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POSTSCRIPT #1: This photo was taken by Sholihuddin and originally published in Jawa Pos in 1995. It was awarded 1st prize for Spot News by the World Press Photo Foundation, who provides the following caption:
Thanks, Anonymous, for your ace research skills.
POSTSCRIPT #1: This photo was taken by Sholihuddin and originally published in Jawa Pos in 1995. It was awarded 1st prize for Spot News by the World Press Photo Foundation, who provides the following caption:
A military truck carrying over 100 youths keels over under its heavy load. The passengers were supporters of local football club Persebaya, enjoying a free ride home and waving flags to celebrate their team's victory. The truck - one of 24 made available by a military commander - capsized after only one kilometer. Most of the passengers escaped unharmed, but 12 were hospitalized with minor injuries.
Thanks, Anonymous, for your ace research skills.
Potsdamer Platz 1997-1999
Vis-à-vis BLDGBLOG's post yesterday on slow photography (and what sounds like a proposal for a neo-atavist Google Street View for off-the-beaten-path, off-grid landscapes, with herds of Strandbeesten replacing Google's fleet of peeping toms), here are Michael Wesely's two-year-long exposure photographs documenting the post-reunification construction on Berlin's Postdamer Platz.
Commissioned by DaimlerChrysler, the images were taken from five different locations between 1997 and 1999. We see “the chronological sequences of the construction activity into one simultaneous action, whereby an infinite number of individual moments overlap until they form a complex structure of fragments of reality. Before and after fuse together.”
Beautifully captured as well is the sun streaking across the sky, its brushstroke-like retinal burn adding to the painterly quality of the photographs. “The massive constructions seem almost transparent,” writes Weseley, “yet the rays of sun in the sky documenting the various seasonal positions of the sun, gain a surprising level of materiality.”
Also worth looking into are Michael Wesely's three-year long exposure photographs of the construction of the Museum of Modern Art.
Vis-à-vis BLDGBLOG's post yesterday on slow photography (and what sounds like a proposal for a neo-atavist Google Street View for off-the-beaten-path, off-grid landscapes, with herds of Strandbeesten replacing Google's fleet of peeping toms), here are Michael Wesely's two-year-long exposure photographs documenting the post-reunification construction on Berlin's Postdamer Platz.
Commissioned by DaimlerChrysler, the images were taken from five different locations between 1997 and 1999. We see “the chronological sequences of the construction activity into one simultaneous action, whereby an infinite number of individual moments overlap until they form a complex structure of fragments of reality. Before and after fuse together.”
Beautifully captured as well is the sun streaking across the sky, its brushstroke-like retinal burn adding to the painterly quality of the photographs. “The massive constructions seem almost transparent,” writes Weseley, “yet the rays of sun in the sky documenting the various seasonal positions of the sun, gain a surprising level of materiality.”
Also worth looking into are Michael Wesely's three-year long exposure photographs of the construction of the Museum of Modern Art.
Dying in the Dying-field
We have already published the above photo on this blog, just yesterday in fact, way at the end of Buttology 2. But we're reproducing it here, as it is possibly the most haunting photo we have ever posted. It deserves its own entry.
The photo is actually a stereograph, taken by the prolific traveller and photographer James Ricalton during a lengthy trip to China in 1900. Unfortunately, we can't find its twin. Published in China Through the Stereoscope: A Journey Through the Dragon Empire at the Time of the Boxer Uprising, Ricalton describes this “dying-field” and its occupants on page 62 thus:
A bit later, he directs the reader to another person in this wrenching scene.
Transfixed as we were with the man in the foreground, we hardly noticed at first the other figure in the background. Even the camera seems to have cast him aside.
We have already published the above photo on this blog, just yesterday in fact, way at the end of Buttology 2. But we're reproducing it here, as it is possibly the most haunting photo we have ever posted. It deserves its own entry.
