Interdisciplinary Desert Studies at the University of California, Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center
A Proposal
Essay by Dick Hebdige, January 17, 2009

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Introduction

"In a landscape where nothing officially exists (otherwise it would not be 'desert'), absolutely anything becomes thinkable, and may consequently happen..."

Reyner Banham, Scenes from America Deserta

Far from being empty and inert many of the great desert systems covering some 20% of the earth's surface are today in extreme flux as vectors as diverse yet as connected as oil and mineral extraction, climate change, depleted aquifers and rapidly expanding human populations threaten to overwhelm desert landscapes and the native species and indigenous cultures that coexist within them. A growing global concern with paradigms of crisis centered on issues like sustainability, bio-diversity and landscape conservation, water use and the search for alternative energy sources has shifted the desert from the margins to the forefront of attention in civic and political discourse and in debates in the arts and sciences on the future of our planet.

At the same time many of the deserts of the world continue to be today's conflict-riven hot spots constituting literal as well as metaphorical war zones where rival interests, territorial claims and world views clash for dominance. Closer to home the arid South West serves as the rehearsal site for the US contribution to some of those militarized encounters in other deserts. It also serves as the brutal staging ground for an often deadly battle of wits, will, endurance and mutual surveillance as professional 'coyotes' attempt to smuggle groups of illegal immigrants to El Norte's faltering utopia past the US Border Patrol and armed vigilante groups.

In response to different aggregations of these concerns in recent years a number of research and educational initiatives have been launched under the 'Desert Studies' rubric. While interdisciplinary in focus, often including prominent contributions from anthropologists, sociologists and historians, the agenda and tone of such initiatives have tended, for understandable reasons, to take their cue from the natural sciences.

Yet the desert has figured for millennia not just as home to diverse nomadic and urban civilizations but as a screen for contradictory human projections. The desert is pictured variously as

• starting point ('home' to paleontology) and end game (Armageddon)
• as dumping ground
• as 'next frontier of leisure' and refuge of last resort
• as unspoiled wilderness, and irradiated hinterland
• as spiritual, military, technological and artistic test site
• as precious irreplaceable resource and as dirt-cheap real estate development opportunity

As such, the desert is as much a jarring cluster of contradictory metaphors, myths and images as it is a set of distinctive eco-systems or social systems. The need for an expanded interdisciplinary and collaborative effort to grapple with the multiple complexities and challenges contained within the actual deserts of the world and within the no less complex idea of the 'Desert' -one capable of incorporating insights from as many stakeholders and relevant fields of expertise as possible- is more urgent now than ever.

DesARTS/Deserts

"Desert. The very word conjures up mystery, evokes the windswept fastnesses of Beau Geste and Lawrence of Arabia. That mystery may be a sign of its imprecision, for the term embraces an improbably vast range of landscapes, from the comparatively lush columnar cactus forests of Arizona and Sonora to the Antarctic, where 90 percent and more of the planet's fresh water lies locked in ice"

Gregory McNamee, The Sierra Club Desert Reader

The canny negotiation of metaphor, myth and material site while in no way the exclusive preserve of the arts is an undertaking for which artists seem especially well suited. In the literary arts there are, of course, the long established traditions of desert writing stretching back to Herodotus and the founding texts of the major monotheistic religions. That tradition is represented in the States by a textual lineage stretching back from the transcribed myths of indigenous peoples to the hallucinatory wilderness logs of conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca through the screeds of early boosters, John L. O'Sullivan and Horace Greeley ,to the work of 19th and 20th century desert advocates like Mary Austin, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, Reyner Banham and contemporary 21st century desert chroniclers like Rebecca Solnit and Deanne Stillman.

In the visual arts the work of 19th and early 20th century painters like Frederic Remington and Georgia O'Keefe and of photographers like Edward Curtis and Ansel Adams helped establish a powerful if sometimes problematic iconography of the inhabited and uninhabited Western wilderness. In another more monumental variation on US desert aesthetics, since the 1970's the desert landscapes of the American West have figured as the subject and site of some of the nation's most ambitious and spectacular land art (e.g. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (UT), Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (UT), Walter de Maria's Lightning Field (NM), Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch, (TX), Michael Heizer's Double Negative (NV), James Turrell's Roden Crater (AZ)). US desert landscapes have served not only as instantly identifiable backdrops for numberless iconic Hollywood westerns, post-apocalyptic sci-fi films and car ads but for millennia among aboriginal peoples as both sacred ground and material support for ritual performance, craft production, and petroglyphic and pictographic rock inscriptions.

