OAS Node #1 [9/14]: Audrey Snyder + Joe Riley - Parallel Cases

During the summer of 2012 Audrey Snyder and Joe Riley traveled through landscapes of abandoned railroads in California and Oregon atop bicycles adapted to run on railroad tracks. The railbikes were devised as a way to re-activate the railroads now lying in disuse in both rural and metropolitan areas of these western states. On Friday, September 14 from 7-9, Occupational Art School Node 1 at Bat Haus will host Audrey and Joe to share their amazing story.

[PROJECT SUMMARY]:
The project first emerged about a year and a half ago when Joe and Audrey became interested in exploring the parallel histories of the American railroads and the demise of commercial printing, specifically its shift from handset type to mechanized linotype and eventually to digital printing. A nearly forgotten – perhaps even abandoned – point of convergence for the histories of the railroad and printing lies in the Tramp Printers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Tramp Printers were itinerant printers who hopped trains across America to set type in the publishing houses and newspapers that had sprung up alongside the railroads. Inspired by the legacy and tradition of the tramp printers they restored a 3” by 5” Kelsey Excelsior hand operated letterpress that they will use to publish a chronicle of their travel in the forgotten right-of-way. Through Parallel Cases, they endeavored to take up the methods and means of the tramp printers as a way to both collect and distribute their findings. 

PROJECT URL: http://parallelcases.tumblr.com/

FACEBOOK EVENT: http://www.facebook.com/events/414933371901352/415164485211574/

[PROJECT ESSAY]: 

Railbikes and Letterpress

The railroads of the United States are cut, tunneled, carved, and wrapped around the country’s vast and varied landscapes. These ribbons of steel were the first avenues that provided an unprecedented kind of connectivity, exploration, and communication through speed; from East to West, city to city, town to town, disparate places became spatially and temporally linked in the American Landscape. The connective arteries of the railroad made the American West a reality and created an inextricable link between the machine that was the railroad, the once remote landscape it opened to the world, and the people that it served.

This confluence of the pre-industrial world and the penetrating machine was supplanted during the second half of the Twentieth century by new forms of rapid transit. Automobiles and highways, planes and landing strips completed the obliteration of a landscape of travel and altered the modalities of communication inherent to railroad travel. The synesthetic experience of nature and space retained by railroad travel was lost in a web of highways and the thin air of the troposphere. As alternative modes of transportation came to dominate, the railroad became characterized by abandonment. Ribbons of steel became streaks of rust.

A concurrent history to the demise of the railroad is that of commercial printing, and its shift from handset type to mechanized linotype and eventually to digital printing.
A nearly forgotten – perhaps even abandoned – point of convergence for the histories of the railroad and printing lies in the tramp printers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the days of handset type, itinerant printers traveled the country by freight train, strapped with their composing sticks and bedrolls, looking for work at newspapers and publishing houses as typesetters. The tramp printer was skilled craftsman whose traveling impetus was borne out of wanderlust and the age-old tradition of the journeyman. They traveled not only to fulfill a rambling personal desire, but also because their craft required the kind of experiential learning that may only be achieved through travel. These Shakespeare-quoting hobos followed the steel rivers of the country, facilitating the spread of the written word in their craft and spoken lore of their adventures.

The railroads had simultaneously acted as a conduit for travel and knowledge, a circumstance that allowed for a unique kind of artistic and cultural production. In the parallel histories of tramp printers and the railroad transport and communication are inextricably linked, so can we use the modalities of the tramp printers to discover what is lost when a railroad is abandoned? And furthermore can we learn about the present landscape of travel and communication through the unique history of a railroad’s abandonment? And can we do this by occupying an abandoned space through reinvented forms of transportation and communication?

