Secret smile

Here's another one from a reader: Flying over Taipei, home to well manicured PARKS, GARDENS AND MEMORIALS, interesting INDUSTRIAL and RESIDENTIAL configurations, swimming POOLS, monumental TOWERS, car PARKS, and other things we enjoy, it seems there are a FEW places that need to be HIDDEN from view. (Thanks JR)

Image: The sinister smile of the secret 'clownface' organisation's HQ

Tunnel Vision

"[Ralph] Hotere was sitting beside the train driver, staring straight ahead as the train hurtled through the landscape then vanished into the blackness of the first tunnel. Then, just as suddenly, theywere catapulted back into blinding light. Then they hit another tunnel. As the artist described this journey he closed his hand when he mentioned the darkness of the tunnel then his fist sprang open when he mentioned daylight. [...] This sporadic immersion in darkness is what makes the visible world come alive, what makes it vivid and even profound; just as the stretch of daylight is necessary for the darkness of the tunnel to work its inverse magic."

Gregory O'Brien recalls Ralph Hotere sitting up front from Dunedin to Palmerston in After Bathing at Baxter's, 2002.

All this talk in the news of potential tunnels in Auckland reminded us of the extraordinary effect created when trying to navigate through Mt Victoria TUNNEL in Wellington using Street View, a curious phenomenon brought to our attention in the comments of Public Address. It's a bit like flying through the intro sequence of Dr Who.

Art From Space has long been interested in finding ways to unfold the 2-dimensional upper surface facade of the map; to somehow burrow within the information, breaking into the matrix, if you will. So our latest addiction is spelunking through the entrances and exits of the world's subterranean roads. Starting local, here are BOTH ENDS of the Lyttelton tunnel, including Peter Beaven's iconic toll BUILDING featured in Long Live the Modern.

With a little help from Wikipedia, here is a quick tour of the world's road tunnels. With six lanes and a good collection of popular culture cameo parts, HERE is the Lincoln Tunnel, which runs under the Hudson river to connect New Jersey with Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. Le Tunnel Sous la manche, or the CHANNEL TUNNEL, has the longest underwater section but no street view yet. Unfortunately there is also no street view or enough resolution to sight the architecture and sculpture that heralds your entry into the Mont Blanc Tunnel, providing a trans-alpine route between Italy and France. At 24.5km, the longest is Norway's Lærdal Tunnel, although there is very little MAP VIEWING yet but we look forward to seeing the sequence of caves added especially to keep drivers amused and alert. One of the longest in Asia is the Hsuehshan Tunnel, which runs from HERE to HERE and has its own FM radio station. Opened in 1897, London's Blackwall Tunnel displaced more than 600 houses, including an alleged former home of Sir Walter Raleigh, and has several sharp bends, apparently included either to keep horses from bolting when they re-encountered direct light, or to avoid tunneling through black death burial grounds. Starting from BLACKWALL (where the ROOFS are impressively landscaped) it brings you out near the MILLENNIUM Dome HERE.

Speaking of tunnelling to the millennium, we would reminisce for a bit about watching Irwin (The Swarm) Allen's The Time Tunnel but a lack of age would make that a fabrication. But we are rather fond of the literary wormhole (wordhole?) Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries have created between North and South Korea. The border town of Pal-Pan Dong is presumably just an artful figment , although it is hard to tell with so little of Korea (North and South) marked on google maps. They have info on the DMZ bus tour here (it takes a while) and here, or you can cruise the BORDER yourself, noting what are presumably military installations all the way along and looking for tunnels.

Within the DMZ you will find just two villages, Daeseong-dong on the South side HERE, and the allegedly uninhabited Kijong-dong in the North HERE, with lights turning on and off but nobody home, and sporting the world's tallest flagpole. As has been reported in the LA Times, google maps has done wonders for opening up North Korea to virtual tourism - bring on the duty free.

Image: The HOLLAND TUNNEL entrance, close cousin to the Lincoln, features on the cover of Yo La Tengo's 1997 album, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.

Mind the Gap

“[These works] capture western capitalism on the grandest scale; the landscape seen from outer space. The landscape from this perspective is slightly mysterious. Describe circular irrigation to most people and they will immediately recall the kind of crop circles depicted in extraterrestrial movies and conspiracy theories. There is usually a ready explanation to this kind of enigma: in the instance of circular irrigation it is purely the pattern created by irrigation sprinklers which enables these abstract and slightly haphazardly constructed landscapes.

“[Adrian] Jackman has worked from public domain satellite imagery in Google Maps. The quality and amount of visual information available varies considerably in this popular web application, enticing the imagination to postulate on unseen spaces. This is of course a technical constraint of the photograph but one that does not exist in painting. For the painter, this lack of visual information represents an opportunity: to capture the available information and successfully fill in the gaps.

