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.

Space bunny

While in London last week, I was able to see the excellent Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The exhibition makes good use of the Hayward's sculpture courts, one highlight being Gelitin's installation that allows you to admire the London view whilst paddling about in a boat on a flooded upper courtyard lake. Surely it would be a sight to admire from the adjacent Royal Festival Hall's fourth level Blue Bar, but it is unlikely to become a surreal fixture on London's GOOGLE MAP, unless the city happens to be re-surveyed while the exhibition is on.

One project of Gelitin's that has made it onto the google map is a giant (knitted) rabbit (sounds familiar), which will be spending 20 years ON A MOUNTAIN TOP in Italy. (thanks YSH)

There is also a free little show at the Hayward which features community crocheted coral reefs. Unfortunately their website offers little in the way of images or information. The Hayward's website, buried amidst SBC stuff, also contradicts (so does Wikipedia) the Psycho Buildings blurb that boasts of how the gallery was designed between 1960-62 by a radical group of young architects, three of whom later joined Archigram, famous for unrealised projects such as a Plug-in City and a Wearable House called the Suitsaloon.

Image: The giant green Star Wars rabbit

Eight easy pieces for tourists

Art from Space is going on honeymoon for the next few weeks and will be back in August. We'll be visiting some of these places while we're away and will be introducing some new Art From Space contributors on our return. Until then, in no particular order, here's some virtual travelling for you:

Looking like a Martian landscape, ULURU, often referred to as Ayers Rock.

Not sure why but the STATUE OF LIBERTY was one of my first pieces of google travel several years ago.

I like a good shadow on google maps to provide an interesting perspective on primarily vertical structures that wouldn't otherwise be too interesting from above. The Thames almost looks like concrete and provides a great surface for sharp shadows, including this great anamorphic rendering of the LONDON EYE.

Responsible for putting the Spanish industrial town of Bilbao squarely on the traveller's map, here's Frank Gehry's GUGGENHEIM.

Originally built as a temporary structure for a world expo, perhaps explaining its daring style, the EIFFEL TOWER was originally hated by Parisians but is still going strong.

Given the usual marginalisation of contemporary art as an activity, I've always been puzzled by is the immense popularity of TATE MODERN, which is one of London's top tourist attractions. How often do the people visiting the Tate engage in the arts when they're at home, and why would they spend the hard-earned holiday time doing something that ordinarily doesn't interest them? Same goes for the LOUVRE, which is the first structure I've found so far that lets you see through a window.

On the Zambezi River on the border between Zambie and Zimbabwe, here is the VICTORIA FALLS, considered the largest waterfall not because of height or width but because it has the largest sheet of falling water.

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.