Traces of a conspiracy

Exhibition announcement:

"In an information-based age, the ability to search and organize information amounts to power. Search engines shape knowledge, modulate web traffic, and contribute to the creation of new semantics and meanings. Currently, Google's influence is unparalleled. It has expanded the way that we search and find information, and inserted itself into nearly every web-based activity.

"The selection of projects in Google Art, or How to Hack Google illuminate and critique the influence of this expanding online institution. The projects include ad hacks that attempt to foil Google's seemingly unstoppable business machinery, playful re-interpretations of search results and alterations of its geographical worldview. Together, they elevate and critique Google's logic, while recognizing its own deepening relationship with our culture, behavior and lives."

Curated by Ana Otero for Rhizome, October 2007.

Included in Google Art, or How to Hack Google is Gregory Chatonsky's Traces of a Conspiracy (2006), which "combines Google Maps Satellite Images, Flickr Photos and found text to produce a generative narrative. Through zooming, panning and flashing, the piece evokes the paranoid and breathless tone of a conspiracy theory while leading its audience through a limitless dialog picked from random text found on the internet."

Also included is Escoitar.org, "an open, collaborative project that encourages the addition of recorded soundscapes onto online maps. Enabled by a hack of the popular Google Maps program, Escoitar.org (meaning 'Listen' in Galician language) was inspired by a particular desire to preserve the acoustic patrimony of GALICIA, a region in the Northwest of Spain. Through the visual network between locations and accompanying sounds, Escoitar.org allows people to understand landscapes, not only visually as places, but also via their autochthonous sounds."

Image: still from Gregory Chatonsky's Traces of a conspiracy (2006)

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.

Guantanamo Allocation Center

[exhibition announcement]

"The 'existential function' of the act of creation leads to the affirmation and the creation of a territory, a group, a singularity, a meaning. But it is only possible to articulate the meaning of a situation in relation to an action undertaken to transform it. To situate oneself somewhere, to create a territory or new modes of subjectification and articulation, is both a political and an existential question. And this concerns social practices as much as artistic practices."

(Maurizio Lazzarato: Art and Work)

A Project in Public Private Partnership
Initiated by Christoph Faulhaber
Realised and Supported by Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg VENUE Hafencity Hamburg Shanghaiallee/Yokohamastr. 20457 Hamburg, Germany

Being one of the first municipalities throughout Europe, the state and city administration of Hamburg, Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, has accredited the public private partnership 'Guantanamo Allocation Center'.

The Guantanamo Allocation Center is an initiative dedicated to the question of relocating the remaining detainees still in custody at the soon to be closed US MILITARY BASE. GAC focuses on the global process of allocation and relocation, and aims to provide accommodations in Germany that offer a process of re-socialization by providing and furnishing a temporary, and eventual, final home.

The project was kicked off by the German artist Christoph Faulhaber and has already teamed up with further both private and public institutions and corporations. With its first installment GAC sets out to laying the foundation for final decisions in the global process of relocating the remaining inmates.

The first installment, considered as temporary accommodation, consists of mobile units each giving room to one inmate. Four wooden crates match one 40 ft. high cube shipping container. The temporary lodging will be accompanied by a program of activities encompassing various aspects, topics and personalities from within the legislation and political process.

In order to realize the final installment, GAC has opted for a vacant lot, part of which was formerly the MAUERSTREIFEN, the military zone within the Berlin Wall. The design of the yet undeveloped 'final home' is oriented towards contemporary designs in architecture and urban planning, taking into account the special needs of the inhabitants.

Furthermore, GAC engages on consultations with international decision makers to preparing ground for the resettling of further inmates.Since GAC relies entirely on civic and individual engagement, we would very much acknowledge support and funding from any direction.

For more information please consult:

Guantanamo Allocation Center
Mr. Christoph Faulhaber
http://www.gac-web.org/

Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg
Senator Ms. Karin von Welck
http://www.hamburg.de/

HafenCity Hamburg GmbH
Ms. Penzlien
http://www.hafencity.com/

Special Envoy to Closing Guantanamo
Ambassador Mr. Daniel Fried
http://www.state.gov/

artfinder Gallery
Mathias Güntner
http://www.artfinder.de/

Image: Street art by Banksy, found here on the Prison Photography blog

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.

