Signs in the key of life

We've been meaning for some time to bring the strange terrain of Las Vegas to Art From Space, but it appears the Art, Life, TV, Etc. blog has beaten us at our own game. Nevertheless, the Neon Museum Cheryl has provided COORDINATES for is quite a sight, even from this distance, and a welcome addition to the proverbial to-do list if we ever get there in the flesh. Even if we don't, this long-retired SKULL in the neon boneyard is an online treasure, as is the assortment of ALPHABET SOUP signage, lucky horse shoes, and the adjacent CARNIVAL.

Image: Andy Anderson, the Anderson dairy mascot, now in Fully Working Order

Here we give thanks...

The vast icy terrain of Greenland appears to be google's biggest blindspot and is punctuated with curious artefacts where indistinguishable bits of map have presumably been stitched together. This glimpse of MARTIAN landscape is certainly intriguing but, at 40km in length, it is this metaphysical GATE that is most striking. But should we attribute it to McCahon, Mondrian or Malevich? Kubrick? (Thanks AS)

Loving the alien

"A recurrent scene in sci-fi movies shows the earth withdrawing from the spacecraft until it becomes a horizon, a beachball, a grapefruit, a golf ball, a star. With the changes in scale, responses slide from the particular to the general. The individual is replaced by the race and we are a pushover for the race­ a mortal biped, or a tangle of them spread out below like a rug. From a certain height people are generally good. Vertical distance encourages this generosity. Horizontality doesn't seem to have the same moral virtue. Far away figures may be approaching and we anticipate the insecurities of encounter. Life is horizontal, just one thing after another, a conveyer belt shuffling us toward the horizon. But history, the view from the departing spacecraft, is different. As the scale changes, layers of time are superimposed and through them we project perspectives with which to recover and correct the past." (Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 1976)

"In London, the Barbican's spring show The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art opened only a day after the latest incarnation of the Carnegie International - at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art - which was subtitled Life on Mars. The two shows proposed superficially different uses of the metaphor of extraterrestrial life to reflect on contemporary artistic practice, yet underlying these apparent differences, one could detect common themes that are now strongly influential in Western culture - that of a pessimistic apprehension of impending disaster; a profound sense of uncertainty and disorientation regarding human society's claim to progressive agency; and a kind of post-historical estrangement from the experience of modernity. What drives these, however, is a now common theoretical and political celebration of what might be called the Absolute Other. Along with the more recently opened mega-show After Nature at New York's New Museum, these shows all share a peculiar critical operation - the use of a strategy of displacement of the human subject from which to ‘look back' or ‘look from afar' on human life..." (JJ Charlesworth, Any Other But Our Selves, 2008)

[22/5/09 this link just in from overthenet]

Image: Mark Bradford, Help Us, 2008, on the Carnegie ROOF

Echoes from the future, mirrors from the past

Today I chanced upon this article by Joe Banks aka Disinformation about the English sound mirrors we mentioned a few months back. I like the way Banks extends the idea of sound as an inherently temporal media to describe the sound mirrors as allowing a 'glimpse' into the future. Banks goes on to compare these structures to Dani Karavan's Negev Brigade Memorial, overlooking Beersheba, Israel, which was presented in the Israeli Pavilion in the 10th Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition. Trained as a painter, Karavan also represented Israel at the 1976 Venice Biennale with his Environment for Peace installation.

Although the NEGEV MONUMENT, with its light tunnels and wind organs, is not so easy to see, many of his other permanent projects are easy to spot from satellite. Here is MA'ALOT, which runs between the Ludwig Museum and the impressive Cologne Cathedral. Here is his ESPLANADE CHARLES DE GAULLE in La Defense, Paris. And here is DORFPLATZ (Village Square) at the Credit Suisse HQ, Zurich.

Since we last spoke about monuments

Until 9 November, Stroom Den Haag in The Hague is holding an exhibition titled 'Since we last spoke about monuments', which is part of a programme called Nu Monument. As the exhibition's press release states, there are "fervent debates the world over about what to remember - where, how and to whose benefit -, public works commissioned, defaced or deplored, countless instances of symbolic abuse in public space evince the extent to which monuments are still with us today, as screens for projecting political or social emergencies, for enacting cultural memory."

Included in the exhibition is Sam Durant's Defaced Monuments project. Christopher Columbus seems to be a regular victim, including THIS plinth in Caracas that once held a Columbus statue. Last time we checked, the Columbus Monument in BARCELONA was still well.

Dead Seas

I noticed this massive earth work in the background of a music video and, with the help of the clip's maker, managed to locate it on the map. Looking like a koru expansion of Spiral Jetty and remarkably visible from a long way up, HERE are the pink ponds of the Dominion Salt Works at Lake Grassmere, also known as Kaparatehau (wind-blown lake) - some fantastic images here.

