Blowing in the wind

The Auckland Art Gallery's Outpost blog has just posted some great images of their George Rickey (1907-2002) Double L kinetic sculpture being put into storage for the duration of the gallery's lengthy redevelopment. Outpost also notes a couple of other editions of the same work; one outside the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which has much better AERIAL IMAGERY (pictured) than its AUCKLAND COUNTERPART, which is essentially invisible. And also a third edition at the Pepsico Sculpture Park in New York. Strangely, although the surrounding properties have perfect resolution at the closest magnification, the GROUNDS OF PEPSICO look like they have been photoshopped with one of those watercolour-type filters. Is there a copyright issue with works of art appearing on google maps? Still, based on this record of what is at the park, we do get to play spot-the-mystery-object with all the large, dark blobs.

A map of the browser uprising

It passed me by earlier this week, but apparently Firefox staged a download day as an attempt to set a Guinness Record for software downloads. The final count was more than eight million and, at time of writing, the record is being assessed by Guinness.

What is especially interesting is, if you look at the interactive map showing which countries downloaded how many copies, it provides a fascinating view of global connectivity. North Korea is amongst the few countries that rated zero. Does that mean no one is online in North Korea, or that download speeds there are so slow that this is beyond their capability, or the internet is so controlled that nobody could take part?

It is heartening to see that nearly 500 people in Myanmar managed to make the download, and even Bhutan got 55. Not surprisingly, most of Africa only made three-digit totals or less. It is strange that the OPEC nations didn't do so well, but it's possibly revealing that Iraq and Afghanistan struggled to come even close to the yet-to-be-demolished-by-the-axis-of-blunder country they flank: Iran.

I started wondering about density of countries, the economies that more populated places can support, and how that might relate to connectivity and technology uptake. Sifting the SpreadFirefox forum, I found this site that lets you sort countries alphabetically or by population, area and density - elsewhere on the site there is a map of computer language use, and google earth overlays to download too. From these figures, someone has already started analysing the Firefox download statistics. Of course, these figures can't be considered an assesment of pure connectivity. They could also be taken as an overview of where there is most resistance to Microsoft's Explorer monopoly. Perhaps North Korea are all happily downloading things at terrific rates on Internet Explorer because Bill Gates has become friendly with Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, much like google have become chummy with China?

I should acknowledge that it is quite probable my reading of the Firefox map has been influenced by Fiona Jack's Missing Peoples project, which lists the nationalities NOT included in the Merriam Webster's dictionary. The dictionary, it seems, has a conspicuous geographical blind-spot!

Image: Map of international character usage, downloaded today from World Gazetteer.

Energy Fields

Yesterday I received an email at work about the falling storage in New Zealand's hydro lakes and the need to conserve power. You can check the daily status of the lakes here. I thought I'd have a look at the actual lakes...

Here is the CLYDE DAM on the Clutha River, forming Lake Dunstan. Notice the historic MINING SITE downstream towards Alexandra. This was one of several controversial hydro schemes of the era, another being the Manapouri Dam, which was stopped, perhaps partly thanks to a hugely popular protest song by John Hanlon. Check out the frosty water and wafting clouds of the SITE TODAY, which is completely shrouded if you zoom out. The most impressive is LAKE PUKAKI, with its glassy water and long SCULPTED CHUTE that rivals anything being done in the Nevada Desert.

Of particular interest now is THIS DAM, near the town of Horahora. As with many hydro projects, the harnessing of nature is at the expense of other sites that become flooded, washing away local histories. The story of Horahora has now been retold through Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena's 2007 project, Aniwaniwa, which recalls the flooding of the Horahora power station where Graham's grandfather worked. The exhibition catalogue has some great images, including the one above, of the power station's last stand.