The desert continues to function simultaneously as figure and ground for many contemporary First Nation artists- literally so in the case of Rebecca Belmore, an Anishinaabe-Canadian artist whose most recent work, Solo (made in collaboration with Osvaldo Yero) consists of a tourist tchotchke (the 'sleeping Mexican') made of local soil and sand installed on Tohono O'odham Nation land adjacent to the Mexican border. The San Diego-Tijuana border and the socio-cultural, economic and political tensions it simultaneously accentuates and regulates has for decades served as the dramatic focus for a highly charged series of performances, installations and interventions associated in the first instance with the Border Art Workshop collective (dir. David Avalos) established in the mid 80's at the Centro Cultural de la Raza/Taller Arte Fronterizo in San Diego. The most celebrated member of the group, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, set out in performances like Border Brujo (1988), to channel the mish mash of stereotypes, kitsch and cliché that congregate at the border by reciting chaotic 'Spanglish' monologues while dressed in similarly garbled costumes. As Robert Neustadt puts it:

'Plastering himself with a (con)fusion of "signs,"...a mariachi sombrero, a necklace of plastic bananas, wrestler masks, dark glasses, a plastic heart, a pachuco hat, skeleton earrings, feathers, punk spikes ,an American flag wrist watch... Gómez-Peña creates a collage-like "text" with his body....His costume mirrors the disnarrative structure of the performance poem that he recites, which reiterates in turn the disjunctive experience of life on and around the U.S.-Mexico border."

The tradition of political and interventionist Border Art practice launched by the Workshop in the 80's has been extended and elaborated in the intervening years by other cross-border arts-centered programs (e.g. the InSite series mounted by San Diego's Installation gallery). More recently still, the Political Equator series organized by Teddy Cruz from UC San Diego and US-Latin American arts consortium,Transitory Publico/Public Transitorio in partnership with a number of Tijuana-based art, design and cultural institutions move beyond an exclusive concern with performance and installation work to engage head-on through public art events, exhibitions, publications, guided tours and long-term Action Research projects a cluster of issues around urban design, border infrastructure, transport, migration, barrio and shantytown architecture.

At the border crossing's edge, the inhabitants of those same barrios and shantytowns thread the lines of idling cars hawking souvenirs and mass-produced artifacts to tourists heading north. Even with the recent decline in northern Baja tourism, touristic art remains an important source of income in Tijuana's subsistence economy. Indeed at every level from street markets to corporate acquisitions and arts sponsorship, the arts play a major role not just in local, regional, national and increasingly global culture(s) but in the global economy itself. As Site Santa Fe, launched in 1995, and more recently established large-scale biennials and art fairs in Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates indicate, the arts play a major role in the globalized economies of (depending on the criteria you use) the 21 or 26 major deserts of the world. In the competition for government funding, corporate investment, private donors and media attention, such initiatives can, as Richard Florida and others have noted serve important 'place-making' and 'place-marking' functions in the global contest for resources. At the same time, such initiatives work to enhance and expand local cultural repertoires by bringing world-class international art to geographically and sometimes culturally isolated communities. Despite recent job losses and uncertainty in arts and media markets linked to the current recession, expansion in these sectors seems likely in the long term in a content-hungry sign economy where communication technologies and media platforms from cell phones, iPods and blackberries to flat screen TV's, YouTube and internet galleries seem destined to proliferate.

On the local stage, the arts play an increasingly significant role in the culture and economy of the Coachella Valley and the upper desert which serve as home (or second home) not only to thriving communities of artists, writers, musicians, arts administrators, theater and film industry personnel but to high profile events like the Palm Springs Film Festival, public art projects like Hi-Desert Test Sites based in Joshua Tree (now part of the Los Angeles biennial) and major arts institutions like the McCullen Theater in Palm Desert. A similar synergy between urban renewal, arts development and the desert landscape is evident in the visionary work of the recently formed Future Arts Research Institute (F.A.R) in Phoenix. Operating under the auspices of Arizona State University , F.A.R pursues research in three areas :Art and Technology, Art and Justice and Desert Aesthetics through the commission of public art works, symposia and other events, and through partnerships with other arts organizations, educational institutions, businesses and non-profits.

F.A.R provides an exemplary model of how interdisciplinary visual arts, new media, theater and performance could be integrated into the development plan at the Palm Desert Center. The Center which is currently home to an MBA, a prospective Executive MBA, a thriving traditional and low-residency Writing MFA, and a number of ongoing research projects on sustainability, Native American affairs and community outreach is ideally situated both geographically and in terms of its emerging programmatic agenda to serve as a base for a broad range of interdisciplinary projects in Desert Studies. With the recent announcement of a $10 million grant from The College Access Foundation of San Francisco and the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership (CVEP) to be administered through UC Riverside's Palm Desert Graduate Center for the Pathways to Success scholarship program, the Palm Desert campus looks poised to take a prominent role in helping shape the educational and economic future of the Californian desert. Set up to facilitate access to tertiary education for underserved low income and non-traditional students in the Coachella Valley, Pathways to Success will help set the tone, educational ethos and programming agenda of the campus as we begin developing an expanded interdisciplinary model of Desert Studies linked, we hope in future years, to new pedagogical, research and public access programs.

