ART 160 /CY PLAN 190 : Ghosts and Visions: Using augmented reality and physical installations to tell history and envision futures
Course Description
In this Humanities Studio course you will research local histories and use methods that may include installations in public space, augmented reality, and audio storytelling to convey what you learn. The study site will be an old shoreline landfill called the Albany Bulb, and you will investigate both the site itself and use it as a vista point to consider histories including Ohlone land use, 19th-century dynamite manufacturing, World War II industry, global container shipping, and Bay Area unhoused communities. You will do archival research and consider questions of the best technologies–or non-technologies–to use to reveal the past and point to better futures. You will engage in collaborative group work and create work that will be used by the general public.
Creative Discovery Course Grant Experience
In Monument to Extraction: Walking California History at the Albany Bulb, UC Berkeley students have created an outdoor journey through the history of California at this mostly uncapped landfill, which is now a public park where people walk their dogs and birdwatch amidst piles of rubble. By interpreting the materials of the dump underfoot in the context of regional and global flows of raw materials and consumption, the students seek to reveal rather than erase the complex interactions of humans and landscape.
Visitors will be invited to take a 1.5 mile-long audio tour that will lead them through an accidental outdoor museum of discarded energy-intensive building materials. Along the way, augmented reality and art installations will link these materials to histories of extraction that are embodied in landscapes visible across spectacular vistas of San Francisco Bay.