|
|
|---|
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Another testing ground is this field of telephone poles located in Chester Township, New Jersey. It's an arboretum of sorts, “planted” with several hundred tree trunks, the total of which may have peaked close to a thousand, carved out of different arboreal species and preserved using various methods. All are arranged in a formal grid and tagged with data-rich metal plates.
Here, AT&T and then other telecommunication companies subjected their lifeless midget forest to the elements and time. A menagerie of woodpeckers and pocket gophers were brought in to attack the poles. Humans and their spiked boots, too, ran rampant about the place in a balletic dance of ascents and descents, empirically choreographed.
All that just to create the perfect telephone pole.
Once a research center partly turned into a weird kind of aviary or a petting zoo or an even weirder sort of artificial ecology, the site is now part of a recreational area and an archive of our infrastructural past.
Monday, June 1, 2009
To register once more our fascination with testing grounds, or sites of experimentation and simulations, here is the rack map of concrete slabs at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' materials testing facility at Treat Island, Maine.
On the island, material specimens are exposed to natural severe environmental conditions to test for durability. They are subjected to between 100 and 160 freeze-thaw cycles, cyclic inundation of saltwater and air-drying, chloride intrusion, wetting and drying, and abrasion-erosion. There and in many other testing grounds, arranged in museological, Donald Judd-like intervals of solids and negatives, these perfect geometries are coming undone. The building blocks of future cities and monuments fracture and decay in a way that belies their solidity and intended permanence. Bit by bit, atom by atom, structures get nullified and give way.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) ends today and will be capped off later tonight with some interesting lectures, one of which will be given by Richard Pell, a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon. He will talk about his Center for PostNatural History, whose mission is “to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.”
Pell has a couple of pieces in the show. Transgenic Organisms of New York State is “a survey of genetically modified organisms that are created, bred, or exist in the state of New York,” and Strategies in Genetic Copy Prevention catalogs and displays “examples of techniques and technologies used during the past century to prevent living organisms from reproducing.”
With his creative output, Pell is trying to reimagine the natural history museum, and by extension, questions our concept of Nature. At least to our knowledge, you don't see natural history museums organizing family-friendly exhibits of bioengineered life, let alone collecting and cataloging them. (We'll be absolutely thrilled if someone tells us otherwise.) But modified living things have been part of our physical and cultural landscape for thousands of years, more so in recent decades with our ever expanding ability to manipulate organisms. On a farm out there somewhere, wheat genetically modified to resist pests better than unadulterated strains is now growing. On a pasture out there somewhere, a clone waits until its ready for its own Dolly moment in front of the world media. On a lab out there somewhere, a biotech entrepreneur is copyrighting recombined lines of DNAs before they are released into the wilds. No natural history museums are documenting this other “natural history” with encyclopedic intensity, but as repositories of knowledge, they should.
Other Simulated Worlds
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
We love reading other people's project proposals: fantastical proposals, provocative proposals, silly proposals, worldchanging proposals, wish-we've-thought-of-it-first proposals. And this, by David Gissen, is a good one: a “fantasy archive for the retrieval of future data related to the indoor atmosphere of cities.”
When I was writing my dissertation, I lamented the fact that we had no archive of indoor air; as we do for all other manner of indoor elements of the built environment—furniture, designed objects, fashion. The specific content of the air of the interiors of the past is lost to us — its bio-physical make-up is gone; we really can’t study it with a full range of analytical methods. But I wondered...what if we archived our current indoor urban atmosphere for the historian of the future? Why would we do this, and how would this be done?
The thought of future urban climatologists in a library of paleo-air, perhaps located on some rocky arctic island, is mindnumbingly interesting.
Imagine cylinders of atmospheres piled high up like drilled ice core samples or perhaps room-sized chambers stacked like shipping containers in vast, darkly lit corridors, all categorized by time, geography and socioeconomic class.
One section contains the indoor chemicals of credit bubble lofts built overnight on gentrified inner city neighborhoods. Another section might be those sampled from rammed earthen homes in Africa, off the grid, with dung-fueled stoves. Or would it be more interesting if they were all jumbled up together? In the morning you're detecting the tell-tale aroma of modern Scandinavian furniture stewing with other chemical exhalations of conspicuous consumption; in the afternoon, something with a bit less artificial provenance.
