You're lost deep inside Yellowstone National Park.
You've no map, no compass and no whistle to attract other backpackers. You could triangulate your location using familiar landmarks, but you aren't well versed in the arts of bushcraft. If only you didn't have to boycott Bear Grylls' wilderness stunt show because of your impossibly high standards of authenticity.
But there's not a drop of worry in you. Before you set out on your hike, you downloaded a fantamagical iPhone app that allows you to access the park's fantamagical wayfinding infrastructure of networked cyborg fauna. In fact, you purposefully went way off the trails just to test them out.
After a couple more days of aimless rambling, you whip out your iPhone and press a beautifully beveled, sweetly pasteled icon. Immediately it starts to broadcast a persistent electromagnetic hum coded with your coordinates and a few lines of instructions.
Soon a flock of birds appears overhead. They circle a few laps, and then a couple more due to atmospheric turbulence and signal disruption, before finally coalescing into an unmistakable shape: a directional arrow.
Thinking that it's pointing to the nearest trail — which it obviously is — you follow it.
After a while the flock suddenly dissipates. You whip out your iPhone again to see the screen flashing red. Apparently the network is reconfiguring itself, and there's nothing you can do but wait.
In the meantime, you take in the natural beauty of the landscape. Temporarily de-augmented, you inspect some of the native plants, enjoy the warmth of a geothermal pool, eavesdrop on the plaintive howls of the forest, marvel at some distant peaks. An hour later, a jingle snaps you out of your reveries. Systems operation has been normalized.
Seconds later, some of the elks that you were snapping photos of earlier start to make a beeline for you. Despite an ingrained fear of humans, they've got you on their sights. The app has turned you into Snow White whistling a hypnotic electromagnetic melody.
The elks stop just a few feet away. After a few seconds of jostling about, they return to munching on the vegetation as before, except this time they're conspicuously more organized. Their antlers, you noticed, are all pointing in the same direction, towards the nearest trail.
The network appropriates not only migratory and flocking behaviors but also herding and grazing behaviors.
As you make your way through this personalized guided tour of the wilderness, the herd ahead readies the next marker for you while the one in the back begins to disband. If there are no elks around, then the network conscripts other animals in the vicinity.
Just before sunset, you switch off the app and make camp. While munching on power bars that night, you realize that like any other network, this one can be hacked. In fact, there's a jailbreak app that lets you code nonstandard instructions. So with nothing else to do, you program some algorithms, enter this-and-that inputs, debug scripting errors, and check for any other stray codes before finally pressing the send button.
Set at full blaze, you position your portable stove to spotlight a slight clearing a few feet away. You take out another power bar, snuggle into your sleeping bag, and simply wait until your plein-air avant-garde stagings of Aesop's Fables and The Lion King begin, staring critters infected with your malware. It's a double matinee anticipated by Humphry Repton.
The next morning, you decamp and continue on following the markers being performed for you.
Unbeknownst to you, rogue PETA members have also hacked into the network during the night, and in their unsuccessful attempt to permanently bring down the entire infrastructure, they've only managed to wreak havoc with its translation matrix. As a result, all coordinates, vectors and fixed action patterns get miscalculated.
You are now being led astray further and further away from civilization, and it's gonna be a very long while before you realize this.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Cf. "Instinct Meet New Technology" in GPS penguins.
Meet the 12-TET Rover. What The New York Timesonce described as a “shape-changing jungle gym” is, in fact, one of NASA's future extraterrestrial explorers, designed to carry out its mission without much guidance from earth-bound ground controllers.
This autonomy is enabled, in part, by its skeletal frame — 26 extendable metal rods forming 12 tetrahedrons, hence the name — which allows the rover to “reconfigure itself into almost any shape” and adapt to terrains and situations that scientists have not foreseen. So “across flat terrain, it would roll like tumbleweed. It could pull itself, almost catlike, onto rocks or flatten itself and slither through holes.”
You can see it in action in an animation that's available for download at NASA's Autnonomous NanoTechnology Swarm website. The movie file, by the way, is 633.7 MB. Consider yourself warned.
Apparently, there's a prototype roaming a hallway somewhere. You can see it in action here [17.8 MB] and here [5.1 MB].
When not tumbling through the digitized surface of other worlds, these rovers have been drafted by the military for urban reconnaissance or hunting down certain cave dwellers.