“Gaps have at one time or another invoked imaginative responses in us all. Whether it be cracks in the pavement or the narrow spaces between domestic decking floorboards. In this new series Jackman has witnessed gaps in the landscape, constructing a collection of intriging new compositions that are certain to strike an imaginative chord with his audience.”

Matt Blomely on Adrian Jackman's exhibition Mind the Gap at Lopdell House.

Image: Adrian Jackman, The Agrarians, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 1220 x 1524mm

Sweet imitation

Cheryl Bernstein's blog, has noted a local business appropriating art from its immediate environment for their own marketing use; in this case it's Neil Dawson's CHALICE. As we have already seen here on AFS, public art and puddings are not such a strange mix (let's not forget this other example in Christchurch).

Despite their scale, the light-handed way Dawson's works define space make them a ghostly presence on the landscape and hard to find from above. His iconic work FERNS in Wellington, despite its much-reproduced presence in local marketing, is barely a shimmer and a shadow. (While you're in Civic Square, note that City Gallery's pre-construction incarnation lives on in google maps.)

The Len Lye Foundation's WIND WAND (street view HERE), now commonly seen in all manner of local marketing, attracted many tributes when it first went up. For a period, there seemed to be an imitation Wind Wand in every back yard. Although the intention was mostly irreverent, one can't complain when a substantial portion of of a provincial city start making their own kinetic sculptures from found objects: bendy PVC pipes capped with gumboots, modified washing lines etc. Dawson doesn't seem to mind a little DIY either, and this website even has a build-your-own sphere page.

But let's not forget Hallensteins' much more cynical handling of being called up for its appropriation of John Radford's TIP sculptures in Ponsonby Park, defended by law firm Hesketh Henry who are also trying to market themselves as art lawyers. Some people want to have their cake and eat it too.

Image: Here we give thanks to Lye (bamboo and crystal vase - don't tell Mrs ArtFromSpace)

Twin Towers

Much earlier this year, a time I distantly recall as being summer, google maps was more likely to be used for scoping out holiday road trips than workplace escapism. That may not have been the purpose of the reader who, knowing our predilection for the strange parallel worlds created by time-displaced maps when they are stitched together, forwarded THIS map link. (Thanks LM)

Whilst further exploring the adjacent area, we came across THIS striking view of the iconic Ratana Church, a now class form which has inspired artists including Don Binney (scroll down), Ans Westra, Robert Ellis, Derek Henderson, Natalie Robertson, and many others. One now features on the cover of Deidre Brown's new book Maori Architecture, already reviewed here and here, which seems a perfectly good opportunity to circulate a digital view.

Here today...

Until midnight tonight a giant LED clock will count through 1440 minutes to re-activate the ALBERT PARK ROTUNDA as a site of activism and free speech. This is Bik Van Der Pol's contribution to the One Day Sculpture series. Given the inherently temporal nature of this project, it doesn't naturally lend itself to the slow-release mapping we usually concern ourselves with here. However, many of these sorts of works leave a long-term residue, either physical or conceptual, that shifts the way we view a site thereafter. Henry Moore's BRONZE SCULPTURE in Wellington, perhaps the antithesis of all this temporal activity, will forever appear compromised as a result of One Day Sculpture, unless the Wellington City Council and Wellington Sculpture Trust decide to accept Billy Apple's proposition, at which point the sculpture will begin to undergo a long-term physical transformation.

Throughout the ODS Symposium there were a few works that were repeatedly invoked as reference points. As evidence of the continued influence of Rosalind Krauss' Sculpture in the Expanded Field, we revisited SPIRAL JETTY and also the disappearance of Tilted Arc. The favoured recent examples that kept cropping up were Francis Alys' When Faith Moves Mountains and Javier Tellez's One Flew Over the Void (Bala Perdida). Like many of these works, Tellez utilises tension from an existing sculptural structure, in this case the West Coast end of the U.S-Mexico BORDER FENCE. Alys recruited 500 volunteers to move by four inches one of the giant sand dunes of VENTILLA near Lima as an act of deromanticising land art for the land-less. In a similarly anti-monumental gesture resulting in more vanishing earth works, in 2007 gelitin spent seven days on CONEY ISLAND BEACH digging holes and filling them in again.

Abandoned

With our running interest in hidden places, negative spaces, voids and other types of monumental emptiness, we couldn't resist this post on WebUrbanist, which we have managed to mostly translate into map locations (and more deserted cities here).

Hong Kong's once anarchic Kowloon Walled City was torn down not long after Jackie Chan used it as a set for Crime Story, including real footage of exploding buildings. Before demolition, Japanese explorers spent a week mapping the vacated site. It is NOW A PARK.