Over the past century what we commonly refer to as the 'arts' have moved from the margins and the apex of our society to merge with the broad streams of mass-mediated, niche-directed information, marketing and entertainment. Over the same period, the modes of representation and engagement with the physical and social environment in contemporary art have undergone equally profound transformations as is evident as we turn from a Georgia O'Keeffe painting of a distantly observed mountain in 1930's New Mexico to consider Teddy Cruz's multi-media micro-scale investigations of today's hyper-tense Mexico-US 'political equator'. By the same token our conceptions of what constitutes a 'desert landscape' and how we are invited to relate to it variously as participants, observers and researchers, as witnesses and citizens have been similarly overhauled. Those transformations are in large part technologically driven.

Experimental Geography

"If you want to go somewhere you need a map".

Nato Thompson, curator of Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography and Urbanism (forthcoming)

Digital communication, sensing, mapping and navigational tools work radically to modify our pragmatic (and felt) relations to space and place. They can potentially reposition us in relation to the close-at-hand as readily as they can facilitate access to formerly remote and inaccessible locations. They reorganize our sense of what O'Keefe herself referred to tellingly when signing off on letters from New Mexico to her friends back in Manhattan as "the faraway nearby". Black holes and 'black space' military installations notwithstanding, satellite surveillance photographs, cell phones, and GPS technologies render daily more remote the idea(l) of absolutely inaccessible locations on (Google) planet Earth. Even the remotest deserts can, with proper preparation and the right tools be traversed at a distance even when they remain resolutely off-limits to all but the most intrepid travelers in 3D space.

Just as physical distances and national boundaries in the 21st century can appear arbitrary and increasingly subject to compression/ contestation so too in a (partially) globalized (information) economy the borders between disciplines and disciplinary clusters appear increasingly vulnerable to collapse and recalibration. As the gap denounced by C.P.Snow in 1959 between modernity's 'two cultures' -the sciences and humanities-becomes not just philosophically but logistically and practically untenable, the arts today are presented with an historic opportunity to reposition themselves as interrogative /experimental research modalities within multiple emergent trans-disciplinary fields of inquiry.

Desert Studies is one such field. Desert landscapes already feature as a major focus of attention in the work of a new breed of hypothesis-testing artist-investigative journalist-cartographer hybrids committed to the development of what Trevor Paglen, a leading exponent of the new approach has called "Experimental Geography". The term refers to a spectrum of practices that range from phenomenological explorations of local topographies to more empirically based studies combining on-site, archival and internet research of specific locations and spatialized systems (e.g. production and supply chains, border checkpoints, military ranges, air bases, prisons, transport systems, broadcast, cell phone and satellite towers, simulation disaster environments for emergency service training, various aspects of urban infrastructure). The work is presented in sound and video installations, photography, guided tours and site visits, sculpture and cartography. As curator Nato Thompson puts it:

"The manifestations of 'experimental geography'...run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water-treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings.. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity's engagement with the earth's surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion".

Some of these approaches, Paglen's prominent among them, focus on the uses of the vast tracts of Western desert land owned by the US military, including operations conducted at restricted 'black sites' like the 5000 square mile Nellis Air Force Range in Nevada that includes Area 51, a top secret weapons development facility that rivals Roswell NM in its significance for Pentagon watchers and conspiracy buffs. Paglen's work poses questions about the awkward triangulation between secrecy, transparency and ultra-visibility that characterizes the USA as a 21st century military-(post) industrial-media-fixated democratic State. Adapting astro-telescopic lenses designed for recording distant planets, Paglen photographs classified facilities from distances of up to 60 miles away, magnifying in the process the microscopic dust and smog suspended in the air between camera and photographed object. The resulting prints, blurred to the point of abstraction, play up the discrepancy between seeing and knowing (the mirage effect).

Experimental geography owes its existence to the seminal work of the Culver City-based Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). Founded in 1994 by Matthew Coolidge, the CLUI's mission statement establishes an ethico-political agenda for the movement:

"Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived."

The Center publishes a tri-annual newsletter along with books and CD-Roms including many focused on the historical dynamics that continue to shape desert landscapes e.g Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America (2006), The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America's Nuclear Proving Ground (1996) and Antartica 1: Views Along Antartica's First Highway (2008) . It also mounts interpretive public exhibits in various sites across the nation. Current exhibitions include The Trans-Alaska Pipeline at the CLUI exhibition space on LA's Venice Blvd, Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry at the University of Houston Art Museum and Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes at the Carnegie Art Museum, Pittsburgh. Center volunteers and affiliates conduct public bus tours and educational field trips, offer lectures including the Independent Interpreter series, and organize site-specific Extrapolative Projects in the field and special focus thematic study areas.

A limited version of the CLUI's Land Use Database, coupled with the CLUI Photographic Archive, a collection of thousands of images taken by Center representatives is available on the internet. The CLUI's American Land Museum, currently in development, aims to establish a national network of landscape exhibition spaces each devoted to regional interpretive programming. The Center's Wendover Residence Program located at the former Wendover Airbase in the Great Salt Lake Basin, Utah ( the base from which the Enola Gay began its journey to Hiroshima in August, 1945) has served as first-base boot camp for successive cohorts of mainly US-based experimental geographers for more than a decade.