Even more impressive are the enormous salt ponds of the Dead Sea, which are well worth SCOUTING AROUND for strange shapes, structures and textures. Note the backbone formed by the Israel-Jordan border, which runs right up the middle of the sea, where you'll find this brilliant STATIC effect just before resolution cuts out.

Wikipedia tells us that the Dead Sea is only the second saltiest body of water on earth, after the CRATER LAKE of Assal, which boasts some impressive volcanic landscapes but none are yet visible at any useful proximity via by google's satellites. Frank Zappa fans may find the location familiar as potentially being the country from which his brilliantly titled Sheik Yerbouti album takes its name.

Image: Lake Grassmere salt farm, taken by Mike Harre

Finding Nemo

If any regular readers still harbour doubts as to whether secret societies and individuals with enough resources have the power to influence the content on google maps, then THIS LINK is for you. A fantastic digital mosaic I've just chanced upon in the port of Amsterdam, just opposite Renzo Piano's fabulous ship-shaped NEMO museum. A large part of the abstracted area is occupied by historic ships in the Maritime Museum but presumably there is a particularly sensitive military presence here too?

Into the future...

"The International Date Line is an awkward nineteenth century device conceived to manage the complexities of modern time, travel and global geography - it is the boundary line between 'today' and 'tomorrow'. Drawn through what was conveniently thought of as an 'empty' ocean, it is a haphazard broken line marked by cartographers on geographical and nautical charts. It is an intangible phenomenon, unbound by international law. The theoretical line is around 180 degrees from GREENWICH, formulated in 1884 as an agreement between commercial steamships of the principal maritime countries of the time. Shifts have occurred for practical reasons over the years, the most recent in 1995 to cluster all 33 small atolls in the nation of KIRIBATI into the same time zone.

"As early as the thirteenth century, mention was made of lost days in the region by the Syrian geographer-historian Abu 'I-Fida. In 1519 Antonio Pigafetta, the Italian chronicler of the first circumnavigation of the world by Ferdinand Magellan, mentioned a peculiar incident that occurred during the voyage whereby somewhere a whole day was apparently 'lost'. In Jules Verne's 'Around the World in 80 Days' 1873, Phileas Fogg learns that by moving eastwards he gains a day and thereby wins the prize. In Umberto Eco's 'The Island of the Day Before' 1994, the seventeenth century shipwrecked Italian protagonist reminiscences on his life and loves and becomes convinced that all his troubles will dissolve, if only he could cross the nearby Date Line."

Rhana Devenport, Date Line: Between Today and Tomorrow, in Date Line catalogue, 2007.

Why did the line cross the road...? Here is the PRIME MERIDIAN ARCH on the road to Barcelona, Spain.

Image: Looking like a cross between a Bill Culbert and a Gordon Matta Clark installation, this is the Greenwich observatory with its viewing aperture open for business.

Letters

Here's a good one, sent in from a reader: A rare site-specific Donald Judd can be found HERE behind the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide - thanks JD.

Apparently quite controversial at the time, Judd swaggered into town in cowboy boots in 1974 to design the work, which was completed in 1975 after he left, never returning to see the final result. If only there was access to online satellite photos then.

In 2004, AGSA commemorated 30 years of having this work in their permanent collection. More details on the work and other public sculpture in Adelaide can be found here.

Watch this space

Collaborating with artists, writers, curators and institutions, the Remotewords project has been marking rooftops with text since December 2007. Beginning with "Start" at their HOME BASE in Cologne, they have since added three sites: FUHRWERKSWAAGE KUNSTRAUM, Cologne, the spectacularly located KUNST:RAUM SYLTQUELLE, Rantum, and they have just activated a new site on the roof of the EDITH RUSS SITE FOR MEDIA ART, Oldenburg (pictured).

At time of writing, all four are "offline" as they have yet to appear on google. As Remotewords says, "The project REMOTEWORDS is based on the idea of disseminating statements in various languages via Google Earth and other available virtual globes. The messages are applied to the roof of the respective institution with paint. The aim of this action is, via satellite system, to publicize the message after a time lag..."

"Google Earth goes to a great deal of trouble to update continually; because of the landmass and the amount of data, however, the time lag can last up to several years. Some recently completed edifices still appear on Google Earth as architectural shells, while buildings long since razed still seem to exist from the air. Google assures us that the image data are, on average, between one and three years old (Source: Google Earth website). The virtual globe systems suggest a present time that in reality is made up of time segments. This fact can, however, be put to artistic use. When news once appears on the virtual globe, it remains on the net for a long time whether it has, in the meantime, been uninstalled or 'censured' in real space."