. In the Carolinas and across the nation, a growing population is demanding more

energy at the same time it is limiting the supply of water to generate that energy. The more electricity is

needed, the more water supplies are depleted. The more water supplies are depleted, the more

electricity is needed to concoct new water and bring it to people-- with larger pumps, longer pipelines,

or energy-intensive desalination” (Blue Revolution, 64).

Overall, it does not seem that a desalination facility would withstand over a more far-thinking

timeline. Again, it would be wonderful to have a greater supply of water brought quickly and cleanly,

but those actions in the short-term would not be sustainable over time. Not to mention, once water is

regulated in this way, people have less stake in how that water is distributed, how, and why.

One part of the desalination debate that particularly peaked interests in line with the river piece

was the way that water was being framed by the Santa Cruz Water Department. In one of their monthly

pamphlets, they refer to water as a “goods provided to customers”. This created a personal outrage with

me because the systemic problem of considering natural resources as commodity is inherently

dangerous and leads to a relationship with those resources which is not respectful or careful.

Mumford discusses access to goods from the perspective that it is removed from the human

hand. As he puts it:

“ the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education, but on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires” (“Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”, 6).

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Once again returning to the issue of desal and campus expansion, more water would be generated, even

if that is not the consensus of the town. Plus, not all desalination facilities are that successful. One built

in Santa Barbara, California back in the 1990s has still yet to be a functioning facility. It crumbled

under the weight of the expenses to maintain it (Desalination, With a Grain of Salt, 27).

There are alternatives to desalination that do not require a lot of energy, such as rainwater

collection. Even though “the conventional wisdom maintains that we can fix our water problems with

more reservoirs and river pipelines, more diversions and desalination plants...we should resort to them

only after an obvious step: stop wasting a drop of the water we already have” and think hard about

more sustainable, long term solutions (Blue Revolution, 106).

Since August of 2014, Santa Cruz has since tabled the desal plans indefinitely. One explanation,

according to city officials is “because they realized voters will not approve building the desalination

plant project that was pitched to them by the city” (ksbw.com). The voters’ unwillingness to support

desal may show that there is a desire for a shift in perspective on our water issues.

In what ways might one think about water as something other than a commodity to take the

severity of our situation more seriously? In the grand view of past historical events, most people will

wait until things are at their worst to take any action. This is concerning. At what point does one act?

Well, if the water is still coming out of our faucet, what else do we need to worry about?

As seen above, there is some resistance to artificial water manufacturing like desalination

facilities. Perhaps, as Barnett says, what the future of water needs are “Johannes Vermeers as much as

the Johan van Veens--the artists as much as the engineers. It deserves the input of anglers and other

ordinary people as much as politicians, large water users, and water managers. It benefits from the

voices of the young with new ideas and hopes, as much as from elders who lived through 1953 and

other defining events” (Blue Revolution, 60). In this way, dialogues are started together in a more

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democratic way to hopefully generate better, long term, sustainable, futures.

III. Methods and Procedures

This piece went through many iterations over the course of nearly a year and a half of research

and prototyping. The following is an account of those trials and procedures which eventually led to the

final version of the piece as it currently exists.

When living in the Seabright neighborhood on the East side of Santa Cruz, I would have to

cross over the San Lorenzo River any time I needed to get downtown or anywhere else on the West

side. After time and time of crossing on bike or foot, I began to ponder the amount of times that people

traversed the bridge and thought about the water, this snaking entity below us. It was this small spark

that propelled me into finding ways of both learning more about the river as well as working with

others to produce work about it.

An early proposal of work to specifically addresses water scarcity and the pending plans for a

desalination facility in Santa Cruz was originally created with collaborator Matthew Jamieson. This

proposal, which can be seen in full length in Appendix A, talked about early plans to do some sort of

mapping/video projection hybrid that would involve other people in Santa Cruz together, discussing the

complex issues of the water. This along with other past work, was a base for future iterations of the

piece.

For the most part, my body of work has in some way always shown relationships between

people and place. In the fall of 2012, I completed Reset Home, a meditation on the ideas that surround

the concept of home. Participants were invited to peer through other people's spaces, into their

surrounding environments, as they ask themselves questions about what it means to be “home”. The

piece took the form of four pop-up projection screens and four corresponding video feeds of different

people's locations. This four-screen cube created an immersive space for viewers to have the

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opportunity to sink into the screens and think about what they were taking in with their senses. The

idea of collecting stories from others and creating immersive and semi-enclosed spaces has stuck with

me since then.

