Traces of a conspiracy

Exhibition announcement:

"In an information-based age, the ability to search and organize information amounts to power. Search engines shape knowledge, modulate web traffic, and contribute to the creation of new semantics and meanings. Currently, Google's influence is unparalleled. It has expanded the way that we search and find information, and inserted itself into nearly every web-based activity.

"The selection of projects in Google Art, or How to Hack Google illuminate and critique the influence of this expanding online institution. The projects include ad hacks that attempt to foil Google's seemingly unstoppable business machinery, playful re-interpretations of search results and alterations of its geographical worldview. Together, they elevate and critique Google's logic, while recognizing its own deepening relationship with our culture, behavior and lives."

Curated by Ana Otero for Rhizome, October 2007.

Included in Google Art, or How to Hack Google is Gregory Chatonsky's Traces of a Conspiracy (2006), which "combines Google Maps Satellite Images, Flickr Photos and found text to produce a generative narrative. Through zooming, panning and flashing, the piece evokes the paranoid and breathless tone of a conspiracy theory while leading its audience through a limitless dialog picked from random text found on the internet."

Also included is Escoitar.org, "an open, collaborative project that encourages the addition of recorded soundscapes onto online maps. Enabled by a hack of the popular Google Maps program, Escoitar.org (meaning 'Listen' in Galician language) was inspired by a particular desire to preserve the acoustic patrimony of GALICIA, a region in the Northwest of Spain. Through the visual network between locations and accompanying sounds, Escoitar.org allows people to understand landscapes, not only visually as places, but also via their autochthonous sounds."

Image: still from Gregory Chatonsky's Traces of a conspiracy (2006)

Breaking Big

Despite a growing list of new writing assignments and good intentions of a productive evening, we couldnt' resist checking out the first episode of James May's Top Toys in which the Top Gear presenter makes really big versions of his childhood toys. First up is the classic Airfix model, the spitfire, which becomes a 1:1 kit, sprues and all - with a cast James May figurine in the cockpit. As overthenet are probably thinking, could be contender for a lookalike - HERE'S one conspicuously big example.

As May notes in the programme, lifesize spitfires aren't rare, there are quite a few replicas balanced on poles all over the place, including THIS recreation of the original spitfire prototype. Or THIS pair fixed in action at Bentley Priory. Even one right HERE in the Waikato. The programme also offered a glimpse of the Sentinel sculpture HERE on Spitfire Island near former spitfire production centre Castle Bromwich, where the episode takes place - nice CARPARK too.

We can't wait for the etch-a-sketch episode.

Endless Summer

A strangely compelling travel piece not so long ago in the NZ Listener describes a blimp-hangar turned holiday resort in eastern Germany. Opened just in time for Christmas 2004 and clearly visible from ABOVE, Tropical Islands is easily as big as some neighbouring villages and has its own airstrip.

The website boasts the world's largest indoor rain forest, a complete tropical village, a Balinese lagoon and Germany's largest water slide. According to Wikipedia, it is one of the world's largest buildings by volume and the biggest hall without supporting pillars. Probably not what Buckminster Fuller had in mind for Spaceship Earth but camping is allowed (for a small fee).

Image: Tropical Islands under construction

"Nature is never finished"

“In my field we’re trained to make condition reports,” said Francesca Esmay, Dia’s conservator, but she added of Smithson’s work [Spiral Jetty], composed of more than 6,000 tons of rock and soil: “Its scale is such that I can’t just go out with a camera and pencil and clipboard by myself and describe it.” So several months ago she turned to the Getty Conservation Institute, an arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has organized and assisted in conservation and monitoring of art and historic sites from Central America to Africa to the Middle East.

After considering nearly every possible way to document “SPIRAL JETTY” from above — Rent a weather satellite? An airplane? A helicopter? Use a kite? — the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.

(Story and image extracted from The New York Times, November 17 2009)

Chute

In our last tour of New Zealand's hydro facilities it seems we missed an important one. Fortunately Peter Peryer, whose use of a blog to reveal the day-to-day influences on his practice is well worth a subscription, has been keeping a close eye on the CLUTHA RIVER. He reports that the dam now has surplus storage and, indeed, it does look like we've gone from a serious low to a significant high since alarm bells were ringing last winter.

We're envious of the remarkable landscapes, cloud formations and earthworks he has snapped while on residency in Otago and during frequent trips north. Here is his Three Sisters in Tongaporutu, reduced to just a pair for a while but now featuring a new sibling. Unfortunately the coast is shrouded in cloud so we can't see exactly which incarnation lives on the GOOGLE MAP.

