Classic tracks

Although the novelty factor is undeniable, we are still finding TVNZ's belated screening of James May's Top Toys curiously compelling viewing, with a surprising amount of art parallels. In epidode one there were oversized KITSETS, then there were large meccano bridges. Another goodie is the recent episode where a classic motor racing track was revived to its former glory using vintage aerial photography and Scalextric slot cars. Sounds a bit like a Billy Apple project, albeit without the slot cars.

For Billy Apple's Bruce & Denny Show, seven classic tracks, raced by the legendary team of Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme during their 1967-1968 victorious sweep of the Can-Am series, were recreated. These were produced from period aerial photographs to determine the exact outline of the tracks as they were at the time, then all converted to the same scale and rotated to true north. Featured tracks are ELKHART LAKE (Wisconsin, now Road America), BRIDGEHAMPTON (New York, now a golf course), MOSPORT PARK (Ontario, now Mosport International Raceway), EDMONTON (Alberta), LAGUNA SECA (California, still active), RIVERSIDE (California, now a mall) and STARDUST (Las Vegas, now the suburb of Spring Valley but fondly remembered).

May's programme is underpinned by a similar sort of social archeology. In this episode he pays tribute to Brooklands, the first purpose-built motor racing circuit in the world but out of action since 1939. Although SECTIONS of the track remain, along with a museum, the most action around here takes place on the Mercedes Benz test track that resides in the MIDDLE of the old track. May sends his slotcars across housing and industrial estates, fences, a river, pond, through corporate offices and across a road in order to recreate the BROOKLANDS circuit. At 2.7 miles in length, Brooklands now holds the record for the world's longest slot car set.

Image: Billy Apple, Paying Tribute. The Race Tracks, 1967, screenprint on paper, 521 x 843mm, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Two Rooms.

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.

Special Reserve

[exhibition announcement]

A lot or a little might be said, but in the end there will be something to pass on.

By WilliamHsu and Nick Spratt

For their project at Newcall Gallery, Hsu and Spratt initiate a series of events that position the gallery as site within a trajectory, providing an access point to other spaces in its immediate surroundings. These events in their varied forms explore and reveal parameters of inclusion and exclusion within shared space. They interrelate in a way that might call into question how collective experiences may be instigated and relayed.We invite you to join us for the opening event on Wednesday evening at Glenside Reserve South.

Please join us at GLENSIDE RESERVE (beside Newcall Gallery, see map) 6pm tonight for the opening event.

Weather forecast looks fine but if it rains please bring an umbrella.

Show runs 4 - 20 February

Hours for 2010: 12-5pm Thursday - Saturday

(The gallery will not be open on Waitangi day, Saturday 6 February)

Details about subsequent events will follow during the course of the show.--

NEWCALL GALLERY

Level 1, Newcall Tower

Hohipere St

Newton

Auckland

http://www.newcallgallery.org.nz/

Doctoring time

Fans of Dr Who spin-off Torchwood (we've just finished the second series on DVD) will immediately recognise THIS view of central Cardiff, which plays a prominent role in the series. Cardiff, so the story goes, is in the middle of a rift in space and time and the Torchwood hub, where they deal with rift anomalies, is based underneath the Millennium Plaza (pictured). One episode has them rescuing a warehouse-scale alien meatloaf (built by Barney (son of Wystan) Curnow). Jumping into STREETVIEW, you're practically on location, waiting for Captain Jack to pop up out of the pavement.

Speaking of enormous alien structures, we've just discovered THIS DOOZY just a little north in Birmingham, designed by Future Systems, who are also responsible for the Lord's Media Centre, found HERE.

Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

The strange representations of reality found on google earth (and maps) got even weirder a few years ago when they launched Street View, adding another layer of time slippage and weird glitches to an already complex landscape. Just over a year ago, Google's army of camera cars trawled the streets of New Zealand and we've been fascinated ever since. Whereas once it was cool just being able to zoom in on the roof of your house, or check out nearby swimming pools, now you can check out cats or catch people doing dodgy things. Naturally, suspicious country folk and those wearing tin-foil hats got nervous.

Our latest discovery is then phenomenon of cloaked cameras. You haven't travelled until you've driven the streets of Alaska inside a PLASTIC BAG. Or whatever THIS ONE is.

So there's plenty of fun to be had with Street View, but we never expected to find this.

It seems, when he's not helping Yoshimi battle pink robots from space or spending Christmas on Mars, our favourite musical cosmonaut, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, likes to hang out in a bath tub out front of his Oklahoma home. Seriously though (not really), it's a bizarre installation Coyne and partner Michelle created for Halloween 2007, just in time for a visit from Google's roving camera. You can see it for yourself HERE (notice how it disappears when you take a jump to the RIGHT?).

Double fantasy

With a full moon on both Dec 2 and Dec 31, the first decade of this millennium will end with a blue moon. But before this year is out, weather permitting, we'd like to spend some time at our favourite swimming spot - Bethells Beach on Auckland's iconic West Coast. Heading north, it follows Campion and Caro's Karekare, popular Piha and McCahon's Muriwai.

Of course, Te Henga (Bethells Beach) is a landscape with its own lovers. Most notably, Don Binney frequently returned to this location, often drawing in situ to capture it both vacant and as a backdrop for his bird studies. Interesting to note that Google Maps has it as Te Henga at THIS altitude, but zoom CLOSER and it becomes Bethells. Curious.

Reuben Paterson now joins the list of artists inspired by this coastal treasure, with a work commissioned for the New Artland TV series. Titled There Goes The Moon, Paterson's ephemeral earth work pays tribute to his ancestral home of MATATA, which was devastated by flooding and landslides in 2005. It also recalls his 2004 outdoor installation for Scape, which similarly paid homage to the sacred energies of a local landscape - PUTARINGAMOTU (Riccarton).

Built and destroyed in a day, Paterson's Te Henga piece, like Riccarton before it, is another Narcissus reflection. This time it is an image of the moon, utilising the shimmering sand and surf to reflect the moon above while the installation is washed away. You can watch the entire process here.

Image: Reuben Paterson, There Goes The Moon, 2009, photo: FAT Productions/TVNZ 7.

Endless Summer

A strangely compelling travel piece not so long ago in the NZ Listener describes a blimp-hangar turned holiday resort in eastern Germany. Opened just in time for Christmas 2004 and clearly visible from ABOVE, Tropical Islands is easily as big as some neighbouring villages and has its own airstrip.

The website boasts the world's largest indoor rain forest, a complete tropical village, a Balinese lagoon and Germany's largest water slide. According to Wikipedia, it is one of the world's largest buildings by volume and the biggest hall without supporting pillars. Probably not what Buckminster Fuller had in mind for Spaceship Earth but camping is allowed (for a small fee).

Image: Tropical Islands under construction

"Nature is never finished"

“In my field we’re trained to make condition reports,” said Francesca Esmay, Dia’s conservator, but she added of Smithson’s work [Spiral Jetty], composed of more than 6,000 tons of rock and soil: “Its scale is such that I can’t just go out with a camera and pencil and clipboard by myself and describe it.” So several months ago she turned to the Getty Conservation Institute, an arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has organized and assisted in conservation and monitoring of art and historic sites from Central America to Africa to the Middle East.

After considering nearly every possible way to document “SPIRAL JETTY” from above — Rent a weather satellite? An airplane? A helicopter? Use a kite? — the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.

(Story and image extracted from The New York Times, November 17 2009)

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.