The CLUI is a relatively autonomous institution capable of operating outside the sometimes geological time-scales equated with traditional bureaucracies. It relies exclusively on grants from government sources, private foundations and individual donations. In its funding and its non-hierarchical networked membership structure - with affiliations to myriad educational and research institutions, community and non-profit organizations, accredited experts, local historians, hobbyists, internet hackers and amateur info-enthusiasts- the CLUI offers an exemplary 21st century model for the excavation, synthesis and dissemination of multiply-sourced information on the American landscape in a range of publicly accessible on- and off-line formats. The explosion in the past decade of similarly organized interdisciplinary Centers and collectives (e.g. w-Xplo, Luminous Green, GlowLab, Raqs Media Collective, Multiplicity, Maps Archive, the Centre for Contemporary Images, the Center for Urban Pedagogy) testifies to the compelling appeal and efficacy of that model in the promotion of the new forms of locally based, globally connected, critically engaged thinking that are likely to play a vital role in the maintenance of an active informed citizenry in the coming years.

The combination of strategic programming, embedded local knowledge and global connectivity is essential to the emergent interdisciplinary paradigm championed by CLUI. The new cartographers use meticulous research to join up the often buried or neglected dots between disjunct locales/contexts/ histories while eschewing the strident polemics and rhetoric associated with the 'political' art of an earlier era. The research findings, produced under controlled conditions and presented in neutral scientific terms, are intended to 'speak (plainly) for themselves'. To cite one example, in 2003 the Milan-based group, Multiplicity -a collective of architects, sociologists, urban planners, and tactical media workers -conducted an experiment in Israel's Occupied Territories entitled Solid sea 03: The Road Map. On two consecutive days in January, members of the group accompanied local residents on taxi rides across the West Bank starting and ending in the same latitudes. The first day's journey took 1 hour; the second took 5 and a half hours. On the first day the taxi conveyed a resident holding an Israeli passport; on the second day the local passenger held a Palestinian passport. While Solid sea could be classified as 'border art' the contrast in terms of methodology, staging and rhetorical strategy with the parodic interventions based around hybridity and the politics of identity associated with Gómez-Peña and the Border Art Workshop could hardly be greater.

Experimental Geography offers one model of an interdisciplinary approach to Desert Studies that could work at Palm Desert. A formal affiliation with the CLUI possibly through participation in the American Land Museum network is worth serious consideration. In addition to any collaborative research projects designed and undertaken by UCR faculty and students in partnership with CLUI personnel, the foyer and ground floor auditorium of Building B could be used for traveling exhibitions and CLUI presentations.

Action Research

"If you want to know how things really are, just try to change them".

Kurt Lewin, social psychologist, founder of Action Research

Another model of interdisciplinary and collaborative research with a leading arts edge that could help establish a strong identity for Desert Studies at Palm Desert is the Action (arts) Research model developed and promoted in recent years through the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), headquartered at UC Santa Barbara. With its roots in a longstanding Inter-campus Arts Program funded through the UC Office of the President, UCIRA was awarded Institute status as a multi-campus research unit in 1999 with a mandate to provide support for an historically under-funded but growing UC arts faculty at a moment when arts fellowships and production grants from external sources were being drastically cut. In the intervening years, but especially since 2005 when UCSB won a system-wide competition to host the Institute, UCIRA's mission has expanded to include the following:

1. to establish the legitimacy of rigorously pursued arts practice-as-research within the University and outside it and to integrate arts practice and arts-centered scholarship more fully into the public research profile of the UC system.
2. through the Institute's grants programs to support UC artists and scholars dedicated to sustained public engagement, formal and substantive innovation and to pedagogical approaches that acknowledge the reciprocal relation between teaching and research in the performing, visual, literary and media arts.
3. to foster resource sharing and collaboration across campuses and to develop innovative residency programs for UC faculty and students and for visiting artists (e.g circulating arts research teams through different UC campuses).
4. to establish an 'action research'/ 'classroom of the community' educational model whereby faculty, students and representatives from off-campus communities/ organizations work together as co-researchers and co-learners on commonly defined issues in real-world settings.
5. to cultivate long-term partnerships with non-UC institutions, local and state community agencies, for-profit and non-profit organizations.

Support is offered to proposals in the following disciplinary clusters on a two-year alternating cycle: 1.Visual Arts Practice and Research/Emerging Fields and 2.Performance Practice and Research/Literature. In addition the Institute sponsors student-generated projects through the Undergraduate Action Research Grants and new curriculum/experimental pedagogy through the Open Classroom Challenge Grants a.k.a What Would You Do With $5000?.

