NONPULSED TERRAIN

Alex Cruse / Oakland, CA, USA — Jan 17, 2020

Tending to themes of radical cartography, NONPULSED TERRAIN acts as an interactive media assemblage, braiding themes of State-sponsored violence, place-making, embodiment, and the use of VR as a training method in warfare.
NONPULSED TERRAIN allows the user to navigate an aerial patchwork of scraped topographic data from geographic sites which have inspired virtual training theaters for the United States military. By allowing the user to assume an aerial vantage, this proposal elaborates on ideas of perspectivalism and terrorism; its textual and sonic artifacts modulate, (re)combining musical traditions from a given location according to one’s place on the ›map.‹

This proposal also questions: how are landscapes produced through, to use Deleuze’s terms, ›pulsed‹ and ›nonpulsed‹ time (the latter referring to that which is resistant to temporal measurement and, consequently, reproducibility)? Counter to the presentation of VR environments sites as endlessly replicable, undifferentiated voids — canvasses upon which large-scale violence may be activated — this project’s aleatoric nature complicates ideas of situated knowledge in physical and virtual realms.

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