As Santa Cruz has experienced yet another uncharacteristically dry winter, the idea of water

scarcity becomes more of a concern. Even as early as April 2013, a pamphlet was sent out from the

Santa Cruz Municipal Utilities campaigning for a desalination plant in light of the lack of rainfall that

the city was receiving. The main push from the city was to build a desalination plant so as to have the

quantity of water that our city needs.

Problems with desalination are the issues with the systemic whole. Why, if the issue at hand is

that there is a scarcity of water, would one build a plant that will manufacture more water, potentially

increasing the population growth of both the city and campus? What avenues does that leave open for

the future? In an attempt to bring people's attention to this issue, the project goals shifted so that they

involved a local pedicab service and the Museum of Art and History (MAH). At the time of the

project’s early prototype stages back in the spring of 2013, the idea was that the pedicab would lead

tours of the river along the bike path levees. Through a collection of audio clips, the community would

be able to have a discussion mediated through a tablet device on the significance of the river and the

connecting watershed. This would have been articulated through collected stories and facts that Santa

Cruzians would have contributed. How often is it that one drives across the San Lorenzo River? Do

they think about what the river is doing there, what the health of this body of water is, or if any of that

matters to anyone?

Aware that I could easily impose my own beliefs on the desalination plant onto the public and

not wanting to make any claims at being a water expert, it seemed more fitting to allow the community

at large to answer the questions that they felt needed to be asked in regards to the city's water issues. It

was in that way, that the idea to frame the project within the context of socially engaged art practice

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came into play. Through this, I would become more of a facilitator making art with a community of

peoples to be able to better democratize information and ideas about water in this area.

Figure 3: The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk still from the Cardiff's website.

This pedicab/touch screen combination idea was also largely driven by the Walking Tours by

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Cardiff and Bures Miller have a vast body of work that so often

incorporates aural story telling or memory making. In fact, their work was the initial inspiration for the

pedicab tour, namely, a more recent piece titled The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk which was

commissioned for DOCUMENTA (13). The piece takes places in a train station in Kassel, Germany. It

is nicely documented as a video of a hand holding an iPhone which has a slightly similar image as the

background of actual, live, surroundings. As the video plays, a woman's voice asks you to match the

movements of your hand, your camera(phone), your video with the movements of the camera within

the video. As you are taken through real space, virtually, you hear the woman's reflections on that space

and are thus able to simultaneously exist in the present at the time of those reflections.

Early on in the project, I had used this as an example of where I wanted the piece to go, when it

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The biggest tipping point with the pedicab and the final decision to change direction to another

means of viewing was actually during the final ride taken on a smaller pedicab. It was a colder evening

in September and I was bundled in a large scarf. The two-seater cab was taking me from the MAH all

the way to the point on the levee path where the river meets the sea, on the East side. As we approached

the shore, though, my stomach sank when I saw two figures, illuminated by the light of the cab,

bundled and asleep along the pavement. I could not stand the thought of having a piece that used the

labor of another person to help articulate the richness of the river. On top of that, it from a place of

great privilege to be able to ride along in a bicycle while another person lays asleep on the road.

Over the summer of 2014, I had the opportunity to accompany Elizabeth Stephens and partner

Annie Sprinkle as their documentarian for a series of workshops and symposia that they were

conducting in France and England. This trip was a turning point in my project, as it was here I realized

that, as someone with a deep passion for cinema, I needed to make something much more film-like in

nature.

For six days I stayed in Bourges, France, partaking in art activities such as nature walks, and

performances based on our reflections in nature with Stephens and Sprinkle. Never have I felt more

welcomed than I have by the people of the thriving arts community here in Bourges. This new family

are composed of a group of exceptionally talented young artists who work in video, music, fiber arts,

sculpture and performance. There are two main art centers in Bourges: L'ecole Nationale Superieure

D'arts (ENSA) and Emmetrop artists centre which has been around since 1984. The two often work in

tandem, providing workshops for the local art students.

Many of the students from ENSA, the Emmetrop community members, and I attended a

workshop in the French countryside on a small, organic farm ran by a young couple in their thirties.

They allowed us to set up a small camp on their land, tour their facilities, and create performances

along the small river on another portion of their property. From there, we also visited a neighboring

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farm that was completely off the grid. Here, water healer and sculptor Michaël Monziès, gave us a tour

of his gardens, where he built and installed rock and cement fountains which were inspired by the

movement and patterns (which resemble the infinity symbol) already found in nature.

