My largest project, STAT-US, has a completely separate website, please visit it here. Below is the current synopsis of the project.
Over the span of five months, San Diego-based artist Tim Schwartz will travel across America making week-long stops at historical societies, art institutions, and local archives to engage with communities and their archived pasts. In each location he will work with local volunteers and archivists to gather and represent data that is emblematic of their community. In so doing he will activate discussions focused on how communities can take hold of their own information in new and dynamic ways, and at the same time, create a system for comparing and contrasting the various communities visited.
The STAT-US mobile research laboratory will be the primary point of engagement with the public. This laboratory is a 22 foot 1957 Airstream trailer that has been converted into a research space. The laboratory will also act as an archive for the project, storing all of the information collected in various formats.
This project builds upon Schwartz’s previous work in exploring the relationship between information and culture. One previous piece, Command Center, uses antique analog gauges to visualize the prominence of specific terms from the New York Times archives (1851-2008), suggesting the cultural preoccupation of Americans at different points in history. Expressing historical trends in a physical form will be one of the techniques used inside STAT-US: over two hundred analog gauges installed in the trailer will enable the potential for expressing innumerable semantic and statistical relationships within communities. Geohistoriography is similar in content (the perspective of America as based on the New York Times archive) but is represented in distorted maps, whereby the scale of a country is directly proportional to the number of references that nation received in the New York Times. A similar mapping of information will be incorporated into the piece: custom maps and information visualizations will be produced for each community visited.