The RYUGYONG HOTEL casts a long shadow over Pyongyang, a towering memorial to failure.

Our favourite is the mysterious and futuristic UFO ghost city of SAN ZHI, Taiwan, which sadly disappeared only a few months ago.

Once the capital of Azerbaijan, AGDAM's crumbling mosques demonstrate that living at the crossroads can have a negative effect, which can leave you in the middle of contested territory just as it can also make you a centre for commerce. Then there are the built open spaces of the city of FATEHPUR SIKRI, Uttar Pradesh, India, which was the capital of the Mughal Empire but is said to have been abandoned since the 16th century when it ran out of water only decades after being built.

Unfortunately the map resolution is not great but here is the former splendor of BOKOR HILL STATION in Phnom Bokor, Cambodia.

Closed in 1999 after a single accident, Opko Land in South Korea is still a mostly intact amusement park, although google has been very slow to add maps and detail to most of Korea so THIS is as close as we get. A shame because we like amusements parks and promise to seek out a few more, abandoned or operating, at a later date.

Image: The UFO house in Sanjhih, taken by cypherone

Tremors

"Theo Schoon, the Dutch artist, introduced me to the geothermal areas of the central North Island - areas to which I have returned many times to record on film the detail and drama of these fascinating places. Here at your feet and in the air you breathe are the feverish exhalations of volcanic activity. These sites are the art galleries of nature's creations, thrust to the surface from subterranean crucibles by steam, boiling water and gases."

Len Castle quoted by Peter Simpson in the Mountain to the Sea exhibition catalogue.

Last week, amidst some of the steamiest weather Auckland has experienced in recent times, Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery curator Tanya Wilkinson opened a touring exhibition of Len Castle's geologically inspired ceramics, combined with photographs by the artist and a selection of commissioned poetry, all of which makes for a nice publication.

Amongst those places favoured by Castle and simmering with primeval forces is the volcanic heart of the North Island around Tongariro, which includes the CRATER LAKE of Mount Ruapehu, the UPPER and LOWER TAMA lakes with their wind-swept, bottle-glass surfaces, and the seemingly kiln-fired, peak of NGAURUHOE, adorned with jewel-like lake glazes HERE, HERE and HERE.

Heading north from the super-sized crater lake of Taupo are the geothermal facilities at WAIRAKEI, the many small lakes through the region, including ROTOKAWA, TIKITAPU with its strange digital surface patterning, the pale blue and strikingly titled Echo Lake (WHANGIOTERANGI) alongside the emerald green Ngakoro, and of course the bubbling mud of WAIOTAPU and WHAKAREWAREWA in ROTORUA. And then, out to sea, it is hard to miss the miles-long plume of White Island (WHAKAARI).

Speaking of smoking peaks, here's MOUNT SAINT HELENS, VESUVIUS, KRAKATOA and ETNA. Not to forget the regularly erupting island of STROMBOLI, site of a movie starring Ingrid Bergman as a frustrated new bride. This in turn inspired Woody Guthrie to write a great piece of bawdy verse in which he longed for the perty actress to make his mountain quiver, a song that went unrecorded until Billy Bragg and Wilco were allowed through the late folkster's notebooks.

Image: Len Castle, Tongariro Emerald Lake

The Big Apple POA

Just north of the Waitomo turn-off is The Big Apple Cafe with its larger than life name-sake sculpture. We actually noticed this one over the Christmas break but it took a second road-trip to confirm the location and find it on the map. Part of the problem, which is also the reason we noticed it anew, is that The Big Apple has just had a pop make-over, now coated in a gleaming red finish compared to its earthier, more naturalistic FORMER LIVERY which, aside from the TELL-TALE BITE, blends with the surroundings. And if anyone is looking their own piece of rural paradise, it appears the owners are now looking for offers.

Circular vibrations

Last year we briefly got curious about whether crop circles exist on google maps but only found those big irrigation machines that are particularly common in places like OKLAHOMA - fields and fields of Mondrian and Mrkusich grids. Now we find there's another kind of earth art, the ominous concentric circles of bombing ranges such as those of Nellis Airforce Base, HERE, HERE and HERE. And of course there are also more mysterious configurations, variously thought to be the work of pranksters, aliens, sound waves, or the Mowing-Devil; two near Sheffield HERE and HERE, and near Parma, Italy HERE (locations sourced from this map).

For an art theoretical consideration of this phenomenon, Emil McAvoy will be presenting a discussion of "the interconnections between crop formations and our current understandings of complex, integrated and nonlinear systems" at this weekend's SCANZ symposium at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.