Uh-oh. That trailer — behind the pole barn — on a former scrap yard — next to the Houston Biodiesel plant — on Buffalo Bayou — may look innocuous. But it’s the new temporary Houston outpost of Los Angeles’s Center for Land Use Interpretation. The CLUI is taking up a year-long residency at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH — but this is where our L.A. visitors will be camping out.

What does the CLUI do? Some sample CLUI projects:

• “On the Farm: Live Stock Footage by Livestock:”
  

  In this exhibit, farm animals show us their point of view through wireless video cameras installed temporarily on their head and necks by virtuoso animal and plant videographer Sam Easterson. Easterson’s technology enables a cow, a pig, a goat, a chicken, a sheep, and a horse to guide us around their world; what they look at, what catches their attention, how they move through space, and how they relate to one another, on the farm.

• “A View Into the Pipe,” an exhibition devoted to Los Angeles’s main sewer line.
• “The Best Dead Mall in America,” a photographic exhibit of the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois, “a decaying shopping mall shuttered since 1979.” The exhibit is on display permanently . . . inside the mall itself, and is not open to the public.

You get the idea. CLUI’s front man is artist Matthew Coolidge, whose act often incorporates academic-sounding narrations of landscape slide shows.

Here’s video of part of a Coolidge performance at the Aurora Picture Show late last year:

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Another shot of Coolidge in action:

So what’s CLUI up to in Houston?

CLUI members Matthew Coolidge, Erik Knutzen, and Steve Rowell will begin their residency by establishing a research field station on a site on the Buffalo Bayou, adjacent to Houston Biodiesel on Navagation Blvd. & N. Drennan Street. From this base camp, CLUI will conduct land research in a mobile unit and will explore the Houston waterways by boat.

Research will focus on the highway system, Buffalo Bayou, and the 50-mile long Houston Ship Channel.

CLUI’s headquarters is on Venice Blvd. in Culver City, California — dangerously close to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

• City Dwellers: UH Students Explore Houston With Guidance From Center For Land Use Interpretation [University of Houston]
• Center for Land Use Interpretation University of Houston Residency 2007–2008 [UH School of Art Program News]
• Center for Land Use Interpretation
• You Are Here- Center for Land Use Interpretation [Vimeo]
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology – Culver City, California [Roadtrip America]

Photo of CLUI research field station: Matt McCormick; photo and video of Matthew Coolidge: Bree Edwards