"Collective memory" is the idea that our own memories are not entirely personal. The way I remember the experience of visiting New Orleans, for example, has become indelibly linked in my mind to the images of suffering and the appalling indifference of the Bush administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"A Sense of Place or Apres moi, le deluge" explores the idea of storytelling pushed to its limits by the use of a particular story beyond the context of the experience it represents and by the use of a personal story to allude to a collective experience.

In the summer of 2001, before 9-11, my ex-partner and I took a two-month roadtrip across the US. During our travels it gradually dawned on me that the American landscape has a story that could only be felt and known within the context of one's own personal experiences. Amidst breathtakingly beautiful vistas there was always a sense of the indignity and suffering brought upon cultures of "other" by the relentless march of "progress" as defined by the American way of life. Upon starting work on this project I realized that my memory of experiencing a specific place is connected to the collective experiences of the people that have been there before me as well as to those experiences that would take place even after I'd already left.

I believe that the essence of who I am is the sum of all of my accumulated experiences. And as a person who has always experienced life as "other"-- an immigrant, a person of color, and a queer artist, the hidden history of the American landscape affected me deeply. It was a case of seeing the most staggeringly beautiful landscape, a totally spiritual experience, and at the same instance feeling in your gut the horror and violence that this land has wrought.

In the book "Other People's Stories" Amy Shuman asks: Who has the right to tell a story, who is entitled to it? And is this representation a sufficient, adequate, accurate, or appropriate rendering of experience? Ethical questions of ownership overlap with cultural conventions of representing experience.

The stories in "A Sense of Place" are a recollection of events that happened on a cross country roadtrip. They are also stories of a collective experience that has more often than not remained untold.

Anyone who is curious about what stories look like on the surface, and what kind of layers exist beneath that surface. Also anyone who is interested in ways of telling an "untellable" story.

A user steps in front of a low square table. The table surface is covered with a white powder on which is projected a map, with pushpins correlating to specific stories. Next to the projection is a smaller physical version of the same map with pushpins. The user chooses a story by pressing a pushpin on the small map. This triggers a specific video vignette. At any time the user can trigger another video by returning to the map and choosing another point of interest.

The installation consists of eight video vignettes and a default image of a map projected onto a surface of white powder. The map has eight specific points of interest where instead of place names, descriptive memory triggers are marked by pushpins. Using Max/MSP/Jitter, the viewer will activate a specific video piece using a keyboard that has been reworked to have a visual correlation to the projected map. At the end of the triggered video vignette the program defaults back to the map.

So far the biggest realization is that simpler is better. I started with the idea of doing ten different video playing on ten different monitors.

Right now the piece is still a little too complicated for my taste. The goal is for the next iteration to be all self contained within the projection, so that the interactivity happens on the projection surface instead of on a separate keypad. Will be experimenting with force sensing resistors and/or Q-Prox sensors.