Future Histories Lab: Augmented Reality and Audio Tours | Susan Moffat

Presentation:
What resources are necessary to assemble for strong storytelling? For example, what role does archival research play in composing a story about place? Outside of the archive, what other tools of the landscape are at our disposal when working on site to tell stories about a place? How should a producer handle temporality in a dynamically changing environment or capture the attention of visitors among pre-existing installations?

The Monument to Extraction tour takes place at the Albany Bulb – a vast pile of construction waste on the East Bay shore that extends a mile into San Francisco Bay. It is a good place to study the connections between extractive resources and our everyday lives. On a 1.5 mile walk across this giant unintentional monument to extraction, participants take a journey through history that uses art, narrative, and augmented reality to link the rubble and slag underfoot to the industrial and social history of the East Bay and mining histories throughout California. Future Histories Lab director Susan Moffat will discuss the process of pulling all the pieces together to create the Monument to Extraction Tour at the Albany Bulb and implications for the regional park’s future development. 

Find more information on how to take the Monument to Extraction tour here. 

Biography:
Susan Moffat is the project director for the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative.  She coordinates the academic program, organizes symposia, supports the development of publications, and conducts outreach across disciplines to faculty, graduate students, and the off-campus community. 

Her research focuses on issues including perceptions of nature and culture in public space, parks, homelessness, and methods of spatial narratives.  She has also has taught planning and leadership development at San Jose State University and UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities and Schools. As a curator, Susan has mounted exhibitions on cartography and on the San Francisco Bay shoreline.  Her oral history and mapping project, Atlas of the Albany Bulb, collects place-based stories from users of wild space at the urban edge, including unhoused people and artists, and was part of the SOMArts Cultural Center exhibition Refuge in Refuse:  Homesteading Art and Culture Project. She also served as a consultant on the Detour audio tour of the Albany Bulb.  She organized symposia including Mapping and Its Discontents and Art, Politics, and the City in Mexico and China; and, in collaboration with the Arts Research Center, Reimagining the Urban and Public Art/Housing Publics: Conversations on Art and Social Justice.

Susan has worked in the fields of affordable housing, environmental planning, land conservation and regional planning advocacy, and journalism.  Her writing on Asian cities, ethnicity and place, and environmental issues has been published in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Planning, and the edited collection The Misread City:  New Literary Los Angeles.

Learn more about upcoming speakers here.

Future Histories Lab offers community-engaged, project-based courses. Dig into hidden local histories and envision better futures in our exciting courses focused on social justice, race, place, and the arts. Take just three courses (in summer or other times) and earn a Certificate in Urban Humanities.