Action research, a term adopted from the vocabulary of reflexive and participatory research originating in the work of social psychologist, Kurt Lewin in the 1940's is increasingly used to refer to public service and socially conscious pedagogy within the arts and humanities through organizations like Imagining America http://www.imaginingamerica.org/ , Design Corps http://www.designcorps.org/About.htm , and Rural Studio http://www.cadc.auburn.edu/soa/rural-studio/ . It is the ongoing cluster of demonstration projects launched at UCSB around shipping containers, 'scavenge architecture' and sustainability under UCIRA co-director, Kim Yasuda's leadership that most clearly exemplifies the ethos and methodology of Action Research promoted by and through the Institute. Building on a partnership begun in 2005 with J. Staal Storage, a Santa Barbara-based shipping company and in consultation with an array of contractors, university administrators, vendors and architects, Professor Yasuda led a group of art and environmental science students through a series of classes initially entitled "Open Container" that culminated in the cutting and welding of two donated shipping containers into a single habitable structure complete with furniture and fittings made from recycled, scavenged and dollar store materials. The structure is to be installed on UCSB's west campus as a temporary replacement art studio for recently demolished facilities.

In November 2007 UCSB hosted a conference ,The Traveling Box: Containers as the Global Icon of Our Era that brought together logistics and port authority personnel, representatives of the longshoremens' union, shipping company executives, labor and transport historians, sociologists, geographers and artists and architects working with repurposed containers to explore the social, economic, ecological and cultural impact of containerization. The conference served as the platform for announcing a competition co-sponsored by J. Stahl and UCSB in which amateur and professional architect-designers were invited to submit design proposals for converting two containers into affordable, attractive, inexpensive, functional and eco-friendly housing. The winning entry submitted by a local architectural firm is currently under construction and will be housed alongside the temporary art studios on UCSB's west campus.

Further iterations of the container project have included the conversion under the supervision of UCSB art faculty member, Jane Mulfinger of a fifth donated container into a mobile arts lab with an expandable exhibition/drawing/screening space and a six seat classroom in its interior. The linked themes of sustainability/over-consumption and the expanded production and supply chains opened up by containerization were further explored in two exhibitions. In Labor Exchange, six UCSB MFA graduate students from UCSB's Art department and two established artists were commissioned to make works from materials purchased at dollar stores and Walmart outlets. The show, housed in the mobile arts lab parked to the rear of the municipal art museum, opened to coincide with an exhibition held in the museum of contemporary Chinese photography. In Use Less students in Professor Yasuda's undergraduate sculpture class made work using only recycled, unremarkable and inexpensive materials, a selection of which were exhibited (and promptly sold) at a downtown commercial art gallery.

UCIRA's commitment to and expertise in Action Research and sustainability studies has been further strengthened by the recruitment to the position of co-Director of Marko Peljhan, a professor in the Art and Media, Arts and Technology programs at UCSB. A polymath with extensive experience in art/science collaborations, Professor Peljhan is associated with a range of projects across theater, dance, new media, art and engineering including Makrolab, a portable, titanium-framed 45'x10' laboratory designed to accommodate 8 artists, scientists and/or tactical media workers in remote locations for weeks at a time. Powered by solar panels and a wind turbine the lab is configured for satellite and network connections and is set up to support research related to the monitoring and analysis of telecommunications, environmental conditions, bio-migrations and weather/climate patterns. Prototypes of the lab have been installed in western Australia (Rottnest island), Slovenia and the Scottish highlands and the structure and the research it has made possible have been featured in major international art shows including Documenta X in Kassel, Germany (1997), Venice (2003) and Istanbul (2008). One version is now permanently installed in the Arctic.

The close institutional and thematic links between UCIRA and the proposed program of interdisciplinary Desert Studies at Palm Desert are likely to shape the future development of both operations. The first intercampus/visiting artist residency jointly organized by UCIRA, UCSB's Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Arts Research Initiative and the Palm Desert Graduate Center will take place in February, 2009. Led by Brussels-based international eco-arts group, Luminous Green , the residency will bring together faculty and graduate students from arts departments from various University of California campuses (UCR,UCSB, UC Davis, UC San Diego). In partnership with the Desert Sustainable Gardens Initiative, participants will form workshops devoted to discussion and experimental projects around the following themes:

1. future desert ecologies
2. native desert knowledge systems
3. sustainable design strategies for a world without water
4. desert soundscapes
5. desert navigation.

Conclusion: Desert Studies Beyond Business-as-Usual

"Last year, the southeastern corner of the northern Australian state of Queensland..entered its 10th year of drought- officially the worst period on record...The (regional) water authority set a target of reducing average daily water use from 80 gallons a person to 37 gallons (or 140 liters) a person (the average daily per-person use in the United States is between 100 and 150 gallons)..Just two weeks into Target 140,as the program was called, average daily per-person use dropped from 80 to 32 gallons. The water saved was equivalent to bringing a desalination plant online- overnight"

LA Times 1.4.2009

NOTORIOUS BORDER HOLE IS SEALED UP "Smuggler's Gulch lived up to its infamous name. For a century the narrow canyon leading into California from Mexico provided cover for cattle thieves and opium dealers, bandits and booze runners. More recently it has hidden thousands of illegal immigrants on their journey north, sealing its place in border lore. Now ..the canyon has been all but wiped off the landscape, its steep walls carved into gentle slopes, its depths filled with 35,000 truckloads of dirt as the federal government nears completion of an extensive border project at the southwesternmost point of the United States...Environmentalists and conservation groups fear that the project ..will harm the Tijuana River estuary, threaten endangered species and destroy culturally sensitive Native American sites...