So I started looking for other large power-generating land installations. There's a lot of solar activity going on in the Mojave Desert. Solar One and Solar Two make for good MAP VIEWING. There's something intriguing about looking from a satellite at what are essentially mirrors but are absorbing and storing the light that is essential to looking (note to self: re-visit Robert Smithson's writings). Lots of good IRRIGATION CIRCLES just to the east too. Someone has just pointed out to me how much they resemble Graham's Tangaroa sculpture, named after the Maori god of the sea. And there's no escaping the resemblence of HALF-CIRCLE irrigation fields to Gretchen Albrecht's lunette paintings.

The PS10 project in Spain (pictured) has a particularly sculptural look, but unfortunately ISN'T VISIBLE on google maps just yet. This BBC report gives a full rundown on how the tower works and I can't wait to see how it looks from above with the jets of light and surrounding "aura". Also yet to be added to the GOOGLE MAP is Nellis Solar Power Plant, the largest of its kind in North America. Nellis is part of the Nellis Air Force Base on the outskirts of Las Vegas and has all kinds of INTERESTING CONFIGURATIONS of military HARDWARE SITTING AROUND.

Images: Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena, Aniwaniwa (still), 2007; Horahora Power Station being flooded as villagers look on, 1947; PS10 tower power plant, Sanlúcar la Mayor, Spain.

Battle of the Triffids

Currently on show at Te Tuhi, Pakuranga is Land Wars, an ambitious multi-platform exhibition curated by Emma Bugden, which looks at the ways land is contested in our present age. John Hurrell has reviewed the show on his eyeCONTACT blog.

Amongst the usual contemporary range of documented sites and actions, relational projects and moving image footage, there is a set of intentionally old-fashioned looking paintings by Michael Shepherd. Michael is the master of artificial aging and could probably paint a convincing looking plasma screen and still have it look like it was made 50 years ago. He was also acknowledged with a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MoNZOM?) for services to art in the latest Queen's Birthday honours list.

I was particularly taken by the wall-label description of his work in Land Wars, which proposes an interesting analogy between the serried ranks of garden centre products and fascist processions:

[...] The three works exhibited here consider changes to the natural wilderness through human intervention. In this, Shepherd includes destruction through development of land but also well intentioned acts of cultivation which unwittingly have an impact on reshaping nature.

The painting Versailles refers to perhaps the most famous garden in the world, the Château de Versailles, described by the artist as the “ultimate constructed landscape”. In Shepherd’s version the formal garden of Versailles is replaced by the Oratia Native Nurseries in the Waitakeres, where native seedlings are laid out waiting to be purchased and planted, a precise and somewhat unnatural arrangement which the artist has likened to a “Nuremberg rally for plants”. [...]

Here, for your own consideration, are the battlegrounds of ORATIA and VERSAILLES.

Image: Michael Shepherd, Versailles 2007/8. Oil on linen. Courtesy of Jane Sanders, Auckland

Sculpture parking

A recent post on overthenet had me wondering about just how impressive sculpture parks might look by satellite. There's a bunch of them around and they're specifically set up for big outdoor work.

Here's Vigeland Park, as recommended by overthenet. An impressive setting but not much to be SEEN FROM ABOVE.

There are two public parks just out of Auckland. Connell's Bay on Waiheke Island; the YELLOW SPECK ON THE RIGHT of the path going north from the bay is probably the Phil Price piece gyrating away. And Brick Bay Sculpture Trail near Matakana, with an impressive piece of land work that can be SEEN FROM A LONG WAY UP. No sign of the pavilion on the lake so the current map must pre-date the official opening of the trail. Not to forget Alan Gibbs' estate on the Kaipara Harbour, which is unfortunately (suspiciously?) OUT OF FOCUS.

The Cass Sculpture Foundation near Goodwood, UK is the model for Brick Bay, but not much that's recognisable to be SEEN FROM ABOVE except the roof of Alex Hartley's Pavilion.

Finally, here's the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Nice to SEE SOME MODERNIST BOXES out in the desert.

Break on through to the other side

I've been thinking a lot about how I'm using google maps as a ready-made material for curating (art-making?), and therefore wondering about the materiality of this resource. How to consider the surface and is there a way to punch through it; to rupture the material? More on that later, but here's a strange IMAGE-HOLE I've found just off the coast of San Diego. Kind of like a portal of some sort.

