EUGENE, Ore. -- (Nov. 12, 2009) -- Artist Teri Rueb creates large-scale, outdoor, interactive installations that utilize global positioning systems (GPS) technology and digital sound. She will discuss her work during the lecture, "Network Landscapes," at noon on Friday, Nov. 20, at the University of Oregon in Portland.
Rueb's instillations incorporate issues of architecture, urbanism and landscape while incorporating themes like the human body, memory, technology, culture and sound. She intends for her work to "engage the body and senses, and allow for visitors to encounter and experience place and people."
The lecture is part of the "Machine in the Garden" digital arts studio class and lecture series. The class and lecture series allows an interdisciplinary look into digital arts through subjects such as landscape architecture and ecological issues. Colin Ives, UO professor of art, said Rueb's work directly relates to the work the class and lectures aim to explore.
"The direction of her work addresses issues of ecology through technology," Ives said. "Her work is smart and poetic and I wanted to bring her to the dialogue."
"Core Samples" is an installation created by Rueb in 2007. It is a GPS data-based audio tour that incorporates history, along with past and present landscape, of Spectacle Island at Boston harbor in Massachusetts. Rueb received the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in the Digital Music category for the piece. For the piece, the experience is comprised of sound, heard through headphones, in response to visitors' physical movement in the landscape.
"Sound content shifts with the changing elevation contours of the path system, suggesting the vertical layers of a metaphoric core sample," said Rueb. "It was one of the most personally transforming projects, there were so many different and competing meanings at the site, encompassing a variety of communities in both the past and the present."
Rueb is an associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is completing her doctoral degree at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where her research addresses constructions of landscape and subjectivity in mobile network culture. Her latest work, "Elsewhere: Anderswo," is located on two sites in Niedersachsen, Germany - one at the Oldenburg botanical garden and the other in a farming village of Neuenkirchen.
The free event is open to the public and is sponsored by UO's Digital Arts Program. The lecture will take place on the first floor event room in the White Stag Block, 70 NW Couch St. "Machine in the Garden" is funded by Intel's People and Practices Group.