HOST: And joining us now in-studio is The Show’s Sam Dingman — good morning, Sam.
SAM DINGMAN: Good morning! Guys, I recently took a tour of the ancestral homeland of the Yaqui people. I took a walk along the banks of the Yaqui River in the rain, learned about the plants that play a central role in the Yaqui community’s origin story, and listened to an oral history of how the Yaqui came to make their home in Sonora.
HOST: Sounds like a very rich experience!
DINGMAN: It was — and the thing is, I did it all without leaving my desk. It was part of a digital architecture project by Selina Martinez, an architect here in the Valley who focuses on using principles of design to add cultural context to built environments — in both the physical and digital realms. As she told me recently, it all started when she used to watch her dad work on their family’s house as a kid.
Full conversation
SELINA MARTINEZ: And I just always remember that whenever it would come to like the flooring, it would be like tile specifically, he would integrate like special designs and things like that, that would always come out like so perfect. And I always found that to be just something special beyond just like laying tile.
SAM DINGMAN: That's interesting. So, if I'm hearing you right, it's almost like you had this kind of early realization that you can put some of yourself into your living space.
MARTINEZ: Exactly. Yeah, I'm Yaqui and Chicano. So, on my mother's side, she's, she's the Yaqui one. And we would constantly visit Penjamo in Scottsdale. That's a Yaqui village over there. And that's actually where my grandfather is, still alive. But most of my family also lives in Guadalupe, another Yaqui community.
So, yeah, going between growing up in Phoenix to Penjamo and even to Guadalupe for our cultural ceremonies are kind of like the three main environments I remember interacting with as I grew up.
DINGMAN: What do you remember noticing as different between your life in Phoenix versus your life in the Yaqui communities?
MARTINEZ: Yeah. So specifically where my mom grew up in Penjamo, there's like this mural actually in one of the alleyways that was done. And it's kind of like a, a nod to our culture and like where we come from since our tribe is actually from Sonora along the real Yaqui. So I think those kind of things help create, I guess, those context clues, you know, that otherwise maybe other residents in that area wouldn't know about.
DINGMAN: And what kinds of examples of that were you drawn towards? If you think about the initial designs that you came up with yourself. What were some ways that you wanted to reflect the cultural history of the world in the built elements of that world?
MARTINEZ: It wasn't really till grad school that I got the opportunity to explore that through an independent project. And I chose to focus it on integrating culture into the built environment. Specifically my own culture.
I had an interest like in plants because that's all contextualized to a specific place. So that was the type of things I was exploring all the layers, history and then the kind of like digital archive of actual places in our community.
DINGMAN: Speaking of your digital work, I was really fascinated by your Species of the River project. Tell me how that came about because that strikes me as a way of using digital modeling to explore Yaqui culture in an even deeper way without necessarily needing to set foot there if that's not feasible for you.
MARTINEZ: Yeah. So the British Museum, they actually found me on Instagram and slid into my DMs and asked me for a coffee and I decided to meet up with them. They mentioned that they were really interested in my work because of the 3D aspect to it.
And specifically, I use 3D laser scanning to document these places which give it a very much realistic fill when you're looking and interacting with the model online. And it's basically a form of cultural preservation is how I see it.
DINGMAN: Well, and the result of all this is this digital exhibition that combines so many of the elements we've been talking about.
And I thought just for a minute here, if it's OK with you, we could maybe step into the exhibition and you could tell us a little bit about some of the choices that you made with it. So if I could ask you to put your headphones on, I will bring it up here.
So we get to the landing page and it says Species of the River and there's a button that says enter. So I'm going to enter and we see some text that says lead the way. So instantly what happens is we're dropped into this rendered environment. I know you can't see the image right now, but tell me about what I'm looking at. I imagine you will remember it.
MARTINEZ: Yeah. So right when you enter this space, you can automatically hear that it's raining. And as you scroll forward into the 3D environment, you will begin to see these orbs and those are basically portals to more information.
DINGMAN: OK. So I'm right now, I'm using the mouse. I'm moving it to the left and the right and I'm looking around and I see the river, it looks like it's maybe early in the morning, the sun is just coming up and there's plants by the side of the river bed. And then I'm scrolling with the mouse and I do see one of the orbs and inside of it there is a green plant. So I'm going to highlight this orb.
MARTINEZ: Yeah. And then you can click into it and you can click on to it again and then that enters into flat pages with more text written information. There's more visuals. We have contributors, local photographer Alexis Lopez, who contributed a variety of analog work representing photos from Ario Yaquii trips, as well as a contributor Alex Figueroa, who did a lot of the illustrations.
DINGMAN: And so now what I'm looking at is an image of a tree. And there's also a button where I can listen to you tell us a story about what we're looking at. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring that up if, if you wouldn't find it too strange.
MARTINEZ: In ancient times when our ancestors, the Suem, inhabited this land, a mesquite tree started to creak loudly. No one understood the ancient language of the tree. A woman was found to interpret the message.
This is the story of our, well, this is one version of the story I should say of our emergence story and how we as Yaqui people came into this world.
DINGMAN: It's really a remarkable experience to, to move through this digital landscape that you have created because the 3D rendering feels very futuristic, you know, and it, it's sort of abstract visually, but you have these very natural sounds in the background that aren't abstracted at all.
And then obviously, there's that sound that we hear when we highlight the orb, let me see if I can do that again. Which, which does have sort of a, almost a video game sort of feel to it. And the effect is that I feel like I'm in the world in several ways at the same time, I feel very present on a website, which is not an experience I've had before.
So tell me more about how this project informs the similar work you would like to do in the future.
MARTINEZ: For me, it's like almost a storyboard for what could come next. What other experience could be created, whether it's just online or even through VR headsets or other immersive experience types, where you can really feel like you're even more deeply in it.
You can go into other areas, maybe in the homelands or other communities. I spend most of my days just on the computer digitally because that's my profession. But I think that it's something that we're not going to escape any time soon. So why not lean into that?
That's another way that I feel as an architect I can contribute because I really love like culture preservation. I can even see other tribes teaching in this way. There's language involved, you know, it just becomes more experiential.