Out of thin air, a physical space is then reconstructed.
Be sure to check out Gissen's proposal to recreate the “smokey air of Pittsburgh at the early 20th century” above the Pittsburgh of the early 21st century.
Vapour City
Saturday, July 26, 2008
The American Museum of Natural History has made available for download historical photographs of its permanent and temporary exhibits. There are photographs of the museum's dinosaur displays and many more of its famous dioramas. All are in black & white.
Perhaps the most interesting from the catalog are the ones showing the museum staff preparing those exhibits. You see in those photographs landscape facsimiles in various stages of recreation; creatures undressed or nearly dressed; ethology imprinted on a three-dimensional canvas; and exterior habitats crammed into architectural spaces.
So marvelous are these bunch that we are going to post a lot of them.
Meanwhile, we have to mention at this point a very early episode of Chicago Public Radio's This American Life, titled Simulated Worlds. In the second act — just after we meet some Civil War reenactors who don't wear underwear and also after we get a tour of a wax museum and a fake coal mine but before we hear about host Ira Glass's visit with an actual medieval scholar to a Medieval Times dinner theater in suburban Chicago — writer Jack Hitt gives us a short history of dinosaur displays.
According to Hitt, dinosaur displays are not entirely the product of accumulated scientific data, of empirical truth. They are cultural artifacts, our “national psychic erector sets which we've put together in different ways depending on our mood.”
During the first decades of the 20th century, the AMNH posed its T. rex bones in an upright position, propped on its tail. Skeletons were broken, some bent and others removed altogether so that it looked like the “marauding predator” people thought they were. And also so that it didn't look too diminutive in the large exhibition hall. Natural history as a function of architecture: it had to reach high up to the ceiling, fill up all that space, loom large over the crowds. This was, after all, the time of P.T. Barnum, “when you put up your most fantastic stuff in your museum or your circus” in order to attract more people than your competitors.
This was also the time of America's ascendancy. Transcribing Jack Hitt:
These creatures had slept forever and now they were upright for the first time in a hundred million years. What had put them up on their feet literally was the wrought iron strength of Pittsburgh steel, the American industrial revolution. But the exact dates are also timely. The brontosaurus went up in 1906 and the T. rex in 1912, just before World War I, when the slumbering giant of America awoke. To the Europeans we were still a friendly, dumb rube of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, but we were about to prove ourselves as international warriors. The crowds that flooded through New York's museum saw two images: the affable but dimmed brontosaurus, and across the aisle, the berserk rage of T. rex. Friendly until agitated, then fury, which is how the world came to see us: an amiable, joshing hick who, if provoked, will kick your ass.
A few decades later, after World War II, dinosaurs were presented in more animated positions, sometimes in “outrageous poses.” They were “jimmied into action poses, locked into face to face combat like two upright grizzly bears or [?] ready to assault. This was the 50s dinosaur, the dinosaur of kitsch. They were no longer held up together by steel but animated by plastic, the essence of America at the time, a substance and a future entirely of our own making.”
In the 80s, dinosaurs gained a new persona. “No longer was the dinosaur a slow, dimmed monster. Now he was a slick, swift, calculating hunter: the Velociraptor. A 6-foot tall predatory entrepeneur, who learned and adopted quickly. He was the perfect dinosaur for global capitalism, who'd eventually starred in a bestselling book and movie, Jurrassic Park.”
As for the 90s, the decade had the eco-saur. Jack Hitt here describes a dinosaur exhibition at the AMNH, then new when this episode first aired in 1996:
We see dinosaur eggs and baby dinosaurs. The ambience is largely about parenting. The scene is more ecological and holistic. We are meant to see these animals as part of the natural ecosystem of their time. Eggs, babies, parents, death, bones. This is a story about the the cycles of life. A warmer tale, a greener tale. This is a story of dinosaurs not as George Patton would see them but as Al Gore would: emblems of a proper view of the environment. The eco-saur, who's seen the light of family values and the beauty of biodiversity.