LA Times, 1.4.2009

ISRAELI TROOPS ROLL INTO GAZA; LENGTHY SHOWDOWN EXPECTED: The ground offensive is aimed at stopping rocket attacks.Hamas promises the strip will 'become a graveyard'.

LA Times 1.4.2009

...absolutely anything is thinkable and may consequently happen."

Reyner Banham

As we turn toward the multiple challenges confronting our world today we are compelled to use all the creative and analytical resources at our disposal to think beyond the sedimented paradigms that under write 'business-as-usual' across the board from energy consumption and waste disposal to the deployment of deadly force and the defense of 'homeland' territory. That imperative to innovate mindfully prompts us to scrutinize every detail of daily life including the traditional discipline-based academic curriculum and the hierarchies of knowledge it embodies and supports. New interdisciplinary hybrids adapted to emergent conditions, are being formed around an ethos of collaboration and urgent curiosity: a 'by all means necessary' approach to synthesizing information and solving problems.

Those priorities and that renewed sense of urgency and engagement with the world beyond the campus are currently shaping the two trans-disciplinary approaches- Experimental Geography and Action Research- singled out in this proposal for consideration as possible models for the development of Desert Studies at Palm Desert. Neither of these paradigms is exhaustive or sufficient in itself. Desert Studies as projected here cannot be apprehended by any one approach however interdisciplinary, holistic or inclusive.

The essentialized idea and image of the Desert as a place without boundary or history runs counter to the spirit of this proposal. Rather the 'identity' of Desert Studies as suggested here far from being fixed ahead of time will automatically be dissolved and reconfigured in different research instances with the articulation of specific issues and concerns, each requiring specific combinations of expertise. In the same way, the identities of the constituent disciplines and disciplinary clusters called upon in any one instance -their signature methodologies, knowledge-generating procedures and truth claims, their effects and affects- are likely to be modified in the mix as heterogeneous teams of academics and non-academics interact together in the field. That potential for profound bottom-up modification even transformation of founding hypotheses, precepts, and theoretical paradigms always inherent in 'work in the field' is likely to be heightened in a field as open yet as crowded, as overheated yet as ecologically fragile, as vital and contested as Desert Studies.

As desert denizens everywhere, human and non-human, know full well, the dictionary definition of the desert as a landscape where nothing exists is palpably false and misleading. None the less we believe as the late Reyner Banham, design historian and some time desert aficionado put it in the quotation that opens this proposal that the desert is indeed a space in which "anything is thinkable and may consequently happen". The openness of that consequential horizon between what we can, in hope or dread imagine and what may actually come to pass is in itself, to say the least, forbidding. Our task is to facilitate the varieties of thinking that may help to move us forward beyond the current impasse where we stand as a collective at a crossroads, poised between inertia and apocalypse.

Dick Hebdige
January, 2009


APPENDIX 1: The Palm Desert Campus

The UC Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center sits on 20 acres directly adjacent to the Cal State San Bernadino campus on land donated by the City of Palm Desert on the northeast corner of Cook Street and Frank Sinatra Drive two blocks south of Interstate 10 . The UCR campus which opened in spring 2005 currently consists of two buildings: the 21,209 sq ft Richard J. Heckmann International Center for Entrepreneurship and a 23,600 sq ft structure, currently designated ''Building B' that we propose be named the UC Riverside Center for Desert Studies. While the administrative offices are concentrated in the Heckmann Center ,both buildings contain teaching and meeting rooms, faculty offices, and teleconferencing and distance learning spaces. In addition Building B has a large foyer which is used for receptions, a 350 seat auditorium and two computer labs each equipped to house 30 work stations.

The campus was made possible thanks to an initial $6m donation by local businessman, Richard Heckmann who envisioned a new kind of institution dedicated to the professional and graduate training of business and cultural entrepreneurs through a 'town and gown' combination of faculty expertise and real world managerial knowledge with a view to expanding and enhancing the region's economy and cultural life. Those goals continue to inform programmatic development at the Palm Desert Center as the campus has evolved since its inauguration to develop research and teaching concentrations in three areas: entrepreneurial management, the arts and the intersection between the physical and cultural environment. The emphasis on leadership training remains constant and is implicit throughout this proposal.

All three of the focal concerns with which the Center is associated are integral to the model of Desert Studies envisaged in this document. The needs of the Coachella Valley and surrounding areas, desert communities experiencing rapid growth and change remain a major organizing priority in our planning process. In this context it is imperative to note the work of the recently established Pathways to Success program which is administered through the Palm Desert Center. The program which is poised to deliver $10m in scholarship support to regionally-based underserved students will transform the demographic profile of higher education in the Coachella Valley over the coming decades. Our campus is committed to participating in and benefiting from that transformation.