Meet the TET Warfighter and its camouflaged pneumatic body.
The thesis is a critical response to Bruce Peninsula National Park's plan to build a new visitor center on a very tame site far from the wild shores of Georgian Bay. The images and text that follow portray an architectural fantasy that proposes, instead, to inhabit the interior landscape of the Bruce Peninsula.
So rather than experiencing the landscape from afar, you are inserted into the interior wilderness of carved bedrock, ancient limestone towers, dark fissures and underground rivers. Instead of outhouses, you will be inhabiting a labyrinth of abysses.
In the proposed scheme, an access and guidance system enables people to climb down into fissures and caverns, mimicking cedar tree roots on the site. Flrexible stainless steel attachments and fittings are inserted into fissures in the rock and hold a network of cedar roots imported to the site from harvested forests. The stainless steel structure mimics fossils, or coral bones, and the roots age and become part of the landscape.
And:
In contrast to the park's philosophy of interpreting the wilderness through a building set apart from the wild, the schematic and imagined access proposal of the thesis do not control or tame the wilderness. The wild space of the interior of the rock of the Bruce Peninsula crosses the boundary of personal safety and loss of identity, and revels in the unconscious. It is through our own inner wild that we respond to the natural and relate to the remaining wilderness.
Here are some images:
In a Metropolismicro-interview of Martha Schwartz, we learn that her dream job is to design “a national park in eastern Nevada, where we join together abandoned gold mines—that have just been left there to rot—and redesign them.”
How marvelous would it be, as part of the master plan to link them all together, to deploy NASA's TET rovers into these mines. In addition to using these skeletal tetrahedral frames as geological armatures, to hold back the earth and facilitate access, they will also bore through the bedrock, drilling new passages and eroding caverns to dwarf the nave of St. Peter's, wherein they will lock into place as columns, arches and internal buttresses.
A few centuries from now, landscape architects will go spelunking through this subterranean park. They are actually postulants to a secret society of Freemasons that had splintered off from the American Society of Landscape Architecture. As part of their Masonic initiation rites, these future stewards of the earth must first immerse themselves in the abyss; it's baptism by artificial voids. To become better caretakers of the environment, they must encounter the fullness, the exquisite grandeur, the terrifying unconscious indifference of the landscape.
In his novel, The Songlines, the peripatetic Bruce Chatwin tries “to get to grips with the concept of the Dreamtime,” and learns, in somewhat rudimentary terms, that one “had to understand it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of Genesis — with one significant difference.”
“In Genesis,” Chatwin explains, “God first created the 'living things' and then fashioned Father Adam from clay. Here in Australia, the Ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species.”
And “each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes.”
Furthermore, “a song can be thought of as both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.”
So, “in theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Illiads and Odyssey, writhing this way and that, in which every episode was readable in terms of geology.”
Illegal immigrants planning to cross the desert and enter the US on foot are to be given hand-held satellite devices by the Mexican authorities to ensure they arrive safely.
Those who get lost or fall sick during the dangerous four-day crossing will be able to activate the device, to alert frontier police on both sides of the border.
The satellite tracking service will require would-be illegals to register their intentions before setting off — a paradoxical move, given that secrecy is necessary for success — but Mexican authorities are predicting that about 200,000 devices will be handed out when the project is launched formally in the coming year.
I once thought - in fact, I still think - that it'd be interesting to grow a garden using only seeds and plants seized at the Customs office.
A garden of seized plants. Captured flowers. Find out what weird, hybridized landscape results. Take pictures of it and submit the film for an ASLA award. Write a new Pamphlet Architecture book about it.
Grow more of the things. Seize whole landscapes coming over the border. An 18-wheeler hauling an open truck bed gets stopped at the gate - because the bed is planted with seeds seized at Customs a year earlier. A small, somewhat disorganized garden grows. So of course, you let it through... It's going back to where it came from...
But you don't. You re-seize it. The loop starts all over again.
You take a dozen or two prospective immigrants. So as to minimize controversy, let's identify them as French.
Through an unimaginably improbable series of events — including years despairing about their country's economic model; being inexplicably listed on the FAA's no-fly list; and a Congress growing increasingly impotent when dealing with immigration reform — they find themselves outside the border of the US, looking in. Just beyond that grove of trees is Arizona.
