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Most of my collaborations are not one-off events. They are long term, repetitive collaborative interdisciplinary art experiences, like working with contemporary artists working through the disciplinary languages of music, ethnomusicology, and composition and, like me, bring those interdisciplinary languages to bear in their research and creative activity. Robert Lippock is one such person. I got to know Robert through an interview process where I was interviewing him as a finalist for one-of-two half-year artist teaching paid residencies at the Institute for Spatial Experiments, UdK. These were competitive residencies, and as a co-director of the institute allowed me to interview and work with people that have a lot more knowledge than me. Robert is one of these people. He grew up assigned to be a shoe-cobbler in east Berlin, and now makes people feet move better than any foot ware. Like an old telephone switchboard operator form the 20th century, connecting scientific and artistic experts to students that are often— in terms of measurable raw intelligence, more intelligent than me too, is one of the reasons I love interdisciplinary teaching. When educators are transparent about how good we are at learning as a way to represent how effective we are at teaching, then interdisciplinary art, science, and architecture collaborations will evolve at exponential rates. These international Future Now tri-annual public art festivals, are one of the ways that innovative teaching can be felt by the public. (NOTE: The third Future Nows festival was schedule to happen in 2021 but was canceled due to Covid-19.) 

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For the 2017 edition of the future now festival, I wanted to structurally echo my choices as an installation in the 2015 edition, but unlike that edition, I wanted to have a physical installation occupying part of the museum space. Like the 2015 edition, I could not join in person as the travel would have conflicted with my landscape architecture teaching obligations. So for this edition I performed a procedural drift (walk) through berlin. I started the walk at sunrise at the central waste water treatment plant. I aimed for HealthPark halfway across the city, which I had to arrive at by sunset. Like this tenure application, I could go any way I wanted as long as I ended where and when I needed to at the end. I decided that I had to document the walk through texts and that I would take reflective notes in chunks of text across the page in my 8.5”x11” black hardbound fieldbook, which I almost always have with me when conducting field research (as well a pocket of colorful pens). Teaching landscape students how to observe and reflect on the world with more than their cellphones is important.

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