Environmental Communications [1980] _ Lost Issue _ Living with The Land
Gucci Bytes
For this submission I was contacted by Christian Pepper and Colter Wehmeier with a pretty bizarre journal idea. Christian had this idea for a “post physical artifact” exhibit that would be documented in a physical book referring to digital files that were found on an archaic Gucci Byte drive. At the end of the day I took this as an investigation into the realm of Para-Fiction and Fetishization of content found in the architectural discourse. I was contacted because of some collages I had made a few years back that took landscape aerials and extruded land masses out of physical bounding boxes that could be defined only from a non-human view. In an attempt to situate these works in a physical artifact from the past I was immediately reminded of the Environmental Communication collective out of the 1960/70s Los Angeles scene. The last catalog of content and slides they produced was distributed in 1979, so why cant I be the designer to produce the first 1980 catalog. Around that time, 1980, the world was about to be introduced to the techno revolution of consumer electronics, see Blade Runner and tour Disney’s EPCOT Center… wow… the future.
Alluding to EPCOT’s Land Pavilion, I titled the front cover issue “Living with The Land”. I conscious did so in a post reflective manner that takes advantage of the angst between the techno landscape of limitless advancements and the finite land we have here on earth. The decision to age the page and make it water damaged was more so to show the artifact was neglected and not praised by those who possessed such a rare manual.
The inside page is a directory of sorts that previews the articles that can be found in the issue.
”Terraforms and the Encounters of The Unknown”
“Pilgrimage & Sacred Fields”
“Feralands”
For more information on Environmental COmmunications, check out this Hyperallergic interview
[The Collective that Radicalized Urban Design in the 1970s with Slides]
In the 1960s and 70s a radical group of bonefied cool cats interested in the built environment of Los Angeles redefined what we refer to today as “urban Ecology”. The used photography as a form of media to mass document and distribute their ideas of what seemed to be underrepresented in the academic institutions claiming to teach architecture and urban studies. As a collective, the group of architects, photographers, artists, friends, significant others of those individuals and anyone else in the group documented all of the happenings they encountered in the area.