Being that my own work explicitly involves water, I was completely enthralled by this work

and have gained a vast new pool of information regarding water quality. What I believe is that if more

people feel emotionally connected to the natural elements around them, they will treat them with more

respect and hopefully consider their own use of those elements in everyday life.

Another aspect of this trip was the sense of community at this artist centre and the way in which

we communicated. I have a very small understanding of the French language, so communication was

often a struggle. But many shared experiences, such as watching performances about respecting nature,

created a universal understanding and tied us together in that specific time and place.

It’s important that I was able to go somewhere where I did not fully speak the language, where I

had to struggle to understand what was going on. In that struggle, I was able to learn more about a

different culture, about politics, about environmental issues at a global scale. It sometimes takes one

removing themselves from a place to understand that place better.

The rest of our nearly one month adventure was spent in England. From this portion of the trip,

I have made life-long friendships with beekeepers, professors, artists, and activists. I visited the TATE

modern, met with a professor, Dr. David Haley, in Manchester who was introduced to me by the

Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison, prominent environmental artists and eco-activists whose

work holds great esteem all around the world. Through the trip and the conversations with people like

Dr. Haley, a lot of conceptual progress was made.

The accumulation of all of these interactions fed the creative flow and I returned to the states

full of inspiration and a vibrant outlook on the project. New ideas suggested I project outside of the

pedicab and throw out the iPad idea all together. I am, after all, a filmmaker, not a programmer, and

26

wanted to showcase my skills and successes in that department.

Upon arriving back in the states, the pedicab tests had started, as was mentioned above, and I

simultaneously began meeting with members of the community to interview them as the audio

component to the project. As these interviews developed, I formulated a questionnaire form (Appendix

B) that provided consistency in the asking process. It was through these interviews that I was able to

expand my own network of friends, colleagues, collaborators, and acquaintances in Santa Cruz. This

process was of huge importance to the piece because it allowed for the platform to pursue research

through an art practice. Through these conversations, there was a better understanding of certain

politicians' reasoning for wanting a desalination facility, which is to bring more immediate water in

drought time and to circulate more commerce into the area. By conversing with locals, there was more

clarity on how, in general, many people think about the river as a separated thing, mediated through

concrete. At the same time, there is a strong genuine interest to reconnect to that place.

In January, 2014, I attended an event in downtown Santa Cruz which was hosted by a few of the

river/environmental advocacy groups in the greater area. Here, I met a gentleman who was involved

with the Guerrilla Drive in Theater, a group of locals who had in the past, hosted many free,

guerrilla-style community film screenings underneath the Soquel Ave bridge in town. Amazed by the

potential of bringing people down by the river to collectively view a film and later discuss it, I was

completely sold on the idea of projecting Go As a River beneath the bridge. This was the community

connection I was looking for.

It wasn’t long before I was shooting footage for that site and doing test projections with the

intention of hosting an event underneath the bridge. Wanting to proceed in as professional a manner as

I could, I felt that I needed to request a special event permit from the city to “legitimize” the event.

However, upon request of a permit, I was denied outright with the explanation that even though the

space was public, it was not open to the public. I was further told that any exceptions to this rule could

27

cause “people with not so great behavior” to spend time beneath the river, which is something the city

is trying to avoid. By this, the woman was implying drug abusers and homeless folks. This offended me

because Go As a River could serve as a positive tool to unite people from the homeless community with

students and other locals, rather than create and othering and atmosphere of criminalization around

them.

Go As a River is not just a projection on a wall or beautiful imagery of the San Lorenzo River.

The piece is the process which includes those things. It is the interviews, the advocacy meetings, the

conversations that I had with people just as much as it was the event on April 12th, the participants of

that event, and everything in between.

IV. Audience Reception & Future Plans

Figure 5: Go As a River premiere underneath the Soquel Ave. Bridge, Santa Cruz, CA. Image by Lyle Troxell

On the night of Saturday, April 12th, Go As a River was installed and projected along the San

Lorenzo River, underneath the Soquel Avenue bridge. The 20’x20’ concrete bridge that secured the

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road above is an ideal projection space with its smooth, cold, gray surface. The installation lasted only

two hours, so as not to violate the noise ordinance. For those who were involved with the setup of the

piece, there was an air of tension circling the event, due to the fact that it had been denied the city

permit. So while looking over their shoulders a little more than necessary, the small group of four set

up a very mobile collection of equipment that consisted of two powered speakers, a long throw 5,000

lumen projector, a power generator, and a laptop to play the media. Despite that fear in hosting a not

entirely legal event, there were no disturbances or interactions with authority figures of any kind.