Our proposal is to situate ourselves in this lost landscape by traveling a series of abandoned train tracks in Northern California on rail-bikes with the aim of producing a primary document of our experience of the past and present states of the lines we travel. We have constructed two bicycles with attachments that allow them to run on abandoned railroad tracks. The rail-bikes are our way of producing an alternate mode of travel along these once-used lines. Our design involves a front wheel guide that clamps the bike onto one rail and an outrigger that provides balance. We believe that a first hand experience of the landscape, facilitated by these bicycles, is key to producing more than just a travel log of our journey. Our chosen mode of travel allows us to be immersed in the phenomenological relationship between travel and history, abandonment and what is lost when technology and tradition are rendered obsolete.

Inspired by the legacy and tradition of the tramp printers we have restored a 3” by 5” Kelsey Excelsior hand operated letterpress that we will use to publish a chronicle of our travel in the forgotten right-of-way. We will send dispatches that will take many forms including prints, drawings, maps, and letters to a P.O. box in San Francisco, California to be collected upon our return. Similarly to the web of communication inherently produced by railroad transportation, our prints, drawings, maps, and letters will form story of abandoned railroads that expands out of our experience to disparate and varied audiences. The form of this production allows a variation in its use. By creating a range of documents we hope to create an archive with the ethos of printed matter as well as to build and write a story of these histories based in our own experience of a place.

The specificity of the Northern Californian landscape we intend to explore is central to our investigation of more expansive notions of systematic abandonment. The History of Californian industry, spirit, and romanticism is one built on raw materials and production. The landscape of the State provided natural resources that sparked the engine of industry: from lumber and gold to almonds, oranges, and cattle. It is also the history of the relationship between remote natural landscapes and prosperous metropolitan centers. The ties and linkages between these two points were at one point solely railroad lines. The fact of a railroad’s abandonment poses a question to many aspects of this complicated interplay between remote locations and urban concourses. The decrease in freight traffic and abandonment of railroads is increasingly relevant within contemporary America, especially California, as a symptom of the effects of globalized industry and shifts in land-use.

The objective of this project is explore what is lost once certain technologies are obsolete, as well as how a reinvention of those same technologies and occupation of a place can help us understand the state of present abandonment. Our inquiry is centered on a unique history of the railroads and printers that is tied to Northern California. For both of us, this project is an opportunity to work on a larger scale that can suspend a more multifaceted and complicated exploration of research and a complimentary artistic production than what we are normally capable of within the Cooper Union and New York City.

[PROJECT LINKS]: 

• The Arm Press (We cannot thank them enough for their support - Audrey & Joe)
• Tramp Printers
• Notes from a Tramp Printer
• The Bentley Railbike
• AY Frame (From Audrey Snyder)
• Pleasedontfront (From Joe Riley)
• Mania’s Done Flickr (From Joe Riley)
• Railriders
• Abandoned Rails of California
• Morningstar Tools

[ABOUT THE ARTISTS]:

Audrey Snyder explores notions of site-specificity, storytelling, and changing urban and rural landscapes through an interdisciplinary practice. As one such exploration she collected over fifty water samples from various sites in California to create a map of water-use in the state. The appearance of the samples, which ranged from clear spring water in the Sierra Nevada to the silty sludge from reservoirs in Southern California, was a material investigation that produced an alternative map. Her projects involve performance, sculpture, and printmaking to tease out the psychic and economic issues that are inherent to an urban versus rural binary. Throughout the Parallel Cases project she plans to further investigate this relationship from the perspective of a rural location.

Joe Riley’s practice is consistently invested in history, issues of communication and correspondence, and technological reinvention. His work is an effort to unify the tangible, material experience with literary, text-based media through modes of “outdated” communication. Most recently he has found a place for the intersection of these interests in the history and folklore of American railroads. He has conducted extensive research on railroad culture, made prints of hobo monikers, corresponded with a former railroad workers and boxcar artists using letterpress, hopped freight trains, and re-broadcasted railroad radio dramas on a pirate radio station. He believes that the scale of this undertaking is necessary to experience the connection between communication and transportation, and its presence in American railroad lore and history. He has also sailed over 5,500 nautical miles.