My favorite group of images downloaded from the now defunctVisual Images Database of the USACE Mississippi Valley Division.
All of which begs the creation of an Artist-in-Residence Program at the Army Corps of Engineers. Imagine what hydrological labyrinths would Mary Miss have constructed. Or what cryptographic alluvial hagiography of the Mississippi would Robert Smithson have written; the encryption key is in the meanders. Michael Heizer in coitus at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory meets John Deer meets ThyssenKrupp Fördertechnik. And perhaps Cai Guo-Qiang in collaboration with Naoya Hatakeyama might be permitted the use of a small nuclear warhead.
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...
It seems that the Big Bang, Einstein's space-time continuum, the US Department of Transportation, the US Department of Commerce, Pope Gregory XIII, and my parents have all conspired to make this day, my birthday, an extra special one.
At three seconds past one o'clock two a.m., the time and date will be --
1) Vicksburg Harbor Project, Warren County, Mississippi. Operation of East Retaining Dike Spillway Hydraullic Fill Control Sturcture, with 35 logs in place. Elevation of top of logs, 105.5, MSL. Pool elevation, 101.2, MSL. Photo taken by U.S. Army Engineer District, Vicksburg, Corps of Engineers, February 3, 1960. Photo file #A9/1145.
2) Vicksburg Harbor Project, Warren County, Mississippi. Construction of industrial fill, habor and approach channels by hired labor and leased dredge. Outlet end of Hydraulic Fill Control Structure. Six stop logs in place, 36 inches high. Dredge leased from: Jahncke Service, Inc. Contract No. DA-22-052-CIVENG-59-450, dated 13 February 1959. Funds: Flood Control, Mississippi River & Tributaries. Allotment: 1255-09. Photo taken by U.S. Army Engineer District, Vicksburg, Corps of Engineers, January 11, 1960. Photo file #A9/1140.
3) This post has been on queue for months, gathering a thick layer of dust. And it looks as though I've waited far too long to write it, since the Visual Images Database of the USACE Mississippi Valley Division is now defunct. Perhaps it's been relocated or maybe undergoing some maintenance, but its link on the homepage has certainly been deleted. It was listed under Information > Documents & Photos, but it's gone. I've sent several emails, of course, but have yet to receive a reply.
If it seems as though I'm freaking out, I am, because the archive contained some of the best publicly accessible, i.e. free, historical B&W photographs of hydrological engineering out there. Or simply the best B&Ws. And at print-ready high resolution! In fact, one could easily confect a high caliber museum exhibit to make fans of Edward Burtynski and David Maisel catatonic with awesomeness.
4) Fortunately, I've downloaded quite a few images, of which fifteen appear here. And you can check out all the originals on Flickr Pruned where they are titled according to their file ID number.
Unfortunately, except for two labels shown above, I didn't think to copy and paste the others. So now I'm not sure which project is which.
5) Still, there is no substitute for the original archive. You can't recreate the joy of witnessing the Mississippi — and all its arterial tributaries, streams, and rivulets, its watersheds, floodplains, and wetlands — barricaded, recontoured, rebared, channelized, angled, and tiled with merely the force of will of the Army Corps of Engineers into a network of levees and dams. An intricate choreography between concrete, earth, water, and gravity. Indeed quite possibly the greatest Theatrum Machinarum in the world. (Or should that be one giant Rube Goldberg contraption — a single misalignment and the entire intercontinental infrastructure suffers complete critical failure?)
6) But in the event of a catastrophe, monitoring stations and several detachments of scouting patrols — proto-nervous and immune systems, if you will — up and down the length of the river should alert central command immediately. Which leads me to wonder: 1,000 years from now, when the entire expanse of the Mississippi River Valley has been fully mechanized and automated, its constituent drainage basins computerized and overseen by a central Pentagon AI, will the entire thing suddenly become self-aware? After shaking off some trees, cows, and people, will it just get up and go? The long captive bastard child of Mary Shelley and the Army Corps of Engineers, creeping about the earth with only vengeance on its mind. Or perhaps a benevolent Alluvial Ent, off to visit his good friends the Yangtze, the Nile, the Rhine, the Po, and the Ganges-Bhramaputra, all by then as roboticized as the Mississippi. (Peter Jackson, are you reading this? Email me.)
7) And another thing: what would remain? A post-glacial, pre-Clovis Man landscape in which stormwater and groundwater go into a non-stop, frenetic search for lesser contour lines? Two things are for certain though: a) the Army will be there to start defying gravity and geology all over again; and b) Pruned will also be there to blog it all.
8) Meanwhile, here are three quotes that seem to have collected themselves in this post as it awaited publication:
a) In his book The Control of Nature, John McPhee quotes James B. Eads, who the author describes as “probably one of the most brilliant engineer who has ever addressed his attention to the Mississippi River”: “[E]every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river—its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits—is controlled by law as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer need only to be insured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the results he aims at.”