And they've just eaten some fruits, you see, or brushed up against a pollen-field plant, indigenous to Mexico but not the desert Southwest — or, since this is a design project after all, you, the designer, have them swallow the seeds and lodge a few more on their persons, in their hairy chests, lanky arms, and perfumed armpits. And for good measure, you surreptitiously stuff their pockets with ones you've gathered from other exotic locales.
Then off they go.
Unfortunately, most of them will die. Without a map, they will get lost, and dehydration will come long before they reach Tucson. That or they get accidentally killed by members of the border militia or by wildlife, if distinguishable. But where they stumble and fall, a garden grows.
These gardens would then act like vegetated outposts, a constellation of caravansaries which subsequent border crossers can follow or add to. Wave after wave, and tragedy after tragedy, this new underground railroad would become as well-established and well-marked as elephant jungle tracks, and as easily traceable as a Songline.
A hundred years later, they'll become the de facto national memorial park for immigrant America, a landscape record for the migrant experience.
The Ellis Island of the Southwest.
To follow a trail there is to embark on a pilgrimage, a sacred reenactment of collective memory and a paean to the soul of the country.
VII.
Can you connect the dots?
Below is a map showing the locations of migrant deaths in 2003, as compiled from maps available on the website of Humane Borders. Red dots are deaths due to heat; yellow dots, unknown causes; and light blue, vehicles. In areas beyond the map, deaths have occurred due to exposure to cold temperatures, homicide, drowning, existing medical condition and train accidents.
The built-up area at the top is Phoenix, Arizona. The white line at the bottom is the US-Mexico border.
Or: by an Act of Congress, Dugway Proving Ground gets transferred from the Department of Defense to the National Park Service.
Landscape architects are hired to turn the site as open and occupiable as all the other parks under the care of the NPS. Because why bar humanity for thousands of years from visiting the place when it can offer new ways of experiencing landscapes?
So they, i.e., the landscape architects, set out do what they do: master planning for uses, choreographing circulation, stagecrafting experiences, preservation, etc. Meanwhile, the CDC concocts treatments for Ebola, Avian flu, smallpox and all other bioweapons the U.S. military had played around with at Dugway.
Soon the first visitors arrive.
They swallow the pills and are immunized.
After a waiting period of a few minutes for the drug to take effect, they then set off on foot, backpacking from one square to another square, from one circle to another, tracing arcs, diameters and circumferences, each and every geometry carefully measured and inscribed on the parched Nevada landscape.
Sure enough, red marks begin to appear on their skin, turning blue, then to black. Cutaneous necropsy. Trigonometry has infected you with a plague. Maybe it's anthrax.
Meanwhile, you are inspecting some angles, their hypotenuse pointing NNE towards some distant, rock-strewn hills. A fog rolls in from aerosol fountains, then evaporates. Seconds later, your lymph nodes begin to swell and a rash starts to spread from your crotch.
But you worry not. It's all part of the tour: a fantastic voyage into militarized infection, from the initial cough to nose bleeds to coma to fully restored health.
There won't be any baby sneezes or sunburns or watery eyes or any of the allergic sort. Because after all, this is not Yellowstone, and you're certainly not on the beach. Camping here aren't made memorable with the mere brush up with poison ivy. That headache isn't caused by altitude sickness. It's something more terrifying, more sublime, more marvelous.
And so with your first contagion cured, you go explore another part of the park. Wide airport runways, a whole series of them, their perfectly straight chalked edges extending far to meet the horizon.
“What superlative surveying techniques,” you shout, perhaps quoting Maria Reiche, and all the while every orifice in your body begins to ooze with blood.
“At the height of the Cold War,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur tells us, “strategic missile bases such as Zeltini were among the most heavily-armed sites in the USSR. Surrounded by barbed wire, electric fences and minefields, they were so closely guarded that they terrified even their own personnel.”
Then history happened, and “now the bases built to defend a quarter of a billion Soviet citizens stand derelict in a country of just 2.3 million. Airfields, missile silos, bunkers and hangars are slowly vanishing under encroaching vegetation - a silent, damp, concrete no-man's land.” And may have completely folded back into the wilderness if it were not for some insistent Americans:
“One day an American observer asked me if we'd found the nuclear warhead store yet. I replied, 'What store?' So he took me for a drive into the woods, reading off a GPS navigator,” [former Soviet military engineer] Upmalis said.
“We found the hidden entry to a nuclear weapons dump behind a ruined building. The Americans knew about it from satellites, but nobody in Latvia knew anything about it,” he added.