The photo is actually a stereograph, taken by the prolific traveller and photographer James Ricalton during a lengthy trip to China in 1900. Unfortunately, we can't find its twin. Published in China Through the Stereoscope: A Journey Through the Dragon Empire at the Time of the Boxer Uprising, Ricalton describes this “dying-field” and its occupants on page 62 thus:
Dying-places are ordinarily in homes or in hospitals, but this poor fellow has neither a home nor a hospital in which to die. We are here in a vacant space near the river—a sort of common littered with refuse and scavenged by starving dogs. It has been named the Dying-place, because poor, starving, miserable outcasts and homeless sick, homeless poor, homeless misery of every form come here to die. The world scarcely can present a more sad and depressing spectacle than this field of suicides; I say suicides, because many that come here come to voluntarily give up the struggle for existence and to die by sheer will force through a slow starvation. They may be enfeebled by lingering disease; they may be unable to find employment; they may be professional vagrants; they come from different parts of the city and sometimes from the country round about. They are friendless; they are passed unnoticed by a poor and inadequate hospital service; they become utterly discouraged and hopeless and choose to die. Their fellow natives pass and repass without noticing them or thought of bestowing aid or alms, and here it is not expected; they have passed beyond the pale of charity; it is the last ditch; they are here to die, not to receive alms.
A bit later, he directs the reader to another person in this wrenching scene.
This far-gone case of destitution and misery is not the only one in this last retreat of human agony; you see another in the distance, probably a new arrive, as he yet has the strength to sit erect.
Transfixed as we were with the man in the foreground, we hardly noticed at first the other figure in the background. Even the camera seems to have cast him aside.
Runway Plantations
Last night, I dreamt of a manic jamboree of deterrestrialized runways, cartwheeling, do-si-doing, pulsating, whistling, trembling, bifurcating into ever greater perplexing formations.
Today, I discovered some works by Hubert Blanz. They are gorgeous.
Go see.
:
The Great Climate Change Park
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Today, I discovered some works by Hubert Blanz. They are gorgeous.
Go see.
:
The Great Climate Change Park
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Silver Lake Operations, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia
Instead of an arboretum of indigenous flora as at Pedreres de s'Hostal, for this copper mine in Western Australia, how about an extraterrestrial garden of phytoremediating plants, both the unmodified and the genetically modified kinds, with gorgeously red- and orange-hued pools of metal-eating microogranisms?
Or you plant this ecosystem in all the disused open pits everywhere except here, where you merely design a circulation system interspersed with “educational signs” and some observation platforms — a masterpiece of topographical mapping, pictorial analysis and narrative making? Or you can scratch all that, and the only intervention you do involves installing a marker near the entrance, for instance, a cairn. How about Las Vegas neon marquee because beyond lies a terrestrial extravaganza? What routes people take inside will be up to them.
Or how about just a set of coordinate rendered perfectly on Google Maps' well-designed web interface? Should anyone want to visit the mine, at least they know where it is on the surface of the earth.
Instead of an arboretum of indigenous flora as at Pedreres de s'Hostal, for this copper mine in Western Australia, how about an extraterrestrial garden of phytoremediating plants, both the unmodified and the genetically modified kinds, with gorgeously red- and orange-hued pools of metal-eating microogranisms?
Or you plant this ecosystem in all the disused open pits everywhere except here, where you merely design a circulation system interspersed with “educational signs” and some observation platforms — a masterpiece of topographical mapping, pictorial analysis and narrative making? Or you can scratch all that, and the only intervention you do involves installing a marker near the entrance, for instance, a cairn. How about Las Vegas neon marquee because beyond lies a terrestrial extravaganza? What routes people take inside will be up to them.
Or how about just a set of coordinate rendered perfectly on Google Maps' well-designed web interface? Should anyone want to visit the mine, at least they know where it is on the surface of the earth.
“Chicago”
Welcome to Chicago! No, not that Chicago.
This is “Chicago”, the fake Arab town built by Israel in the middle of the Negev desert to train its military forces in urban warfare.
