Renée Green: Code: Survey

Renée Green’s ongoing residency, Pacing, continues in CRC/bookshop with an installation of Code: Survey (2006); in this version, the focus is on the online dimension of Green’s public art commission for the California Department of Transportation. Code: Survey was developed for the Morphosis-designed Caltrans District VII Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles as an architectural and digital installation. Whereas the building houses a grid of 168 glass panels of images related to transportation, each panel engraved with an alphanumeric code, the website is its searchable counterpart of photographs, codes and an index of keywords. Images, texts, film footage and audio from interviews with Caltrans employees as well as native Californians intermingle in Green’s website as a dynamic archive that undermines and complicates our expectation of searching any form of place.

Code: Survey is permanently hosted by the California Department of Transportation’s website at: Code: Survey

Artist's Text

Code: Survey exists as a process allowing temporary imaginary inhabitation of, or passage through, an unknowable place. In this incarnation, the process has been applied to what is known as California, although other locations can be used to yield different possibilities.

How might one attempt to know a place? How might one encounter a place imagined to be known?

The surveying process in this instance demonstrates a form of tracing used by a highly sensitive team of polycarpous and polyglot polyhistorians, who over three years developed a methodology that encompassed searching, collecting and exploring a variety of clues based on spoken or sung words, written words and keywords, sounds, films and images.  Photos, images, diagrams and maps provide an index of previous moments or intentions, even if their contents aren’t easily identifiable or understood by the time they are encountered.  They can be examined nonetheless. Speculations can form, as well as informed attempts to decipher.  Codes were assigned. Stories multiplied. The process of assembly can continue in one’s imagination.

Code: Survey can be located as a website and became accessible internationally in 2006.  A physical version of Code: Survey, made as a structure of glass, film and steel, can be found in the Caltrans Headquarters of the California Department of Transportation in downtown Los Angeles.  The work was commissioned by Caltrans and the architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis.

Renée Green

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker known for her highly layered and formally complex multimedia installations in which ideas, perception, and experience are examined from myriad perspectives. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented.

Green's exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums and art institutions, among them the MAK Center for Art + Architecture at the Schindler House, West Hollywood; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, all in New York; Musée cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Portikus, Frankfurt; Centro Cultural de Bélem, and Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Vienna Secession; Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MACBA, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York & Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen. Her work has also been present at the Whitney, Venice, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Berlin, Sevilla & Istanbul Biennials, as well as in Documenta 11 and Manifesta 7.

Her most recent books include Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014, Duke University Press, Durham), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco), and Ongoing Becomings (2009, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne). She is also the editor of the collection of essays Negotiations in the Contact Zone (2003, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon) and a Professor at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture & Planning.