More journeys by hot air balloon

Exhibition announcement:

March 5 - April 3
Lighter Than Fiction (2010) by Jenny Marketou (Greece/US)
Presented by the Project Room for New Media at the Chelsea Art Museum

The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, and the Project Room for New Media are pleased to present Jenny Marketou: Lighter Than Fiction. What do you see when soaring over Los Alamos, New Mexico... utopia or dystopia? A landscape of natural beauty or a place where nature was unleashed in the creation of the nuclear bomb? Jenny Marketou’s video installation poses the question, juxtaposing dreamlike perspectives with disturbing realities. These contrasting states are experienced in three single channel video projections that comprise the installation.

In “Stolen Bubbles” 2010 Marketou has mixed visual and sonic material from Karel Zeman’s “The Stolen Airship” 1966 with her original animation that draws from the airborne balloon project called “Bubbles” 2009 - both filmed over Prague, Czech Republic.

“Bubbles” is based on a public sculpture project where the artist created a remarkable set of 14-meter banners with her original graphic composition using the word “Fragile” which were draped onto an air balloon. Marketou filmed as she and her guests riding the balloon experienced breathtaking views of PRAGUE and the dream-like sensation of floating with the wind currents, hovering above the busy pace and anxieties of city life.

“Levels of Disturbance” (2009) is structured around the aerial audio and visual recordings that Marketou captured while flying in a small jet over the natural landscape around LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was created in the 1940s, that is still contaminated by nuclear waste and turbulent human emotions. During editing Marketou destroyed the order of the video sequence and the coherence of the narrative, placing at the center of each frame a round sphere animated in a perpetual motion that controls and obstructs access to the full image of the landscape. The viewer is drawn into this unsettling spinning sensation, generating metaphors for the human condition.

“Lighter Than Fiction” investigates the precarious balance between reality and fiction capturing the view from above where the lightness of utopian sensations and imagery are contrasted by dystopian realities.

Image: Still from Jenny Marketou's video animation “Levels of Disturbance” 2009

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.

The Zero Island

Via the Starkwhite Blog, we discover the Cactus Dome of Enewetak Atoll, a cracked concrete cap more than 100m across, covering a radioactive dump left after US nuclear testing in the Pacific Proving Ground. The dome fills a crater left HERE by the 'Cactus' blast, preceded by 'Ivy Mike''s world-first test of a hydrogen bomb in 1952 as part of Operation Ivy, which completely atomised the island of Elugelab, leaving a 2km-wide hole HERE.

"What you have just seen was an awesome turning point in history..."


Image: Ivy Mike makes the cover of Life, found here.

The Seat of Power

Although Moscow is home to his MAUSOLEUM, St Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad) is naturally home to one of the world's many statues of Vladimir Lenin. One of Russia's most iconic MONUMENTS, it has become the butt of jokes after vandals added some rear ventilation to his coat earlier this year. Fortunately nobody was hurt in this latest incident. Curiously, it was April Fool's day when the event took place and found its way into the world media. The St Petersburg Times reports that a sarcophagus will be placed over the statue during its restoration, a bizarre fate for any bronze hero but something we would love to see images of.

Image found here

Motor City is crumbling

The industrial heart of Detroit has become a ghost town, according to a recent photo essay in Time Magazine (thanks SH). Images include the grand MICHIGAN CENTRAL STATION, derelict for more than 20 years; The FISHER BODY PLANT, producer of Buick and Cadillac bodies, abandoned in 1991 but still home to some floor sculpture; and what must be the grandest car park we've seen, the former MICHIGAN THEATRE within the MICHIGAN BUILDING, apparently built on the site Henry Ford built his first car.

Looking around, Henry seems to have his NAME written all over this town. THIS lot full of rusting iron frames is quite a sight. Heading west from the city you find the Ford plant, and nearby Zug Island and surrounds has some DRAMATIC AND INTRIGUING scenes. We wonder how life COMPARES across the river in Canada?