At its peak, Go As a River brought in about fifty people, the majority of whom are graduate students

from various UCSC departments, including HAVC, Film, SocDoc, and DANM. There were some

participants who came from within the community who had heard about the event through

word-of-mouth publicity. It was difficult to get the word out about this piece due to its legal ambiguity.

One woman in her 70’s came by herself because of her pure love for the river. She held my hand as she

told me how beautiful the video appeared. Conversely, as I was leaving, there was a homeless man who

responded with appreciation to the screening event, which he said he had watched from a far at the top

of the slope.

It is important to note these two individuals in particular who may be perceived as others in this

situation. They were set apart because of their age and clear separation of economic status. When the

homeless man complimented the projection, it seemed like a success to the piece in that it was

engaging with another person who could perceivably have knowledge and experience of the river. The

river does not care whether or not someone is of a different class or generation. It is a unifier in that

way. The river is what brings all people together and the event is what, at least on this particular

occasion, was bringing people together for the river.

Their presence gave me the opportunity to reflect on and consider the ways that they too may

have experienced the river and continue to experience it. That this man may call the river home means

29

he has a unique connection to it. Folks that are pushed outside of society because they have been

criminalized by a broken system come to rivers or forests or parks because they are the few remaining

spaces left to go to be accepted, or to try to get by. Once more, it is the San Lorenzo river that this man

decided to go to, it is his water just as much at it is anyone else's, if one can even claim ownership over

such a thing. People need it to survive, to restore, to feel safe, to feel home.

The elderly woman who was there said she had heard through word of mouth that the event was

taking place. When talking further about why she came, she said that she cared a lot about the river and

the wildlife along it. She has, one can imagine, seen the changes that the river has gone through over

the years; how it has varied in size and strength, carried giant logs all the way to the sea, washed out

houses, and slowed to a still and thin trickle. In thinking of this, one can only wonder how those stories

can continue to be activated to bring people closer to the San Lorenzo.

In general, the reception of the piece was very positive. Most remarks were situated around the

visuals: the meditative quality of the rippling water both drew you in and pushed you away. The ebb

and flow away from reality seemed to have been a good effect that was achieved by enticing one with

the soft views of the river, the mumbling of the voices, then pushing one back with the peaks of audio,

thus providing a chance for the viewer to once again situate themselves in the present, beside the river.

What became clear was that some sort of cinematic experience was shared by all who came that

evening. In order to reach the projection, one has to walk down a semi-steep slope. One participant

recalled the feeling of excitement they felt when, at first unsure if the event was still taking place,

walked from the top of the bridge down the slope, where they then began to catch the light of the

projection. It was in this moth-to-a-flame sort of enticement that makes me think that, at the very least,

the project had some success in bringing people’s attention to the river.

These two people mentioned above are important to the river because they understand a

different history than the students from campus. Students often end up as part of temporary

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establishments that only remain during the duration of one's degree. It is unfortunate that a permit was

denied during this event, because Go As a River becomes a greater success in the unlikely connections

it makes between people who again are all coming together for and because of the river.

Apart from the visuals themselves, the atmosphere created from this piece (and due in large part

to the chosen location of the project), was what most others responded to. One visitor said, “the

environment couldn’t have been any more perfect. Just being right beside the San Lorenzo, beside the

natural elements. At one point there was a barn owl that flew by the bridge. It just seemed right”. By

being able to engage with the river and projected video of The San Lorenzo, simultaneously, the

audience was wholly immersed in the work and in the conversations circling around this body of water.

Although a success as a “cinematic event”, many also commented that the audio of the piece

was sacrificed in some way by the social nature of the gathering. This did not come as a surprise to me

and I take it as a great learning experience. In order to accommodate a space like that, I would have

needed much more audio power by having stronger speakers, or a greater quantity of them. One person

remarked that they looked forward to an online version where they could spend more time with the

piece’s audio.

The following day was a rehearsal for Bloom Santa Cruz, an art function that showcased the

work of about 13 artists, myself included, on water and sustainability themed works. During that

rehearsal, a colleague commented on the fact that that the piece did not seem to make as much sense,

once removed from the river. It makes sense as a film, but once taken away from that location, it loses a

part of it that makes it whole.

