12 Cal students create an interactive self-guided Albany Bulb tour
ALBANY >> Every place has stories to tell, even a former garbage dump-turnedpark, as demonstrated by a self-guided interactive tour of the Albany Bulb that debuted in April.
The tour, known as “Monument to Extraction: Walking California History at the Albany Bulb” (monumenttoextraction.org), is the creation of students attending a spring course in the UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab taught by Susan Moffat. A former construction debris dump site may seem an unlikely candidate for an interpretive tour. The students found ample material, though, by scratching beneath the surface and gazing out at the surroundings of the manmade spit of land that extends into San Francisco Bay north of the Golden Gate Fields racetrack.
“The goal is to imagine future history,” Moffat said. “We want to tell the stories particularly of the East Bay and the Bay Area in general (tied to larger and more personal contexts).”
The 12 students — nine undergraduates and three graduates — researched and created the mixed-media tour this year from late January to early April. The tour incorporates littleknown historical insights of the city-owned site itself, its relation to the history of nearby areas, and those within its panoramic view, tying them to immigration, development and social movements, among other components. The audio narration that guides visitors on the 1.5-mile tour is enhanced by small ephemeral art pieces at each stop and mosaics that add “augmented reality” through historic photos or other images to be viewed on a smartphone app.
“It was one semester, and they worked really fast,” Moffat said. “I’m really proud of them. They had so many pieces to put together, and they rose to the challenge.”
The extraction theme was not chosen at random. This project is part of the “Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss” global environmental art series of exhibitions created worldwide (extractionart.org/ home), “which seeks to provoke societal change by exposing and interrogating the negative social and environmental consequences of industrialized natural resource extraction.”
Stops in the Albany exhibit examine topics from deadly dynamite manufacturing in the 19th century to oil refining that continues nearby today, along with immigration, food processing, highway construction and other areas.
“Everything, if it’s not growing out of the ground, comes from mining,” Moffat said. “We were looking at the material in the Bulb itself and things like the oil refinery in Richmond that you can see from there.”
As founder of community group Love the Bulb (albanybulb.org), which “celebrates and protects the creative spirit” of the location, Moffat is familiar with the history of the site and its surroundings and has led numerous walking tours to share that with others.
“Some of the stuff I cover in my walks,” she said. “But the students went out and dug up information I didn’t know. They added new layers of knowledge that they shared.”
The Bulb is owned and managed by the city, and discussions about making the site part of the adjacent McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, which is managed by the East Bay Regional Park District seem to have stalled. The city is including the Bulb in the parks master planning process happening this summer.
The Bulb has been known for years for the temporary and always-changing art pieces found there that are created from debris and castoff material, starting when a large homeless community settled at the site. Its art differentiates the Bulb from the shoreline state parks stretching from Oakland to Richmond. The art installations in the tour were made in the same spirit.
“It’s kind of the culture of the Bulb, people are always making things out there for others,” Moffat said. “That was a learning experience for the students about the collaborative culture of the Bulb. They had to figure out how to tell stories in public making ephemeral art. I told the students ‘Whatever you make is not going to last forever. You’re going to have to let it go.’ ”
Moffat fears losing that aspect of the site as it falls under the more standardized vision of the regional parks.
“All the interpretive signs that are there right now are about plants and animals, and that’s great, but there are other stories to tell,” she said.
Installations at parks are “usually more permanent, like an interpretive sign, which can be informative but is limited in content and not interactive,” Moffat said. “It doesn’t change much with time. It’s better to have lots of different stories about some place than just one narrative because there is no one narrative that is correct.”
As Albany updates the master plan for city parks, Moffat is urging people to speak up for including the Bulb in planning, saying, “I think it deserves consideration.”
Response to the tour has been positive, she said.
“I hope people come out and see it,” Moffat said. “The sculptures may or may not be there, but the audio tour will be online.”
She also hopes to see new tours in the future, whether created by her class or by others inspired to tell other history.
“There are so many other stories,” Moffat said. “Climate change, natural history, history of art at the Bulb, the people who lived there. The point is not just the story of the Bulb but really the whole world.”