Air travel appears to be an occasional recurring theme of Peryer's and he has even snapped the elusive B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, which has invisibility powers that seem to even keep it clear of map sitings. A number of people have documented finding them HERE at Edwards Air Force Base, halfway between Lancaster and Littlerock. Similarly, there were a lot of documented sitings of one left on the tarmac HERE at Northrop Grumman, and most of the fleet of 20 are said to reside HERE at Whiteman Air Force Base, but in all three cases someone has done a very good job of spiriting (airbrushing) them out of view. There is apparently one parked inside a hangar at the National Museum of the US Air Force, although a good gathering of vintage craft can be seen outside HERE. In the middle of the Indian Ocean on the controversially depopulated Diego Garcia atoll, which contributes to GPS data, you can see HERE the portable climate-controlled bubbles they are kept in. But our favourite siting, also at Edwards AFB, has to be this bomber-shaped garden over HERE.

Images: Peter Peryer's Sluice Gate Number 1 at Roxburgh (above) and our own version (below), one of NZ's Top 10 modernist structures according to Docomomo.

Spanish Bombs

Given that a primary interest of Art From Space is to curate and explore art by appropriating images of existing phenomena via the digital assemblages of satellite photographs found on google maps, the second life of art works is something we pay a lot of attention to. Although the Mona Lisa is generally considered the world's most reproduced artwork, in Spain it seems that honour goes to Las Meninas by Spanish court painter Diego Velazquez. Despite our not venturing anywhere near Madrid, where the painting now resides at the Museo del Prado, we regularly encountered postcards, t-shirts, jigsaws, coffee cups and even mouse pads emblazoned with the popular work.

Testament to the importance of Las Meninas is the fact that, in 1957, Pablo Picasso produced numerous interpretations of the work, totalling 58 oils which he later gifted to Barcelona's Museo Picasso. Picasso is not the only one and the Museo Picasso currently has an exhibition of works by a long list of artists, all inspired by the same painting, including Salvador Dali, Richard Hamilton, Phillipe Comar's perspective analysis, and Eve Sussman's video re-enactment, which was recently shown at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Other derivatives were found on the streets of Spain including a grouping of three of the pictured sculptures by Manolo Valdes, just installed on CALLE ERCILLA in Bilbao but yet to appear on satellite view.

Another work we kept running into without having to visit Madrid was Picasso's Guernica, which also once resided at the Prado but is now at the Reiner Sofia, as overthenet have recently noted. This is probably not surprising given that we were in Basque territory where the work has inextricable links to the region and the staunch independence of the locals, who are unlikely to ever have it on home turf, even after the construction of a local Guggenheim franchise. In addition to the usual paraphenalia, we found this framed jigsaw puzzle hanging outside a games shop in the alleys of San Sebastian's old town.

It seemed fitting, then, that the last stop on our Spanish tour had fortuitously become a pilgrimage to the actual town of Guernica, officially known as Gernika-Lumo in Basque. It is interesting to consider the contribution Picasso's painting continues to make to international awareness of the blanket bombing of the town by German Luftwaffe pilots on behalf of Franco's Nationalist forces in 1937. Even so, the name now seems synonymous with the painting and the actual place has a more mythic quality to it. So walking through Gernika's streets, it is odd seeing signs that bear its name to proclaim such mundane things as the local podiatrist's clinic.

Not far from the church of Santa Maria, one of the only structures to survive the bombing, is the pictured ceramic-tiled reproduction of the painting - Guernica in Guernica. Just along the road in the other direction is another significant surviving location, the Tree of Guernica (Gernikako Arbola) a symbol of freedom under which the town's people and national officials have been meeting for centuries. Unfortunately, google's resolution doesn't quite let us see this sacred site, but I can't help wondering how much this AERIAL VIEW resembles what the German pilots saw 70 years ago. It is probably also worth noting that a bridge and ammunition factories, which were ostensibly the bomber's targets, survived the three-hour blitz.

Soft Sculpture

The front page of today's NZ Herald has the interesting story of three activists bursting one of the bubbles that protected the notorious WAIHOPAI SPY BASE near Blenheim and denuding the satellite dish hidden within. It wasn't that long ago that the NZ government denied that it even has such a facility, let alone was using it as part of an international intelligence network shared with other countries including the USA. It is commonly thought that the base is used to eavesdrop on civilian communications, and even UN diplomats.

The story concludes: Global Peace and Justice Auckland spokesperson John Minto said the photo of the deflated dome was a "powerful symbol of resistance to New Zealand's role in supporting the so-called war on terror being waged by the US".

Photographing or giving detailed locations of such places would have once been a matter of national security. Taking a photo of a US navy boat in port can still get you arrested. But the entire fleet of any country's security forces are now there for the finding on GOOGLE MAPS. A bit like British Artist Fiona Banner's project, All the World's Fighter Planes.