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Double Positive
 We have not come here for a rendezvous.  We have come here simply to rest.  We are refugees, en route to less troubled terrains with only a thin film protecting our caravel from the fallout. Thinking this ancient swimming pool a safe harbor, we berthed our diaphanous spaceships within its partitioned terminal.  Our stay will be brief, but the vaseline landscape might just convince us to strike our Utopia here.
UPDATE: Land Art Generator Initiative
 Registrations for the Land Art Generator Initiative competition are finally being accepted. The goal of the competition is to design and construct Land Art / Environmental Art installations that have the added benefit of large scale clean energy generation. Each sculpture will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to thousands of homes. Note that this is foremost an art competition, meaning “the installations are art first, power plants second. There may need to be sacrifices to be made in terms of efficiency of energy generation in order that the design function primarily on a conceptual and aesthetic level. The objective is not to design and engineer a device that provides the cheapest KWh or the most energy per square meter of land.” The deadline is June 4, 2010.
Terraforming Versailles on the Moon
 Last week, government and commercial websites in South Korea and the U.S. were targeted with denial-of-service attacks. In the U.S., “[the websites] of the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department were all affected at some point over the weekend and into this week.” And in South Korea, “at least 11 major sites have slowed or crashed since Tuesday [July 7], including those of the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, the mass-circulation newspaper Chosun Ilbo and the top Internet portal Naver.com.” There is evidence to suggest that the cyberattacks were instigated by North Korea, though a link to the rogue state may never be proven definitively. From rogue states or not, from Russia or China, from the domestic front or not, cyberattacks like those of last week are real and significant threats to America's computer network systems. To develop defenses against such online attacks, the U.S. Defense Department has been creating specialized forces. For the Army, there is Army Network Warfare Battalion, which was activated last year. For the Air Force, there is the 57th Information Aggressor Squadron, whose hackers “spend their days and nights probing the military’s vast computer networks for weaknesses to exploit” in “a series of inconspicuous trailers” at Nellis Air Force Base. Meanwhile, at West Point and the other federal military academies, cadets can now choose to receive training in cyberwarfare. “There is hardly an American military unit or headquarters that has not been ordered to analyze the risk of cyberattacks to its mission — and to train to counter them,” wrote the New York Times. “If the hackers were to succeed, they could change information on the network and cripple Internet communications.” Also last week, New Scientist reported that the first node in space of the interplanetary internet went online. This newly installed system aboard the [International Space Station] could one day make communication automatic and less prone to data loses between earthbound networks and spacecrafts and astronauts orbiting the earth or in deeper space.  According to a press release prepared earlier this year by Carnegie Mellon, researchers at the university assisted Astrobotic Technology Inc. in developing conceptual robots capable of preparing lunar landing sites for a future moonbase. Specifically, these lunar bulldozers would be tasked “to build a berm around a landing site to block the sandblasting effect” of multiple landings and takeoffs. Alternatively, a fleet of “small robots could comb the lunar soil for rocks, gathering them to pave a durable grit-free landing pad.” It is envisioned that these robots would be sent to the moon in advance of human expeditions. In other words, these telepresent digging machines would be operated from earthbound venues — and thus prone to takeovers from hackers. Not that that would be easily done. As far as we know, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity haven't yet been commandeered by hackers and programmed to dredge arabesque parterres on the surface of Mars. Certainly, what would be easy is fantasizing about a rogue landscape architect with previous training in cyberwarfare at the National Security Agency. Because of the financial meltdown, he is between jobs, simmering and festering in soul-draining temp jobs, constantly bombarded by the cackles of gossiping colleagues in adjacent cubicles. Clearly in need of a creative outlet, he sets up a botnet of thousands of infected computers to try to take control of the moon rovers. He will have to wait, however, until those robots have landed and their calibrations finished to start hacking the servers of NASA and what would then be a greatly expanded interplanetary internet. But once appropriated, he will upload a different set of instructions. He will program them to terraform a full scale, regolithic Versailles on the surface of the moon. Artist-in-Residence-in-Mars
Land Art Generator Initiative
 At the moment, there are no project sites, no deadlines, no jury and no sponsors to announce, let alone what coming in first place will mean, either receiving a cash prize or a commission or both. But if and when the logistics are properly set up, Land Art Generator Initiative could be a fascinating competition to follow. From the project statement, emphasis theirs: The goal of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) is to design and construct Land Art / Environmental Art installations in the United Arab Emirates that have the added benefit of large scale clean energy generation. Each sculpture will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to up to 50,000 homes in the UAE. How about a frozen desert artificially gouged with wind-damned canyons? There is a blog, bLAGI, in which you can check for any updates.
