Test Park tour broadcast
Featured in Test Plots Magazine, Issue One


Test Park


A theme park’s landscape gives form and narrative to a myth, but it also gives it a place. Typically the myth’s disparate parts do not coalesce at any one location but are scattered across the larger territory or in many media. A theme park melds these elements so that... the landscape coordinates and situates the ideal and the real, providing a context that presents a useful version of the myth, enhanced visually and aurally. The spatiality of the landscape in particular gives myth weight and force. The tale becomes truer and the place, by implication, better as the former gains spatial extension… the landscape in one of today’s theme parks often does more than simply recollect an existing myth; it creates popular culture’s new ones. -- Terence Young, Theme Park Landscapes




Test Park is a virtual terrain created from a collection of physical test sites currently found across the United States. Experimenting with new technologies, test sites are usually not accessible by the public. Through isolation and experimentation, test sites produce autonomous places and alternate realities. Despite their separation, ambiguity, and lack of public exposure, test sites are quite influential, acting as reference models for our future cities.

Test Park uses satellite imagery to gain access. Collaging test sites found across the United States together, the project creates one location (a type of theme park landscape), a virtual terrain for public tours [via Twitch/GameShow] and interviews [via Skype]. Test Park acts as a place/platform for test site scientists and engineers / Unity developers and designers / and visitors to share their views.



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