NOT IN RANGE

NOT IN RANGE is an experimental documentary and bicycle-as-installation in production by Shadow Mountain.

Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range

The project focuses on the northern boundary of the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range (CMAGR), a vast live-fire training environment in the Colorado subdivision of the Sonoran Desert in Southern California east of the Salton Sea. The CMAGR exists as a physical landscape and an invisible field of signals, surveillance, and rehearsed violence.

The range functions as part of a broader network of militarized terrains. Aircraft from nearby installations such as MCAS Yuma, NAF El Centro, and other regional bases enter the range to conduct bombing runs, rocket attacks, and strafing exercises against fixed and mobile targets distributed across the desert floor. These activities are coordinated through layered systems of radar, telemetry, and communications, allowing pilots and operators to rehearse detection, classification, targeting, and engagement.

The Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range is also a Superfund Site.

Sensing and Capture

Shadow Mountain will navigate the northern perimeter of the range along the Bradshaw Trail using a human-powered mobile-sensing bicycle, the Giant SLOTH (S.low L.ocomotion & O.ppositional T.actical H.abitat). The bicycle is outfitted with an array of software-defined radios, optical systems, and scanning tools, and Giant SLOTH will collect radio transmissions, visible light, ultraviolet, and infrared video, as well as 3D scans and Gaussian splats of artifacts encountered along the boundary.

These recordings will reflect a fragmented and indirect experience of the range, where activity is perceived only through partial signals, acoustic traces, and fleeting visual encounters.

Experimental Non-Fiction

The resulting work will take the form of an experimental non-fiction documentary installation presented upon the Giant SLOTH bicycle itself. Inside the exhibition space, the bicycle transforms from a remote-sensing instrument into an exhibition system. The technologies that gathered the material will also present it, bringing fieldwork and exhibition into a single continuous apparatus.

Video clips, audio recordings, and spatial scans will play across multiple LCD screens mounted to the frame and trailer, accompanied by amplified sound and sensor-driven interactions. The system will include audio amplification, speakers, LCD panels, Arduino microcontrollers with hall-effect sensor arrays, Raspberry Pi media modules, and LED lighting.

A Charged and Unstable Field

The desert here operates as a layered site of visible and invisible forces, where sensing systems, weapons testing, and environmental traces accumulate into a charged and unstable field.

Perceptions and Imperceptions

NOT IN RANGE is shaped by incomplete knowledge, intrigue and complexity.

Interleavings and Contortions

The Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range can be understood through interleavings and contortions of intensity, invisibility, and transformation. NOT IN RANGE hopes to capture the spirit of this complexity.

The Resolution of No Resolution

Military sites are positions that never resolve into a complete picture. The Bradshaw Trail gives proximity as a civilian and functions as a remote-sensing proscenium for the ever-changing relations within the CMAGR.