Fish Viewing Room, McNary Dam, Washington. CLUI Morgan Cowles Archive Photo
Monday, February 20, 2012, 5:30 PM | Center for Creative Photography 108
Lecture: Anthropogeomorphological Extrapolations: The Center for Land Use Interpretation on the Ground.
In this lecture Coolidge will take the audience on a tour through a range of built landscapes, in an attempt to extract meaning from the pits and piles that surround us.
Matthew Coolidge is the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), which has been constructing stories out of the intentional and incidental architectures of America since 1994. CLUI, a research organization exploring landscape issues, engages in projects such as Event Marker, a series of signs similar to roadside historical markers that are erected to commemorate significant but obscure land-use phenomena like bomb test sites and film locations. CLUI also executes exhibitions such as The Best Dead Mall in America and A View into the Pipe (an excavation exposing Los Angeles’ main sewer pipe, offering a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the metropolis). Other activities include guided bus tours and interpretive programs as well as initiatives like the Land Use Database, an online resource of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States designed to educate and inform the public about our landscape as it is altered to accommodate the complex demands of society. Neither an environmental group nor an art collective, CLUI resists categorization by maintaining a diverse, eclectic program of activities that invite a closer examination of “humankind’s interaction with the Earth’s surface.” CLUI is the lead agency for the establishment of the American Land Museum, a network of exhibition sites in various interpretive zones across the country, which together form a dynamic portrait of the national landscape.