This, again, was noted when the actual Bloom event took place the following weekend. A

spandex screen stretched the width of two 4-foot railings that barricaded pedestrians from the rock cliff

that jutted out into the ocean on the other side. A significantly more narrow projection than that on the

bridge, Go As a River made its run that night, but with many more people willing to interact with the

31

piece than in other instances. On one hand, the symbolic implications of people interacting with an

image of the river was considerably successful; however, to truncate the projection caused it to lack the

presence it commanded when on the bridge.

In its most recent iterations at the Thesis Exhibition at the Digital Arts Research Center

(DARC), the general public had the opportunity to engage with this piece in two ways: first, as it

existed in the form of documentation within the DARC and second, as another projection-event on the

back wall of the DARC building, underneath a pedestrian bridge.

While there weren’t quite as many folks at the Thesis Exhibition screening, the energy of the

group was nice, and positive feedback was given. With the exception of it not being along the San

Lorenzo River, this was a more successful screening in its clarity of the presentation. Being that the

event space was at the DARC, it was easier to power all of the electronics, and there was at no time any

threat of authority figures telling us to turn everything off. The use of electricity to power this piece is

in contradiction with the environmentalism I wish to advocate for, it's true. But that only goes to show

that I too am a part of that systemic problem. But it was through video projections that I chose to

convey my ideas.

The audio had been significantly improved since its premiere and was easier for people to hear.

One critique point from Camille Utterback was that I could have created listening stations along the

river for a greater length. This could have been a solution to my audio issues underneath the Soquel

Ave bridge. It is something I am still contemplating, and in future, more sculpting will need to happen

around the sound to make it easier for people to hear the very crucial interviews of the piece.

How does such an ephemeral piece live beyond the interviews and event? The documentation

was meant to provide context for the climax of the piece, the April 12th screening. The reality of it is

that the piece should have remained as the event, with secondary events as a falling action. In this

reflection, there is a success in the failure of the documentation to understand how to make this piece

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better as it lives in the future. For example, embracing that the city most likely wouldn't endorse future

events, but to continue to host the film in public spaces to generate even more conversation around the

river.

V. Conclusion

Looking back at the piece, it has its own successes and failures. While it did exceed in bringing

some folks together by the river, there could have been more dynamic ways in which the piece could

have pushed the politics of the piece, perhaps by somehow incorporating the fact that the event was

technically denied by the city. The piece cannot be metered on how many people attended the event

though, since what I believe actually would have stayed with people are the conversations that they

generated in themselves and between others at said events. The visuals, though, are an important

catalyst for this and it is through those projections and audio that work in tandem with the bridge space

that fostered that sense of place between viewers and the river. I anticipated my own activist side to

come out a bit more in this piece, which it did not. A failure on my own part, I can come away from this

knowing that I need to be much more assertive in maintaining my personality in my work and not being

afraid to do so. In this regard, it may be more appropriate to consider the piece a social-political

happening instead of an environmental work, even if that was the basis of the project's origins.

Through the piece, some of the questions that were originally asked in earlier proposals, such

as: “What perspectives do we have of the San Lorenzo River or the Watershed, the lifeblood of our

city?” were answered. The general impression from the interviews and conversations is that the river is

something that people care very deeply about, but that, through human control is in a state of need.

Many perceive the San Lorenzo as an important part of this community, but could not articulate why. It

was then explained that the San Lorenzo is a major part of this town because it is the source of water, it

is the unique thing that brings this whole town together.

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This paper begins with a quote by Buddhist scholar and peace advocate Thich Nhat Hanh. He is

also responsible for the title of the piece, Go As a River, another saying made to enforce the connection

between one's self and these changing and swift bodies of water. While not mentioned in the body of

this paper, it is important to end on ideals that run throughout my overall outlook on life. Taking from

the Buddhist way of thinking, we are all connected to one another and therefore are a part of the water

(which is a part of us). Need we be reminded, that we are actually made up of 70-90% water. In

respecting the water we are respecting ourselves, keeping ourselves healthy. To have this kind of

respect, we must be looking at the past to see how the future can be influenced, while still living in the

present.

