The Process

This project was created by students over the course of 14 weeks in the course Art 160/City Planning 190, Ghosts and Visions. The course was taught by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of the UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab and founder of Love the Bulb.

The students came from 10 different departments ranging from Art Practice to Architecture to Computer Science to Public Health to Urban Studies, and the process was shaped by students’ particular strengths and interests. All students lent their expertise or took on specialized roles. The final products are shared achievements in teamwork.

Site
Students came to know the Bulb through sensory immersion exercises at the site as well as readings in planning documents and regional history. Repeated visits deepened students’ understanding of park conditions, users, navigation, as well as immediate background on construction materials found at the Bulb. Students considered the sight lines in the landscape accessible from a single point as they debated the site selection for their monuments that would also tell their stories. 

Monuments/Art Installations
In order to develop ideas for art installations at the site, students began to think about form and function by experimenting with small interventions in their own neighborhoods such as leaving gifts or signs. We visited the Rosie the Riveter memorial in Richmond, a few miles from the Bulb, and studied other examples of memorials and land art. We considered how to capture a passersby’s attention and or create a purposeful invitation with our work. Students proposed and refined designs leading up to a final build period.

Mosaics and Augmented Reality
Students worked with artist-instructors Lynn Jones and Lisa Norman to design and install a mosaic artwork at each site that related to each story’s extractive industry. Using the mosaic as the portal image, students created an augmented reality slide show or video with the Artivive app and Bridge content management tool. The augmented reality served to deepen the on-site experience and ranged from a brief animation to a slideshow of historic photos to short clips of archival video.

Historical Research and Essay
Students identified materials locatable at the Bulb and made connections with local extractive histories. Through compiling archival material, students further teased out specific stories about explosives manufacturing, immigrant labor, World War II industrialization, food processing, shipping, brickmaking, transportation, container shipping, and the oil industry, and the histories of racial discrimination and segregation that wind through all of them.

Audio Narrative
Students converted their historical research into short narrative pieces. Repeated oral presentations on site helped students identify the key components of the story. Students learned to write for the ear, edited and recorded their personal audio segments, and collaboratively discussed the content for the beginning/end of the tour. Anticipating the visitor’s path through the Bulb, students coordinated wayfinding instructions in the audio with physical markers on-site.

Website
Throughout, students practiced documenting for a public-facing audience. Like the physical tour, the website required the orchestration of various components into a unified, cohesive user experience.

Tour
Throughout the semester, we considered the production of the tour a kind of “devised theater.” By this we mean we used a creative process of iterative improvisation to finally land upon a “score” or script for a “performance.” In this “performance,” park visitors are participants in a shared experience created by the interaction of their own bodies and memories with the site, the audio story, the art installations, and the augmented reality. This way of working is inspired in part by the work of choreographer Anna Halprin and her husband the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who combined their disciplines to design both places and performances.

Students discussed the flow of the experience, gift-giving, hospitality, and how to play with the visitor. Drawing from the semester’s stock of imagery and themes, many students collaborated in the design of collateral related to the public unveiling of the tour, including maps, invitations, and flyers.