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.

Chute

In our last tour of New Zealand's hydro facilities it seems we missed an important one. Fortunately Peter Peryer, whose use of a blog to reveal the day-to-day influences on his practice is well worth a subscription, has been keeping a close eye on the CLUTHA RIVER. He reports that the dam now has surplus storage and, indeed, it does look like we've gone from a serious low to a significant high since alarm bells were ringing last winter.

We're envious of the remarkable landscapes, cloud formations and earthworks he has snapped while on residency in Otago and during frequent trips north. Here is his Three Sisters in Tongaporutu, reduced to just a pair for a while but now featuring a new sibling. Unfortunately the coast is shrouded in cloud so we can't see exactly which incarnation lives on the GOOGLE MAP.

Air travel appears to be an occasional recurring theme of Peryer's and he has even snapped the elusive B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, which has invisibility powers that seem to even keep it clear of map sitings. A number of people have documented finding them HERE at Edwards Air Force Base, halfway between Lancaster and Littlerock. Similarly, there were a lot of documented sitings of one left on the tarmac HERE at Northrop Grumman, and most of the fleet of 20 are said to reside HERE at Whiteman Air Force Base, but in all three cases someone has done a very good job of spiriting (airbrushing) them out of view. There is apparently one parked inside a hangar at the National Museum of the US Air Force, although a good gathering of vintage craft can be seen outside HERE. In the middle of the Indian Ocean on the controversially depopulated Diego Garcia atoll, which contributes to GPS data, you can see HERE the portable climate-controlled bubbles they are kept in. But our favourite siting, also at Edwards AFB, has to be this bomber-shaped garden over HERE.

Images: Peter Peryer's Sluice Gate Number 1 at Roxburgh (above) and our own version (below), one of NZ's Top 10 modernist structures according to Docomomo.

Wild Bill in Cloudland

Painter Bill Hammond's 1989 visit to the Auckland Islands has become somewhat of an apocryphal story, which we are told resulted in the brooding bird paintings that followed. What little most of know of this forsaken place are the hallucinatory images Hammond has fed into our imaginations. It is shrouded in further mystery from the fact that Hammond, who does not do interviews, has never spoken publically of his experience there. Photographer Laurence Aberhart was on that same expedition and last year added to the legend in the Jingle Jangle Morning exhibition catalogue with the tale of a long, cold night on Enderby Island, holed up in car cases and being entertained at "Bill's Bar". To conclude the catalogue's written section, there are two nocturnal photographs by Lloyd Godman, also on that trip along with Gerda Leenards, of a possessed-looking Hammond stalking through a Rata forest - these photos are now on show in the Auckland Art Gallery's Enchanted Garden exhibition.

But what is the reality of this mythical, far-off bird-land? Even a search on google maps sheds little light, with none of these subantarctic islands yet being marked. With some guidance from a traditional atlas, the ISLANDS are easily found and, at first appearance, present a primal view of the chiselled, craggy landforms on which shipwrecked castaways have often had to survive. Wikipedia tells us the MOSTLY uninhabited islands form the southern-most edge of the submerged continent Zealandia and are formed from volcanoes, with the main strait that is the hub of the southern end being the crater of an extinct volcano.

Zooming in, the crater seems completely shrouded in shadow and cloud, until one seemingly bursts through to a CLEAR VIEW of grey, icy waters and bare hills. Up on Enderby, you can almost smell the salt air as rows of Hokusai-waves queue to crash over CRAGGY ROCKS encrusted with dribbling layers guanno. Off the west coast is the evocatively named DISAPPOINTMENT ISLAND, which sits within a blurred circle of digital void, much like the time warp which has carvedthe island's NORTH-WEST TIP into several overlapping temporal zones.

Nearby Macquarie Island is not only draped in cloud from LONG-RANGE, it is completely LOST from the map, forcing you to drive blind until you get into close-range. At its northern tip a striking HORIZON LINE is formed at the point where the map disappears back into cyberspace.

Image: Cover of F.E. Raynal's Wrecked on a Reef, a tale of shipwreck on the Auckland Islands

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.

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.