But if this hotel is any evidence of Latvia's entrepreneurial spirit, these “ghost bases” may just become the country's most popular tourist destination.
So to repeat: Mildewed missile silos. Subterranean bunkers. Minefields and pestilential swamps. Silent airfields and cavernous airplane hangers. Barbed wires. Electric fences. Arcadian birch-covered hills. GPS navigators. World War III launch pads. Munition dumps.
“There are too many Grand Canyons,” declared Lucy Lippard. “There is the place itself and its staggering geography—the rims, the river in the Inner Gorge, the maze of side canyons, mesas, plateaus, forests, arroyos, vegetation and wildlife, and all those hoodoos, columns and spires (so-called by 19th-century devotees of the Church of the Wilderness). There is the no-nonsense (and topographically nonsensical) governmental gridding of ungriddable lands as the frontier fell away. There are the variously perceived canyons through which flow the never-ending verbiage that attempts but never succeeds in seeing, let alone describing, this sight of sights. And at a deeper level, there are the interpreted canyons, the contested canyons. From these emerge our individual and collective psyches, reflected in the geographies of national history and personal experience. The abysses are epitomized by fundamentally divergent views of place and nature expressed by the Canyon’s Native peoples and by the ruling ethics of the National Park and Forest Services, themselves often at loggerheads.” And now, to add to its “macro-microcosmic multiplicity” that “staggers retina and rhetoric,” this gorgeous spectrally lit 3D view from the South Rim. Georgia O'Keefe spaceborne with an Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer.
If a team of naturalists at Cornell University had its way, the Great Plains of North America may once again be home to lions, cheetahs, elephants and other megafauna that roamed the land 13,000 years ago.
Team leader Josh Donlan writes in Nature: “Our vision begins immediately, spans the coming century, and is justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds. The idea is to actively promote the restoration of large wild vertebrates into North America in preference to the 'pests and weeds' (rats and dandelions) that will otherwise come to dominate the landscape. This 'Pleistocene re-wilding' would be achieved through a series of carefully managed ecosystem manipulations using closely related species as proxies for extinct large vertebrates, and would change the underlying premise of conservation biology from managing extinction to actively restoring natural processes.”
So forget Jurrasic Park; that is so 1993. For 2006: the near semi-ancient past.
And they're not just talking about one or two desolate tropical islands. They have set their eyes on an entire continent.
Their plan is essentially a wildlife conservation program, one that encompasses ultra-complex ecological systems that will take many decades to realize in multiple phases. But it's a peculiar kind of conservation: “Managed elephant populations could similarly benefit ranchers through grassland maintenance [...]. Five species of proboscidians (mammoths, mastadons and gomphotheres) once roamed North America in the Late Pleistocene; today many of the remaining African and Asian elephants are in grave danger. Elephants inhibit woodland regeneration and promote grasslands, as Pleistocene proboscidians probably once did. With appropriate resources, captive US stock and some of the 16,000 domesticated elephants in Asia could be introduced to North America, where they might suppress the woody plants that threaten western grasslands. Fencing, which can be effective in reducing human−elephant conflict in Africa, would be the main economic cost.”
Speaking of economic impact, depressed areas of the United States may be receptive to an “ecological history park,” as it might inject some ecotourism dollars to the local economy: “[H]umans have emotional relationships with large vertebrates that reflect our own Pleistocene heritage. More than 1.5 million people annually visit San Diego's Wild Animal Park to catch a glimpse of large mammals — more than the number of visitors to most US National Parks.”
But nearby urban areas, so close to so many disease vectors, may be susceptible to deadly outbreaks, possibly to ones more lethal and contagious than AIDS and Ebola.
Still, it's certainly fascinating to think that an hour or two car drive out of Pruned HQ, somewhere near the bland-sounding town of Rockford or Rantoul, you could be snapping away at a herd of elephants or a den of lions.
The Washington Monument will open this weekend in time for Independence Day celebrations in Washington, D.C. A refurbished landscape by Laurie Olin delineates a 400-foot security perimeter with an elliptical pathways lined with a 30-inch high retaining wall, a strategy that is part English ha-ha and part medieval moat. In a post 9/11 city and country where obtrusive Jersey barriers and closed access permeate the landscape, Olin's design finds a balance between the aesthetic gaze and contemporary realities.
