Individual Work
Canyonlands: Edward Abbey in the Great American Desert

"Canyonlands" is a web-based, interactive project that blends text and video imagery on a vast, scrolling environment. Following in the footsteps of the novelist and essayist, Edward Abbey, users navigate paths through a desert landscape that is being overturned through dam-building, road-building, mining, and industrial tourism. The project combines maps, photos, archival films, original video, and many other elements on a scrolling, virtual landscape suggestive of the Colorado River, its canyon lands, and the deserts of Utah, Arizona and California. Users arrive in a desert American West in the 1950s. The work incorporates nonfiction materials in an artistic environment to offer an interdisciplinary blend of art, writing, and scholarship. Recorded in the deserts of Utah, Arizona and California the cinemascape was made possible with the support of funding from the LEF foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, Temple University, and California State University.

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