SoEx Off-Site, a series of major commissioned public art projects investigating diverse strategies for exploring and mapping public space, features new work by Ledia Carroll (SF), Glowlab (NY), Packard Jennings (OAK), Neighborhood Public Radio (SF/OAK), Christian Nold (UK), Jeannene Przyblyski (Bureau of Urban Secrets) (SF), and Rebar (SF/OAK).

SoEx Offsite is a series of off-site public art and related programs investigating artists’ strategies for exploring and mapping public space. These strategies can be traced to the Situationist’s derive, the practice of drifting through urban space, and psychogeography, the study of the effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The year-long series features eight projects utilizing strategies such as simple acts of walking and note taking, to projects employing high-tech and technological apparatuses as a means to disseminate geographical and historical information, to performances, actions, or events. Several projects involve the audience’s participation, enabling the public to engage in acts of urban mapping and reflect on their own experiences in public space. The newly commissioned SoEx Offsite projects were chosen by Southern Exposure’s curatorial committee and staff from a pool of almost 300 international submissions.

ABOUT THE COMMISSIONED PROJECTS

Ledia Carroll uses a field line chalker to draw the perimeter of Lago Dolores, a former freshwater lake, in her Mission Lake Project. The full perimeter outlined with a blue chalk line will mark the shoreline of a now vanished lake in the Mission District that stretched roughly over a five-block diameter from (what is now) Van Ness to Guerrero and 15th to 20th Streets. Following the still visible ancient depression of the lake, Carroll’s graffiti chalk line will make the boundary of Lago Dolores apparent to the public. Mission Lake Project is a social project encouraging Mission District residents, gallery visitors, and tourists to take a walk in a place you may already know to see something not seen before but is true. A lakeside barbeque, perimeter bike race, and guided tours of the underground waterways round out the project.

Glowlab, a New York-based artist-run production and publishing lab directed by Christina Ray, will run NOSO a real-world platform for the temporary disengagement from social networks. The public is invited to participate in a citywide micro-intervention by participating in NO Events with NO Friends and thus creating the desired NO SOcial networking connections. These “NO” events, called NOSOs, will take place in designated cafés, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants – whose identities remain unknown to one another – agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet, and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another “Friend” is present in the space. With the growth of online activity such as blogging, vlogging, podcasting, skyping, texting, IMing, dating, trading, buying, and selling, NOSO offers an oasis to the 21st-century Web 2.0 junkie. Anyone may participate in the project by registering online.

Packard Jennings will design “fake” lottery tickets for his project Lottery Tickets. As a prize, each “Scratcher” will have a unique message that pertains to the unusual and simple pleasures of the local community as told by residents and shop owners. Jennings’ artist-designed lottery tickets will be handed out with other Lottery purchases or upon request from local stores in four different districts of San Francisco. Through short prose and drawn symbols, the scratch-off tickets will direct the participant’s attention to a local event, both accessible and free. The intention is to transform an instant of personal greed into a moment of contemplation about the local environment, community, and culture.

Neighborhood Public Radio will produce Radio Cartography an innovative radio project involving a diverse group of artists, Mission District residents, youth, and Bay Area audiences in the production of media-based public art projects and original radio programming that investigates our experiences in urban space. Radio Cartography will take the form of a home base for the station in a small storefront hosted by SoEx, a portable radio unit that will migrate throughout the Mission District neighborhood, and three distinct projects entitled Talking Homes, City Tours, and State of Mind Stations. Radio Cartography seeks to investigate strategies for exploring and mapping public space using the medium of radio in innovative and non-traditional ways. The project attempts to merge technology-based endeavors with more conventional tactics of walks and performances. This project will launch in November of 2006 and will run through spring 2006. The resulting programming will be accessible on NPR’s website and at locations where distinct portions of the projects take place. This project is generously supported by a grant from the Creative Work Fund.

Hailing from the United Kingdom, Christian Nold will host a series of intensive workshops with local residents in which participants borrow a ‘bio mapping’ device to go for a walk. Bio Mapping is a research project exploring new ways that individuals can make use of gathered information about our own bodies. Instead of security technologies that are designed to control our behavior, this project envisages new tools that allow people to selectively share and interpret their own bio data. The ‘bio-mapping’ device measures wearers’ Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their physical / geographical location using a GPS. The data will be downloaded and used to create an “emotion map” that locates the varying levels of arousal during their walk. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualize where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

Jeannene Przyblyski and the Bureau of Urban Secrets is producing Comings and Goings: 2 Backwards Journeys Thru Land’s End, a self-guided walking tour weaving together Victorian pleasure, military history, ecology of flora and fauna, and geology. Following the Coastal Trail from Sutro Heights to Sea Cliff—and back again—the 3-mile journey reconceives a narrow band of open space wedged between city and ocean. Each participant will be equipped with a reversible way-finding guide and an audio tour, downloadable as a Podcast from the SoEx website or available as a cd-rom at sites to be announced. The point of embarkation will determine the particular story line that the participant will follow—each roundtrip backwards journey (Sutro Heights to Sea Cliff or Sea Cliff to Sutro Heights) touches upon some of the same moments but casts them differently, reveling in the sensation of history doubling back on itself to color the present with a past that constantly shifts—like the ground beneath your feet.

Rebar, an open source art collective led by Matthew Passmore, Blaine Merker, and John Bela, will collaborate with Snap Out Of It (SOOI) in COMMONspace, an exploration of San Francisco's privately-owned public spaces. Using the Planning Department's map describing the location of fourteen unique sites, COMMONspace will investigate these spaces in terms of accessibility, surveillance, and other explicit rules. REBAR and SOOI will activate these public spaces through a series of paraformances: performance actions that test each site's implicit social codes and engage public participants. Paraformances will begin as playful actions by single individuals and culminate in full-scale 'flash mob'-style occupations that increasingly engage the attention and participation of accidental audiences. Documentation of the site evaluations and paraformances will be published on-line to raise awareness of these spaces and inspire debate regarding their role and function as a part of San Francisco's commons.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Creative Work Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and Southern Exposure’s Members.