Burning up years

Hard to tell what we're looking at in this strange LIBYAN LANDSCAPE I chanced upon yesterday while admiring the incredible desert patterns just to the east of here. Presumably it's got something to do with oil production as I've just noticed a burn-off happening just over HERE. All very impressive when you realise the scale of these images. A view of the ENTIRE INSTALLATION is comparable to the same magnification required for a view covering the width of New Zealand's NORTH ISLAND.

Antonioni Park

I have been admiring the good resolution available in London , which now allows you to zoom right in. At the closest resolution, there is a nice analogue grain to the image, which had me thinking about Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 movie Blow-Up. The film has the main protagonist obsessively making photographic enlargements to try and confirm a murder he may have inadvertently documented but the details are elusively lost in the grain. As Wikipedia puts it: "Ultimately, the film is about reality and how we perceive it or think we perceive it." Although I can't recall the exact geography of the park in the movie, as far as I can tell, the murder took place HERE.

The Wikipedia Blow-Up entry also provides a link to this resource, which is a database of film locations. There is something quite interesting about the slippage between depicted fictional cinematic space and the actual spaces where these scenarios were filmed. Such as the way The Last Samurai used MOUNT TARANAKI in New Zealand as a stand-in for MT FUJI in Japan.

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.

Death and Disaster

There is an interesting relationship between minimalist sculpture, monuments and memorials, as someone commented to me a few weeks ago. Conventional monuments, through their inherant longevity and ability to outlive their original context (and maker), to some degree inevitably become a consideration of mortality, whether it was the original intention or not. The traditional model is the cenotaph or statue, vertical (phallic?) structures that commemorate a person, event or (by default) the artist and the commissioning patron or corporation. In the case of disasters, a memorial is created, perhaps as a byproduct of the event itself, that takes on a significant resonance as the site of some great tragedy. In some cases the site is a signifier in name alone, remote and inaccessible, perhaps inhospitable as a result of a catastrophe. Or the signifier is what was erased from the site, structures that become iconic symbols of what had previously been there, now marked by an absence or a metaphoric place-holder of some sort. Or the disaster lives in the public imagination, especially of those who never have or never will visit the site, through iconic images distributed by the mass media.

Perhaps the most significant of these is the empty (negative) site that once held New York's World Trade Centre, now known as GROUND ZERO.

New Zealand's worst air disaster, the 1979 crash of a DC10 into Mt Erebus, Antarctica was made the subject of Stella Brennan's White Wall / Black Hole, exhibited in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. Images of a dark, inky stain left in the snow are probably what first comes to mind when kiwis think of EREBUS.

Stella's excavation of history has recently led her to links between the military development of sonar and radar in WWII and the present application of that technology in ultrasound, most commonly used to show signs of growing life during pregnancy. Included in her South Pacific exhibition are ultrasound images of a model Enola Gay, which dropped Little Boy on HIROSHIMA.

The name Chernobyl has become synonymous with the nuclear reactor accident at the nearby town of PRIPYAT, Ukraine, now contained in a 30km exclusion zone. This dead-zone makes for spooky viewing when doing a virtual fly-over with google maps. Notice, if you view labels or flick to map view, that the whole region is unmarked, as if it officially doesn't exist. Especially if you're familiar with Elena Filatova's images, allegedly taken on several motorcycle tours of Chernobyl's environs. Unlike the work of some of the artists on this site, it is said that the results of Chernobyl will remain in the land for 48,000 years.

Inventor Nikolai Tesla (played by David Bowie in the movie The Prestige) apparently had plans for a mechanical eye that would allow people to see all over the globe - I wonder if he patented that one, google maps? A favourite amongst conspiricists, it is thought that Tesla misfired a Death Ray he was aiming at the Arctic, causing an enormous explosion in Tunguska, Siberia. I was kind of hoping to find some sort of radioactive crop circle mysteriously maintaining its mark on the land. Not great resolution around here but still worth a VISIT.