The 25-Year Riverine Journey of a Wooden Boulder Carved out of a Felled 200-Year-Old Oak Tree
 Beginning in 1978, when a spherical chunk of oak got lodged in a stream as he was moving it to his studio, the sculptor David Nash has documented its long riverine journey. “For 25 years,” Nash writes, “I have followed its engagement with the weather, gravity and the seasons. It became a stepping-stone into the drama of physical geography. Spheres imply movement and initially I helped it to move, but after a few years I observed it only intervening when absolutely necessary - when it became wedged under a bridge.”    The journey is so extraordinary — made more so perhaps by the fact that it's so well-documented — that we can't help but quote the rest of Nash's accounts: During the first 24 years it moved down stream nine times remaining static for months and years. Sedentary and heavy it would sit bedded in stones animated by the varying water levels and the seasons. Beyond the bridge its position survived many storms, the force of the water spread over the shallow banks did not have the power to shift it. I did not expect it to move into the Dwyryd river in my lifetime. Obviously we know what has happened to it — it's been scooped up by a reclusive oil tycoon to adorn his secret garden like a pilfered Grecian kore. Resting on a pedestal, accumulating monetary value, periodically acting the part of a showpiece to entertain guests.    It would be unsurprising to hear someone remark that the boulder is at the mercy of the elements, although we're more apt to say that it is the river that is at the mercy of this artifact, under the weight of human agency, and of Nash's relentless gaze and choreographic machinations. The river turned into a Picturesque folly; the passing of time, the same physical forces that smooth out rocks and bend rivers turned into a constructed view.
The Mastaba of Abu Dhabi
By the way, how are the plans for Christo and Jeanne-Claude's project for the United Emirates going along?
  Perhaps the duo are presently occupied with Over the River? Meanwhile, wouldn't it be deliciously intriguing to hear that Dubai is scheming to snatch the project away from its rival and that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are receptive to a change of venue? Just wondering.
Landscape challenge #3
A multiple choice question this time. What is the function of this concrete protrusion on the plains of the Negev Desert in southern Israel?
 a) An ancient observatory for equatorial auroras.  b) A twenty-first century 10,000-square-meter “contemplative space” used by horny teens and meth junkies.  c) A twentieth century freedom sculpture commemorating an Israeli war victory.  d) A future astronomical viewing platform for the coming galactic collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies.  e) All of the above. (Answer) Is Dani Karavan a cargo cultist? Landscape challenge #2 Landscape challenge #1
Is Dani Karavan a cargo cultist?
 Two things discovered saved in the same folder during a recent spring cleaning of my archives: a set of images of the large scale works of the Israeli artist Dani Karavan; and an essay by J.G. Ballard titled, “Robert Smithson as Cargo Cultist,” which according to my notes, appears in Land and Environmental Art by Jeffrey Kastner (1998). The images and parts of the essay are reproduced here.  On Smithson's most celebrated work, Ballard asks, “What cargo might have berthed at the Spiral Jetty? And what strange caravel could have emerged from the saline mists of this remote lake and chosen to dock at this mysterious harbour? One can only imagine the craft captained by a rare navigator, a minotaur obsessed by inexplicable geometries, who had commissioned Smithson to serve as his architect and devise this labyrinth in the guise of a cargo terminal.”  And now you must be thinking: What intergalactic tourists had commissioned Dani Karavan to design interstellar runways in the guise of an esplanade and a boulevard...in the guise of a sculpture in the guise of a peace memorial? Are those lasers just some sort quantum communication devices, beamed from watchtowers stationed along his axial trails?  Ballard wonders further: “But what was the cargo? Time appears to have stopped in Utah, during a geological ellipsis that has lasted for hundreds of millions of years. I assume that that cargo was a clock, though one of a very special kind. So many of Smithson’s monuments seem to be a patent amalgam of clock, labyrinth and cargo terminal. What time was about to be told, and what even stranger cargo would have landed here?” But what about Dani Karavan? What awaits at the end of his pilgrimage route, what will countless benedictions invoke? Peace? No, too shortsighted. Karavan operates in deep time.  Ballard again: “Fifty thousands years from now our descendants will be mystified by the empty swimming pools of an abandoned southern California and Cote d’Azur, lying in the dust like primitive time machines or the altar of some geometry obsessed religion. I see Smithson’s monuments belonging in the same category, artefacts intended to serve as machines that will suddenly switch themselves on and begin to generate a more complex time and space. All his structures seem to be analogues of advanced neurological processes that have yet to articulate themselves.” Fifty thousands years from now our descendants will also stumble upon Karavan's concrete allées, but rather than bewildered, they'll walk themselves into a feverish pace as if some genetically encoded instinct had kicked in, up and down, going and returning until delirium sets in, visions of primeval landscape architects, up and down, arriving before leaving, and then finally...
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