At present the Center offers an MBA with an Executive MBA in prospect along with traditional and low-residency MFAs in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. In addition, a number of research projects are ongoing at Palm Desert. Building on UC Riverside's long-standing commitment to restoration of the Salton Sea and to agricultural and geothermal research and water restoration in the Coachella Valley, the Center for Conservation Biology is engaged in a number of research projects on sustainability (including the Desert Sustainable Garden project referred to above) and the impact of (sub)urbanization on native species and habitat.

Native American Studies forms another focus for regionally based research. In collaboration with local and regional tribes, UC Riverside faculty and students are currently conducting research for new tribal museums, collecting oral histories to preserve tribal histories, designing a certified site monitor program to protect tribal artifacts, contributing to the Takic Language Revitalization Program, and embarking on studies of environmental, educational and energy issues on reservations.

The Palm Desert campus also performs a significant public service in offerng a number of outreach and extension programs including the Desert Lyceum discussion group, the Literacy Network, Writing in Schools (in which MFA Writing students teach in local high schools), Learning in Retirement and the UCR Osher Continuing Learning Institute. Finally the Center also sponsors, co-sponsors in partnership with local institutions (e.g. the Rancho Mirage Public Library ) and on a regular basis, hosts in its auditorium well attended talks, lectures, readings, screenings and performances by leading artists, scholars and experts including the Arts and Letters series which this year alone has included Pulitzer Prize winning authors Tony Kushner, Geraldine Brooks and Junot Diaz..

APPENDIX 2: Desert Studies Programmatic Suggestions

1. Desert Studies Residency Programs

With the requisite funding, Palm Desert could adopt a residency program similar to the one recently established at Arizona State University by the Future Art Research Institute (F.A.R) whereby scholars and artists are invited for periods of varying duration to Phoenix to present their work, engage with the city and its environs and to frame proposals for regionally based art and research projects. Through the ReMapping the Desert: Phoenix initiative, groups and individuals from outside the city have an opportunity to contribute to regional development through the execution of research and public art commissions.

Examples of works commissioned since the Institute's formal launch in the fall of 2008 include the Rebecca Belmore- Osvaldo Yero collaboration cited in the main body of this proposal, The Arizona Project a polyvocal, one-woman performance piece around immigration researched, scripted and performed by New York actor/ artist, Anna Devere-Smith, a heliocentric "Skyspace" installation on the ASU campus to be designed by James Turrell, a vacant lot trailer-truck textual hoarding project by Chinese-Canadian artist, Ken Lum (curator of the 2007 Sharjah Biennale) and a survey and report on the creative industries in Phoenix by Professor Andrew Ross, Chair of the Social & Cultural Analysis Dept at NYU..

The larger long-term vision for F.A.R includes extending the residency and exchange network to link up scholars and artists from all the major deserts of the world. The first link in that transnational desert chain has been established between F.A.R and the Townhouse gallery in Cairo, Egypt with Belgian-born, Mexico City-based artist, Francis Alyss invited to articulate a connection between Cairo and Phoenix. FAR has expressed a strong interest in developing a planning-and-resource-sharing partnership with the Palm Desert campus and with the Center for Art & Environment at Reno's Nevada Museum of Art. The aim of such a partnership is to set up a regional institutional network/coordinated programming circuit and in the long term to implement this ambitious international desert-centered research and exchange program.

The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) is similarly pledged to sponsor innovative/ international residencies. The Institute is already partnering with the Palm Desert campus in the upcoming arts residency planned for the Boyd Deep Canyon Reserve for February, 2009 which will include, in addition to the Brussels-based eco-arts consortium Luminous Green, faculty and graduate students from 4 UC campuses- UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara UC Davis and UC San Diego. The Institute is interested in nominating the Palm Desert campus as a UCIRA hub/ residency site in a permanent network collaborating UC campuses. We hope the Luminous Green residency will establish a viable precedent for future exchanges/team research-and- learning experiences in which faculty and students from different UC's convene to produce work around designated topics germane to Desert Studies. UCIRA's aspirations for exchange programs are also international in scope and the Institute is in the process of setting up research and residency opportunities in Italy and the Arctic.

Without being issued with formal invitations representatives from many other institutions including the Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna,and the University of Malmo, Sweden have enthusiastically consented to participate in one way or another in Desert Studies projects and exchanges.

2. Graduate Degrees and Certificate Programs : The Low-Residency Model

With the successful launch at the Palm Desert Center in the fall of 2008 of the low-residency MFA Creative Writing and Writing for Performance program (UC's first low-residency MFA), Palm Desert is strategically positioned to establish itself as a premier site within the system for low-residency learning. The low-residency model resonates with the Palm Desert Center's founding mission insofar as it acknowledges, along with the utility of digital information and real-time virtual communication platforms, the 21st century student's commitment to and embeddedness within the world beyond the campus (including most importantly the world of work) while by the same token allowing the student more flexibility in terms of time-and-attention management than is possible within the traditional academic training. The low-residency model also accords with the conceptual orientation underpinning this proposal, for example, in the recognition, alluded to throughout, that digital and satellite technologies work simultaneously to intensify and relativize the felt sense of scale and place and distance. In the version of Desert Studies put forward here neither community nor meaningful exchange necessarily entail physical proximity, certainly not routinized, or synchronized proximity.

