Christina Shivers

A continuation of Drawing Machines Series 1, this project was produced as part of an exhibition created for the YAF/AIA Atlanta Emerging Voices Award.

The Dislocaregraph registers the disturbance of ground at the Gilbert cemetery. Surrounded by road on all sides, the cemetery was a former slave cemetery found during the construction of I-75 in the early 1980’s. Many of the headstones were missing and unfortunately, several of the headstones were moved by a local store in order to attract customers. After the discovery of the cemetery, several plans for monuments occurred amidst several political fights. Eventually new headstones made out of the same concrete of the interstate were erected. Additionally, the exact location of the remains at the cemetery remain a mystery as well. The Dislocaregraph is placed into the ground at the site and regularly records the vibrations of passing cars; five plum bobs draw within a bowl of sand, registering the car vibrations around and the disturbance of the bodies that lie so near.

The Inclinograph measures the amount of landscape creep at the location of the Crawford family cemetery. This cemetery was on a plot of land sold to Avondale estates mall in the 1960’s. In order to not impede development, the plot was disembodied from the ground and built up with a thick wall in order for parking lots to be built all around it. Eventually, the mall went out of business and became a Wal Mart and Pep-Boys. The cemetery is still located there, in the back of the Pep Boy’s Parking lot. Upon visiting the site, one is keenly aware of the ever increasing presence of garbage and waste at the site. The disembodied landscape appears to slowly be reuniting with land as the slow accumulation of trash takes place. The Inclinometer measures this creep using a system of weights and pulleys. Once the landscape grows and begins to touch the weights, the pulleys adjust and manipulate a magnetic ball bearing that influences a bed of magnetic fluid.

The Visiograph allows a glimpse into the past. Atlanta is a city with a collective amnesia and the Gulch is an example of this city’s will to destroy any bit of memory that exists in the city. Sitting at the crossroads of multiple rail lines, the Gulch is one of the founding plots of land within Atlanta. Over the years of Atlanta’s history, multiple rail lines, rail depots, shanty settlements, roundhouses and train stations sat within this space. The crowning achievement of Atlanta’s railway architecture was the Terminal Station. Lasting less than 100 years, the grand station was left derelict and rotting in the late twentieth century and eventually destroyed to make way for newer governmental buildings. The Visiograph takes the form of an armillary sphere and is placed upon the site. Within the middle of the sphere is a transparent image of past architectural features of the gulches landscape. The goggles placed adjacent to the sphere allow the viewer’s gaze to be directed at the present architectural features at the site, the past is overlayed and projected.