Introducing Myself - Tour Idea


Message posted by Trevor on July 06, 2004 at 18:26:58 PST:

Hi All,

I've been hanging out on this and other lists for quite some time and have learned a great deal from all of the incredibly knowledgeable people on this list. I felt like it was time to formally introduce myself and describe what I am doing here.

My name is Trevor and I’m an artist and a geographer. Right now I’m working on the connections between incarceration and military activity, and am using Groom Lake/Nellis as one case study and Pelican Bay prison here in California as the other. Some people talk about the Military Industrial Complex, others about the Prison Industrial Complex --- I’m talking about the connections between the two. I will be working on this project, which I intend to turn into a book, over the next three years or so. I would absolutely love to talk to many people on this list about their own research at some point in the not-too-distant future. I have talked at professional geography conferences about how much “academic” geographers have to learn from the research that many of you have done and continue to do. Keep up the good work!

More immediately, I am working on an art project about the Nellis Area. I think that the sorts of images on websites like Dreamlandresort, LazyRanch, Bluefire, and Desert Secrets all capture a really interesting kind of aesthetic that I’m interested in. I know that there are tons of incredible photographers and recordists on this list who know much more about this topic than I can every hope to learn, but your advice has been and continues to be invaluable. I really appreciate how generous people on this list are with their advice and knowledge. If anyone on this list would consider collaborating with me to produce and exhibit some of this material, I’d love to talk about what that might entail. My email is at the bottom of this message.

As a part of this larger collection of material I’m producing, I’m interested in taking some folks from the Bay Area on a “tour” of the Tikaboo Valley, with stops at TTR and Tikaboo Peak. I’ve been hanging around these areas for about a year and researching the area for about a year and a half, and it’s amazing to me that even though “Area 51” is so famous, most people really don’t know a damn thing about it. I see news reports all the time placing it in New Mexico or in Arizona.

My question to the group is this: have any of you heard of people doing similar “tours” of the area in the past? I know that the Center for Land Use Interpretation (www.clui.org) has done one (they’re a big influence on my artwork), and I also know that there have been some ‘flying-saucer’ type tours in the past. I wouldn’t charge any money at all to go on these tours, just mostly getting people out there. I’m wondering if there’s any reason that I haven’t thought of that this might be a bad idea…

Ok, sorry for rambling on and on here. Just wanted to say hi and give people a ‘heads-up’ on what I’m doing here and the kinds of projects I’m working on.

If you’d like to contact me off-list about any of this, feel free to write to me at echo_locution@hotmail.com .

Thanks
Trevor


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