The present, however, is very grim. Companies are still buying up land to install desalination

facilities and California is in a major drought. On May 29th 2014, an article by columnist Paul Rogers

was published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel discussing the approved plans for a desalination plant in San

Diego (santacruzsentinel.com). Even though Santa Cruz suspended its plans indefinitely, other parts of

the coast are working to bring water to dry areas. There are other alternatives to which water can be

made, such as by collecting rain water. In the coming years, the ways this country plans for the long

term future are going to be critical, but action needs to happen now. Go As a River is only one piece of

the conversation, but it is push towards a greater awareness to extreme need for deeper connection and

respect to the rivers and to the planet.

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VI. Works Cited

Barnett, Cynthia. Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis. Boston: Beacon, 2011.

Print.

Branden, Joseph, and Jonathan Walley. Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005. Print.

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VII. Appendices

Appendix A: Early Proposal

As artists, we would like to marry science study and art making to engage the community and

address these very complex problems. To approach this issue we will interview the experts on this topic

in both the arts and sciences. This includes members of the city water commission, environmental

scientists, environmental lawyers, vocal advocates for alternatives, and prominent artists in the

environmental arts movement. We would like to gather their perspectives and stories to produce a

poly-vocal interactive experience that both engages and informs the public.

The framework for our art will be based on ideologies from people such as Jane Jacobs, Lewis

Mumford, in addition to Buddhist thought and pre-Christian beliefs and mythologies. Everything is part

of a whole, but without those individual pieces, the whole would not be. We plan to create a series of

medium-sized projects - all of which are interrelated - to help illustrate the things we discover along

this expedition Part of the art installation we are working to create will entail a non-linear documentary

video installation that can be projected on to various water and structural surfaces (like bridges and

dams).

The videos can visually represent the information we have been collecting in addition to

showcasing community voices/ opinions on the issues: communication between local government and

the community; our relationship to our resources, nature, and the systems we have put in places to

maintain life on this planet. Further, a video installation can be made from all of projections where are

done under the major bridges connecting from one side of Santa Cruz to the other. The point here being

to emphasize ways in which the river unites and is deeply integral to this community.

A large component to environmental well-being is awareness. We are at a point where we are

living well beyond our means and have taken to making machines that in turn manufacture the

resources we need to survive. But then what is our relationship to those resources - manufactured or

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untouched - in our daily lives? It is of great interest to me to discover what sorts of association the

community has it our local water sources. What perspectives do we have of the San Lorenzo River or

the Watershed, the lifeblood of our city? Conversely, what memories or perspectives might the river

itself hold? How can it be viewed outside of commodity or “nature-thing”? Through experimentations

in filming both the community members as they interact with the river and the river itself, we hope to

get a better understanding of these questions and to uncover some greater, untold history of this place

we currently call home.

Appendix B: Sample Questionnaire

Memories

What is your earliest memory of the river?

Do any stories of or around the San Lorenzo River come to mind? Perhaps stories that someone

else has told you or stories of your own experiences?

How have those stories changed your perspective of the river, if at all?

Impressions

What does the river look like today?

What does the river smell like? taste? touch? sound?

Would you play in this river?

Does the river look healthy? What makes it so or not so?

What do you think it feels like to be the river?

What do you think the river looked like 25, 50, 100 years ago?

Politics

What do you know about the SLR?

What is something you learned about the SLR that may have surprised you?

How do you use the river? (the water? the bridges? a place to think?)

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What parts of the river do you rely on?

What is your relationship to the watershed? How do you interact with it?

What do you think the river would say if it could speak to us?

What is the one word that you would use to describe the river?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I, _________________________________ give my permission to Danielle Williamson to use(printed name)

my recorded voice and photograph for her river art piece, Go as a River. I understand that my voice

may be used in her project, my photograph exclusively for public documentation, and that the project

will be seen at public events around Santa Cruz, California, her artist website, as well as in any

festivals, exhibits, and other media events that she may submit her piece to.

____ yes, I would like my name listed in the credits of the art piece as a participant.

Appendix C: Rejection email for event permit from Santa Cruz City

Hi J.

Danielle and I met yesterday to discuss her proposal for a video/audio art display under the Soquel Bridge.

I had met earlier with Andrew Eisenberg, City Parks Supervisor, regarding this request. He informed me that this area is not open to the public. It is a maintenance road only and is posted as closed. Since it is not a reservable area, it would not be an appropriate location.

Danielle and I discussed other areas, none of which will meet her needs.

With that in mind, I wanted to let you know that this project will not be scheduled or be issued a permit.

I have included Danielle and Andrew on this email so all involved are in the loop.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

–-------------------- Special Event Coordinator

City of Santa Cruz/City Manager Department

–----------- @cityofsantacruz.co m

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