BNMI Alumni

Paula Levine’s
Shadows from Another Place

Paula Levine is a locative media artist who has completed two residencies at the Banff New Media Institute working “The Wall,” the second project in her series Shadows from Another Place, which maps hot spots in the Middle East and then super-imposes them on North American cities. Her goal is to translate the political unrest over 7,000 miles away into local terms using technology people carry with them everyday – cell phones and GPS devices.

For “The Wall,” Levine travelled to Israel and Palestine researching the impact of the security/barrier wall on people living within towns along the route in the West Bank region. She focused on a short 15 mile segment of the structure between Abu Dis in the south and Qalandiya in the North. Carrying a camera embedded with a gps device, she was able to georeference all sound, photographs and videos to the precise locations they were taken.

The wall began being built by Israel in 2002 as a security measure against suicide bombers and killings in public spaces in Israel. It ranges from 11 feet to 22 feet in height and separates Palestine occupied regions from Israeli occupied regions in the West Bank. Families and communities are being divided from social, economic, health and educational services, making travel from home to work to school difficult and often impossible.

“Geographically, this region is very difficult to understand,” says Levine. As a Jewish person living in the diaspora, Levine ventures to say “from the outside, it's hard to comprehend how radically the country is being remapped as the wall draws its own borders. Lives and land are both being ruptured and changed. [In this region] the normal flow of everyday life will never be the same as long as the wall, and the accompanying system of controls such as barrier gates, checkpoints, earth mounds blocking roads, and the restrictive access to roads based on license plates, remain enforced and in place.”

Levine feels there is a huge gap between what is presented in the media and what is actually happening in this region. Her goal with this project is to close that gap and in a visual sense collapse the geographic distance between the outside world and the West Bank.

Soon Levine will launch www.thewall.net, where the 15 mile section of the wall will be super-imposed on San Francisco, New York, Vancouver and Montreal. Users will be able to explore the area online by clicking on the check points Levine visited to view the video and photographs she captured. More importantly, people will be able to walk the route the wall would potentially take, were it to be built in their city, creating, as she describes, “moments of fusion between two places meeting.” From a mobile device (cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone, or GPS unit) people will be able to receive the video and photographs from the check points and imagine how their daily lives would be disrupted by the wall, if it was in their city. Levine wants the experience to be literally like travelling the West Bank, without having to leave your hometown.

“The Wall” has been produced through a Co-Production residency at the Banff New Media Institute.

“The Banff Centre gives life to ideas,” says Levine. “Every moment you can turn and have a conversation where you realize anything is possible.” Levine works closely with a graphic designer Tyler Jordan and programmer David Kretz to create the website. “In two weeks I can accomplish work here that would have taken six months.

"Residencies at Banff allow for consistent and extended conversations . It is such a gift to be here within a community of wide diversity and intensity. The Banff environment creates opportunities for experimentation and opportunities bring projects to completion. This is essential for moving ideas to final works and there are few places that provide opportunities and critical engagements that can enable both to happen. Banff is a treasure and the people who work here are extraordinary."

“San Francisco < - > Baghdad” was the first project in Shadows from Another Place. It overlays the locations of bomb and missile landings in Baghdad (March, 2003) on San Francisco.

Currently, Levine is an associate professor at San Francisco State University in Conceptual Information Arts. In the past two years, her work has been shown at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design; University Art Gallery at California State University; The Mohr Gallery at the Community School of Music and Art in Mountain View California; Practicing Jews: Art, Identity and Culture conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Semaine Internationale Desc Arts in Evry, France; ISEA 2006 conference in San Jose; Almost Perfect Residency at The Banff Centre; and the Santa Rosa County Museum in California. She has been published in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.