Most of my final official day of SCANZ is taken up with a hike up the lowest reaches of Mt Taranaki with C5’s Steve Durie and Bruce Gardner. Along for the ride are Jim, Trudy, Ken, Xiu Li, and I. In the carpark, Bruce shows us the four satellites overhead on the small screen of his hand-held GPS receiver, and there’s some Q&A which really gets me thinking about the fact that what we are about to be engaged in is, essentially, radio navigation. We eventually get directions to the unsignposted waterfall from the DOC people after they have dispatched a few telephonic queries to local Iwi. We embark on our map-making exercise, and there’s a split sense of being both completely grounded in the richly textured sub-alpine greenery, all parasitic plants and small native leaves and great grey-green mossy beards dripping with moisture in a thick milk of mist, with mud on my trainers and friendly hellos to trampers coming back in the opposite direction, and also high above anything which could be personified, and the tension between the two holds throughout the walk, even when getting whacked in the face with sticks and working out exactly where to put my weight on the slippery stones so I don’t fall head first into the ice cold river. It’s a different way of being in space, and the experience is almost analogous to a less passive version of seeing your own street in Google Earth while sitting in the living room, but without that slightly unnerving feeling of submitting to the ideology of a technologised gods eye view, the idea of astral travel re-envisaged as the ultimate Panopticon. Something else, perhaps quite an obvious thing, about the active investigative research space of SCANZ, and its participant artists’ investigative uses of technology is really crystalised for me in this walk up the mountain, when it becomes abundantly clear how many electronic devices of various kinds we have with us (at least one still camera each, various audio and video recording devices, as well as the GPS receivers), and also that there is no sense that these devices are creating a barrier, or flattening out the environment into an image, as they would be in a more touristic context. Instead of encouraging us to watch the world like a television, the heightened listening and seeing and sensing going on around me is facilitated by these devices to narrow attention down to tiny sounds and extend it out to long durational sequences. Xiu Li, totally enraptured by the trees, has wandered off with her video camera and is nowhere to be seen. We stop and wait, and by the time she appears Ken has spotted a Wood Pigeon sitting on a branch, watching us watching it.
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