Participants:

Christina McPhee creates large digital chromogenic prints from medium format documentary photography, digital video, digital photos, and drawings made on site at seismically active zones in central California: from Carrizo Plains about 150 miles north of Los Angeles -- called the Cadillac of San Andreas Fault geomorphology -- to nearby Parkfield, where a 6.0 quake on September 28, 2004 has delivered a rich trove of geomorphologic data.

In the online diaries, Christina McPhee -- in collaboration with writer Jeremy Hight and information designer Sindee Nakatani -- draws from live, micro-seismic measurements and compiles hourly updates into number sequences that collide with an archived seismic database from the recent quake. The diaries are a live communication from a continuously active seismic landscape. Like fragmentary pages from a cinematic notebook, the data triggers Flash movies in which sound, text and visual narratives juxtapose the intangible, intimate and local sense of place with the “big data reality� of the continuous seismic activity in California imagined as a darker take on the romantic American western landscape. Layers of fiction trigger from the disturbances, much like the way human memory reconfigures itself after shock.

Related links: talk about it in our forum | Watch Webcast