Image: Fisher Body Plant #21, Interior, including artwork by Scott Hocking. (Sean Hemmerle)

The All-Seeing Eye

"From the Panopticon to the Wunderkammer explores the deep chasm between ideas of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’. One of the most damaging fantasies of modernity was the idea that there could be a universal view to encompass all people, phenomena and things within set categories. Many museums were founded on such convictions. This view is also made evident in the punitive institution of the Panopticon, the rationalist, Enlightenment prison in which one governor could see all the inmates in their cells from a single, fixed, authoritarian viewpoint. This approach is contrasted with the earlier, more fluid Cabinet of Curiosities, a prototype of the modern museum, which brought together disparate items from different origins as objects of delight and wonderment. In a reversal of history, this Biennale will be a contemporary Wunderkammer, allowing the audience direct experience and enjoyment of a wide range of art that is not categorised in any hierarchical way. [...]

"The Panopticon is a type of prison designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. It features a circular array of inward-pointing cells – allowing one guard to observe all the inmates from a single point of view, without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched. The central goal of the Panopticon was control through both isolation and the possibility of constant surveillance."

Media announcement for the 2010 17th Biennale of Sydney

Now let's peer into some Panoptic structures:

Panóptico in BOGOTA, now the National Museum of Columbia

PRESIDIO MODELO in Cuba is also now a museum.

MT EDEN Prisons in Auckland, which apparently resembles...

DARTMOOR Prison, England, which was once put to sea by the Goon Show.

The ROUND HOUSE is the oldest building still standing in Western Australia, which is also home to Australia's Hardest Prison: CASUARINA.

STATEVILLE in Illinois is one of America's Hardest Prisons.

The notorious INSEIN PRISON in Burma was actually built by the British and was the largest in their empire before World War II.

While we're sneaking in and out of correctional facilities, here's ALCATRAZ ISLAND, GUANTANAMO (or Gitmo) and COCKATOO ISLAND, which, like Alcatraz, is now a tourist facility and next year will once more be a venue for the Biennale of Sydney.

This interactive map provides international statistics on prison population per capita.

Image: Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla De la Juventud, Cuba.

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

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.

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.

Echoes from the sky

Since first seeing Disinformation's photos of them in the catalogue for David Toop's 2000 Sonic Boom exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I've always been intrigued by the sound mirrors near Dungeness, and eager to visit if an opportunity ever arises. Meanwhile, they definitely warrant a GOOGLE VISIT. More are scattered around the South-east coast of England and were built from as early as 1914 to amplify listening ability to up to 20 miles. Intended to provide early warning of an aircraft attack, they were soon superceded by faster aircraft and radar. I see there has been talk of resurrecting these and, using new technology, building a counterpart in France - was this ever done?

Portable versions were also developed, including the fearsomely named Japanese War Tuba. There are some great images of the acoustic mirrors here, and more about sound weapons on the Stalker blog here, here and here. As Stalker notes, this kind of weaponry is still quite contemporary and rather scary. But could be fun in the hands of an artist though. I'd love to see (hear) focussed sound being projected from hot air balloons. Thanks to James Pinker, who alerted us to this latest development with rather insidious implications if put in the hands of unscrupulous marketing people. At least the crap cannon has been shown to be an urban myth!

The China Syndrome

I've been doing a little reading about apocalypse movies in advance of next week's exhibition, The Swarm. Whether it's attacking insects, tomatoes, tidal waves or aliens, according to a text by Kim Newman, most of these films are a symptom of anxiety about the bomb. As Newman puts it The China Syndrome (1979) "takes its title from the facetious term for what would theoretically happen if a nuclear reactor went into meltdown - the plutonium would eat through the world and turn up in China."

I couldn't help thinking of Maddie Leach's Andalucía 2007 project earlier this year at Te Tuhi. With a little help from some contractors and bored.com, She dug a hole in the gallery courtyard and emerged in a Spanish olive grove. You can try it for yourself here by zooming into your chosen hole location and then clicking on the map. If LAKE TAUPO really had no bottom, you could swim to a strange looking island just out of CASA DE PERABAD, halfway between Seville and Madrid.

The China Syndrome is about a nuclear plant on THREE MILE ISLAND, Pennsylvania. According to bored.com's hole-digging service, a meltdown would actually leak through to HERE, in the ocean about 1000km south-west of Perth. So we're not so safe from nuclear catastrophe in the South Pacific after all.

Image: Maddie Leach, Andalucía (detail), 2007. Excavated hole (1m x 2m), earth, tarpaulin, fencing mesh and waratahs.

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.