In an era when the role of America is uncertain, when solutions to many of its problems are unclear, our nation's dinosaur exhibits speak directly to our time in bright yellow stickers attached directly to the display cases. That message: we just don't know.
And like the dinosaurs dying out, that's “probably not a bad thing.”
In any case, more photos! Including this seemingly contemporary snapshot of a bear confronting its own simulation, predating both Jean Baudrillard and Damien Hirst by decades.
Would we have to reassess the history of Abstract Expressionism if we were to discover that this taxidermist was Robert Rauschenberg's lover and that the artist's found objects were not appropriated from the streets and trash heaps of New York City but were actually pilfered from the museum's workrooms during their nighttime trysts?
And the rest.
Marvelous indeed.
Simulated Worlds
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
“For reasons not fully understood by scientists,” NASA tells us, “the weeks around the vernal equinox are prone to Northern Lights.”
This is a bit of a puzzle. Auroras are caused by solar activity, but the sun doesn’t know what season it is on Earth. So how could one season yield more auroras than another?
To better understand auroras, NASA sent five satellites, collectively called THEMIS, or Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms. During the mission's first year of operations, the satellites have “observed one geomagnetic storm with a total energy of five hundred thousand billion (5 x 10^14) Joules,” which is “approximately equivalent to the energy of a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.” And then there are those so-called magnetic ropes, which are magnetic fields that are “organized much like the twisted hemp of a mariner’s rope connecting Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the sun. Solar wind particles flow along the ropes in whirligig trajectories leading from the sun to Earth.”
To repeat: Solar wind particles flow along the ropes in whirligig trajectories leading from the sun to Earth.
Having recently been alerted by BLDGBLOG to these proposals for the George W. Bush Presidential Library — speculative architecture via air mail; manifestos for $0.41 — we can't help but wonder:
Can you build a library out of auroras?
Can these shimmering ribbons of earthly solarity be turned into a repository of knowledge?
Using a translation matrix yet to be programmed and actuators yet to be invented, you could digitize, say, the entire content of BLDGBLOG into charged electrons and protons, which you would thereafter eject from a fleet of satellites orbiting between the earth and the sun. These particles would then hitch a ride on solar winds, eventually colliding with artificially produced charged particles floating in a finely reconfigured magnetosphere. Writing in the sky with remnants of stars.
Or you could use the satellites to weave and unravel those “magnetic ropes” to manipulate the flow of solar wind particles, as one would strum the strings of a cello to create certain photonic vibrations.
Alternatively, instead of satellites, you could have a gigantic circular struts floating above the poles. Through millions of spray nozzles, charged particles will be exhaled, the amount and timing and direction being determined by a complex algorithm yet to be conceived.
When all things are working (or not working), the polar regions will be alight with the transliterated works of Mr. Manaugh. The whole landscapes singing Homeric tales of undiscovered subterranean rooms, lunar urbanism, buttressed buttresses and magmatic Baroque churches. The still waters of the Icelandic fjords and the hushed glacial fields of Alaska filled with the geomagnetic crackling of encoded artificial islands and algal farms.
However, in order to listen to them — i.e., to read them — patrons would need to use sensors yet to be developed located in spaces yet to be spatialized.
A couple of things:
1) Going back to the original question, should that now ask: can you make auroras out of libraries?
2) Not in a million years did we think that we would ever reference Babylon 5 and Diller+Scofidio in a single sentence in this landscape architecture blog, but our description above reminded us of the Shadow Planet Killer and the Blur Building.
Could Dani Karavan's Negev Desert observatory serve as a model for the library's access terminals?
“But shouldn't libraries be universally accessible?” you might object. “Not everyone can afford the trip. A few can't even stand the cold.”
Very well then. Forget BLDGBLOG — sorry, G! — this will be the new wing of the Vatican Secret Archives, open only to scholars with academic credentials and well-funded fellowships. In fact, forget our north pole, let's make them even more inaccessible and file them on other planets.
Heretical gospels howling by Jupiter's magnetic fields.
For more photos of auroras, check out this Flickr pool.
Goodbye, Alaska!
Vapour City
