The small, remote township of Parkfield, located 218 miles south of San Francisco and 196 miles north of Los Angeles, is considered by many experts to be an ideal place to study the state’s seismic activity.

University of New South Whales fine art graduate student D.V. Rogers considered that assertion when he selected the rural site to house his interactive land art piece described in a media release as “a seismic art interface between real-time reported Californian earthquakes and a hydraulically actuated earthquake shake table.”

“It’s not pure science; it’s not conventional art practice either,” said Rogers, a native New Zealander who’s spent most of the last decade in engineering and software development.

Rogers has managed to garner the support of a variety of companies and institutions on the project, including the United States Geological Survey, where he serves as a USGS artisan resident.

Installed in a 75-foot long by 30-foot wide and six-foot deep excavated trench on an open field owned by John Varian in downtown Parkfield adjacent to the Parkfield Cafe, the large-scale, time-based earthwork actually reacts to earthquake activity and uses interactive technology to update and feed the information to the scientific world, Rogers said. The $20,000 project is essentially a conceptual art project, self-driven and funded by private money. It went live on Aug. 18.

Each time an earthquake occurs, an array of steel rods attached to the earthquake shake table oscillate and resonate, “reflecting the dynamic nature of the Californian landscape,” according to the release.

An average of 30 to 60 seismic events occur throughout the state each day. The earthwork is triggered by near real-time reported Californian earthquakes from magnitude 0.1 and above, Rogers said.

The earthquake shake table is surrounded by an array of vertical motion sensors called L10 Geophones, which get excited when walked over or jumped upon and trigger the vertical motion of the shake table.

Rogers said the geologically interactive, kinetic earthwork is a geological performance blip resulting in a feedback loop between the seismicity of California and a physical and mechanical representation of all the state’s seismic events that occur until Sunday, Nov. 16, when the piece will be disassembled.

“If you think of deep time, geologic time, essentially this is an artwork that is a very temporary intervention within that immense timescale,” he said.

There’s actually an interactive component where visitors to the site can trigger the table as well. Rogers said he would welcome the opportunity to have local schoolchildren or the interested public visit the site for field trips and the like on appointment.

Data collected from the project will be digitized and used for educational and research purposes, among other things.

“It’s certainly been a very interesting project to undertake and it’s been a really rich and rewarding experience,” Rogers said.

To learn more about the piece or check in with the project status, visit www.allshookup.org.