Though artificial, our hometown's dessicated twin is “highly realistic.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose photographs of “Chicago” are collected in this book and are replicated here, wrote: “To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: 'I love you Ruby' and 'Red ash, hot as blood'. Burned-out vehicles line the streets.”
Perhaps more interesting than its spatial “authenticity” is the fact that the “history” of this ghost town “directly mirrors the history of the Palestinian conflict.”
This is where generations of Israeli soldiers rehearse over and over again like actors in a Hollywood studio set. Here, with props on hand or littered about, they perfect their stage presence, try out some new moves and hand gestures, and fine tune their dialogues in front of cardboard cutouts of generic terrorists. Here also, they practice their showstopper: walking through walls. And then it's time to step out in front of live television cameras, the whole world already a captive audience, to play out their well-choreographed routines.
Meanwhile, “Chicago” is so named because its bullet-ridden fake walls apparently recall the punctured real walls of Al Capone's Chicago. While still acknowledging the dizzying complexity of Arab-Israeli relations, one wonders if a small yet meaningful step towards lasting peace could be taken if, on Israel's side, it stops vicariously engaging with the Palestinians in secret, replicant cities after first exorcising this mythological, gangster-infested Chicago from their collective memory and replace it with something real and true?
Not everyone was a mobster then, the same way not everyone offered something to our former governor for Obama's senate seat. The same way not all Palestinians are terrorists.
In any case, should the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman and his party's racist ideology get their way in a ruling coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu, and all Israeli-Arabs get expelled from Israel, their homes and cities dismantled and resettled over, at least part of their history, albeit one written by others, has been recorded for future archaeologists to study.
Subtopia: MOUT Urbanism
BLDGBLOG: A miniature city waiting for attack
Welcome to Chicago! No, not that Chicago.
This is “Chicago”, the fake Arab town built by Israel in the middle of the Negev desert to train its military forces in urban warfare.
Though artificial, our hometown's dessicated twin is “highly realistic.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose photographs of “Chicago” are collected in this book and are replicated here, wrote: “To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: 'I love you Ruby' and 'Red ash, hot as blood'. Burned-out vehicles line the streets.”
Perhaps more interesting than its spatial “authenticity” is the fact that the “history” of this ghost town “directly mirrors the history of the Palestinian conflict.”
The first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawl, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here.
This is where generations of Israeli soldiers rehearse over and over again like actors in a Hollywood studio set. Here, with props on hand or littered about, they perfect their stage presence, try out some new moves and hand gestures, and fine tune their dialogues in front of cardboard cutouts of generic terrorists. Here also, they practice their showstopper: walking through walls. And then it's time to step out in front of live television cameras, the whole world already a captive audience, to play out their well-choreographed routines.
Meanwhile, “Chicago” is so named because its bullet-ridden fake walls apparently recall the punctured real walls of Al Capone's Chicago. While still acknowledging the dizzying complexity of Arab-Israeli relations, one wonders if a small yet meaningful step towards lasting peace could be taken if, on Israel's side, it stops vicariously engaging with the Palestinians in secret, replicant cities after first exorcising this mythological, gangster-infested Chicago from their collective memory and replace it with something real and true?
Not everyone was a mobster then, the same way not everyone offered something to our former governor for Obama's senate seat. The same way not all Palestinians are terrorists.
In any case, should the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman and his party's racist ideology get their way in a ruling coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu, and all Israeli-Arabs get expelled from Israel, their homes and cities dismantled and resettled over, at least part of their history, albeit one written by others, has been recorded for future archaeologists to study.
Subtopia: MOUT Urbanism
BLDGBLOG: A miniature city waiting for attack
Solid Ground
Armatures for a fluid landscape, as photographed by Toshio Shibata.
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Vicksburg Harbor Project
Armatures for a fluid landscape, as photographed by Toshio Shibata.
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Vicksburg Harbor Project
Other Simulated Worlds
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:
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:
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
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
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