8b) But apparently these engineers are not of the god-fearing sort and so undertook a frontal assault against the Creator: “This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce, to lose her standing as first amongst trading nations... We are fighting Mother Nature... It's a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory.”
8c) BLDGBLOGexplains it a little clearer: “It's too easy, not to mention slightly vindictive, to blame all of hurricane Katrina's catastrophic impact and aftermath on the Army Corps of Engineers; but it is worth remembering that New Orleans – in fact the near totality of the lower Mississippi delta – is a manmade landscape that has become, over the last century at least, something of a military artifact. To say that New Orleans is, today, under martial law, is therefore almost redundant: its very landscape, for at least the last century, has never been under anything *but* martial law. The lower Mississippi delta is literally nothing less than landscape design by army hydrologists.”
9) One final thing: looking at all these monumental earth-moving hydroengineering, is it possible that entire mountain ranges from who knows where, maybe Canada, Peru or even China, may have been blasted to bits and then shipped off to the Midwest? A futures market in mountains, something to exacerbate debilitating trade imbalance with China? Maybe not, but I particularly like the image of a whole Andean mountain passing through the Panama Canal on a Panamax supertanker. Ghosts of dead Land Art artists haunting its slopes. Rolling boulders up to the summit. And of an entire Chinese mountain, 1/10000th of the Himalayas, holding back the Mississippi in the guise of a Native American burial mound.
10) So whether it is a hydropolitical war or a religious war or a trade war or whatever, Visual Images Database has documented it all, making it one of the greatest repository of photojournalism out there.
It seems that scientists at the University of Oregon have discovered a way to make liquid droplets walk on their own.
Even uphill!
In the phenomenon called the Leidenfrost effect, or film boiling, liquid droplets on a surface heated above their boiling point form an underlayer of vapor, which suspends them above the surface like a hovercraft. Normally, the droplets would move about erratically. However, Professor Heiner Linke and his colleagues have discovered that if “placed on asymmetrically structured surfaces, such as a piece of brass with periodic, saw-tooth shaped ridges” they would self-propel themselves in one direction. And quite literally using their own steam power.
Professor Heiner Linke is not yet certain where the propulsive forces come from, but he has already speculated on how it can be applied: “This method uses heat to pump liquid, and could therefore be used in pumps for coolants, for instance to cool microprocessors. Such a pump would need no additional power (it's run by the heat that needs to be removed anyway), it would have no moving parts, and it wouldn't require a thermostat.”
Of course, I'd like to know if you can construct a landscape feature exploiting this phenomenon. Parks criscrossed by racheted channels heated simply by the Earth or the parking garage underneath, and on these channels, giant film-boiling droplets race past by, indifferent to gravity.
If you turn on the heat, will the Chicago River re-reverses to its original course? Probably not, but I'd like that to see that happen as an annual event.
Shadow by Adam Frank and Zack Booth Simpson is “an interactive installation that projects a disembodied, autonomous, human shadow on the ground. This apparently living shadow attempts to merge itself with the viewer's real shadow. When this occurs, the invisible figure, implied by the virtual shadow, inhabits the viewer's own personal space. Real-time 3D graphics and video sensing are used to produce this work of interactive light.”
Coming soon to back alleyways, undergound parking garages, deserted downtown streets, elevators, and hospital corridors.
Found a short AVI file while cleaning our archives. It's from Crowd IT, a utility tool for 3d Studio Max that can simulate very large crowds, thereby allowing you to make your computer generated landscapes, cities, and buildings seem more realistic, if so desired.
Probably there are better crowd-rendering tools out there, but for now, we are more interested in this particular movie and its complete lack of context. There is simply the crowd, following some sort of external parameters imposed by the designer, creating patterns and timelines.
And so we wonder: can you create a park without its accoutrements — no shrubs, no benches, no paths, no water features — but simply the pageantry of mass psychology? No tectonic elements to program activities or direct traffic, only a flat terrain and its mass ornament, self-organizing (or even self-destructing) under its own internal logic.
Or do they already exist? Are streets in a way already a parkless park? How about prison courtyards — where the built environment always plays secondary to group dynamics? People-watching as if your life depends on it, and it does.
Lastly, what will the crowd actually do in a real parkless park? What Busby Berkeley musical formations will thousands of people enact? And what would happen if I throw in a screaming man infected with Avian flu? Or confect a scene in which an al-Qaeda cell finds itself in the company of a pack of Texans? How about a pedophile or two? Would the crowd keep its distance or swarm around and stone them to death? Or how about a zombie?
![Adam Frank and Zack Booth Simpson](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_yiiPzeRfNBQ/TJ8Bl0QaZRI/AAAAAAAADEk/QzmgzsRrAes/s800/060403_2_spectral_3.jpg"")