Intensive team immersions in desert landscapes of one kind or another for limited time-spans are however crucial both as occasions for primary research and personal growth and as group bonding, cohort-building exercises. In addition to on-line instruction and mentoring, the low-residency Writing MFA requires students to attend two intensively scheduled 10-day residences, one in the Fall, one in the Spring, at a hotel in Palm Springs where they participate in workshops, tutorials and discussion groups and attend lectures and readings. We recommend that this model, suitably adapted, be applied to Desert Studies. The location and framing of concentrated residences for Desert Studies programs need not follow the template established by the Writing MFA i.e. sequestration within a hotel 'campus' in the lower desert. A Desert Studies residency might be based in a wilderness location, or organized around a road trip or a series of guided tours in the South West. Alternatively it might take place in a university or art school located in a desert overseas or at a cultural event like the Sharjah biennial, the Tuareg Festival in the Desert (Timbuktu) or the Wild Cinema Film Festival (Namibia). While the rubric for Desert Studies laid out here is designed to be broad enough to accommodate programmatic development in as yet unanticipated areas, possible foci for interdisciplinary low-residency graduate programs at the Palm Desert Center organized along these lines might include:

Comparative Desert Studies
Art and the Environment
Spatial Studies
Experimental Geography/Mapping the Desert: SoCal
Native American Studies
Conservation and Resource Management
Media Production
Arts Management


The low- residency model will enable us to recruit a diverse, geographically dispersed, potentially international student body. It will also make it possible for us to attract an equally diverse, geographically dispersed, for the most part 'virtual' world-class academic and professional faculty.

Once these and other programmatic emphases become established at the graduate level at Palm Desert, certificate programs in the same subject areas taught through a combination of site visits, lectures and workshops by UCR faculty and locally based professionals/experts can be offered to local residents.

3. Alternative Energy Retro-fit: A Design Research/On-Site Training Opportunity

Collaborative research and community outreach opportunities at the Palm Desert campus extend well beyond the kinds of visiting artist/scholar residency, certificate and graduate low residency programs outlined above as ongoing projects on conservation biology, Native American studies and the Pathways to Success program indicate. The Alternative Energy Retro-fit proposal sketched out below is an example of a possible one-off facilities-based Action Research project:

The UCR Palm Desert campus's two flagship buildings designed by Detroit-based Rosetti and Glendale-based LHA Architects provide a bold public signature for UCR's satellite initiative. Architecturally, they promote a contemporary 'desert aesthetic' centered on clean lines and a celebration of space and light with high ceiling atriums and visually impressive steel and glass facades affording stunning views of the mountains and Palm Desert skyline. However the buildings are not energy efficient and given the quantity of glass, unenclosed interior spaces and multiple entrances climate control costs run high. A solar panel retrofit would simultaneously cut costs and serve to reposition UCR's Palm Desert facility not just on the cutting edge visually /architecturally but as a green design campus committed to alternative, renewable energy.

Rather than outsourcing the retrofit to a commercial contractor, UCR's Department of Environmental Engineering could be invited to delegate faculty and grad students to undertake an appraisal of our energy needs, the quality/efficiency of current energy provision and to offer alternative energy-based design solutions. Another option would be for UCR to partner with a company specializing in building efficiency and green power and use the ensuing retrofit as a training/research opportunity for UCR Engineering and Environmental Science faculty and grad students. Copper Mountain College in nearby Joshua Tree which is about to add a new library and sports complex to its campus is currently considering this kind of partnership with Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls, the company now responsible for providing the 29 Palms Marine Base with 57% of its energy from 8500 solar panels. As well as cutting energy costs and putting our money where our mouth is in terms of a commitment to sustainability, the Alternative Energy Retrofit affords an excellent opportunity for us to combine new curricular/research design with infrastructural innovation: using the physical facilities as a laboratory for integrating practical/professional training, a green agenda, cost-cutting and new/alternative technologies.

Desert Studies: Public Programming

The consistently high attendance at public presentations on virtually any topic linked to desert flora and fauna, the desert landscape, conservation and sustainability issues at the Palm Desert Center testifies to the intensity of local interest in desert ecology. The success throughout the fall of 2007 of the Writing from the Desert series mounted in conjunction with Rancho Mirage Public Library which featured workshops and readings from 19 distinguished desert writers suggests that public interest also extends to the rendering in text and narrative of human interactions with the desert landscape.

The consolidation of Desert Studies at Palm Desert will enable us to develop more systematic public programming on the relevant issues through thematically organized workshops, talk and screening series, exhibitions and conferences.