Imagine entering a large communal space in a city and finding a digital light and color display board like the one in Times Square or in Piccadilly Circus But instead of showing advertisements, this billboard is programmed to respond to questions by the people who see it. For example, in answer to "Where are we?" the mural zooms from the stratosphere down towards Earth across the North American continent to San Francisco Bay, then through layers of fog and bright sun to the buildings of Union Square, and continues underground through water pipes, electrical and sewer lines to the geological strata beneath the exact site of the billboard and its viewers. Using the multi-layered stream of digital information already available from NASA satellite feeds, it could investigate questions such as:

• What would happen to the watershed if it rained for 40 days and 40 nights?
  
  
• What if a volcano exploded through the earth’s crust in the middle of the bay?
  
  
• How will the Pacific Plate move during the next 20 years?
  
  
• What does rush hour 1999 look like and what will it look like in the year 2010?

With new interactive programs using mapping, topographies, and animation, the mural could explore a visual interface of information never before seen together. Storing data from the past and projecting it into the future, using moving and still images, we could literally play with the analytical as well as the sensory database of information we already have at our fingertips. As isolated individuals, we sit in front of our own computer screens accessing information about the rest of the world via the Internet. This public interactive mural would provide a unique collective experience of sharing and interpreting new visions of our life on this planet.

As an artist, my work has been about discovering new ways to see the world around me. I have been inspired by the vision from space since the early 1970’s when Skylab sent back its first images. I used NASA photographs as sources for large paintings in the 1970’s. While teaching at San Francisco State University’s Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art, I created a theater performance called MACRO/MICRO using satellite images and plate tectonics information. Satellite images appear in my photo collages and are the subject of recent paintings. But now that it is possible to access satellite images directly, I want to create a playful public visual experience, in the hope that we might come to a more imaginative and intelligent awareness of our environment arid our place in it. In his book, LIVES OF A CELL, Lewis Thomas said:

"Although we are by all odds the most social of all social animalsÑ-more interdependent, more attached to each other, more inseparable in our behavior than beesÑ-we do not often feel our conjoined intelligence. Perhaps however we are linked in circuits for the storage processing and retrieval of information, since this appears to be the most basic and universal of all human enterprises. It may be our biological function to build a certain kind of Hill. We have access to all the information of the biosphere... the circuitry seems to be there, even if the current is not always on."
(P.14-15, LIVES OF A CELL, Viking, 1974)

Why not put some circuitry to work, and learn from the process of seeking?

If interested in this project please contact: sallyweare@hotmail.com Telephone: 707.527.6002