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Agro-veillance
If blanketing UK cities with a thick scopic fog of CCTV cameras weren't enough, the countryside may soon find itself placed under similar heavy surveillance. But this, curiously enough, might be a good thing.
As reported by BBC News last month, researchers from technology firm QinetiQ and from Aberystwyth University flew an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “over fields in England and Wales to map the nitrogen levels in soil, to determine whether fertiliser applications were needed.”
The data collected was then used to create a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map, which “tells you the difference between 'green crops' that are photosynthesising and bare ground.” Where there is bare ground, more fertilizer may be needed.
Equipped with this NDVI map, some GPS locators and a techno-pimped out John Deere, farmers would thus be able to target areas in need of supplemental nutrients and to better estimate how much to use, potentially releasing less fertilizers that otherwise would leach out and pollute water sources down the hydrological line. This is precision farming.
Of course, you can use the same information-gathering technique to monitor other environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, disease outbreaks and pest population.
The ecological impact is potentially huge. Imagine only watering crops that need to be watered (and only when required) instead of flooding the entire field. Imagine as well spraying just those diseased plants with herbicides (and only when there is an outbreak) instead of suffocating acres and acres of fields with poison all the time. Better yet, you send in a cadre of Medusa agrobots networked to GPS satellites to surgically excise these botanical tumors.
With a surveillance network such as this, one wonders if you can re-purpose it to monitor other things, say, the urban poor doing a bit of nighttime grocery shopping while the food crisis and subprime armageddon rage on in the inner cities. When detected, they get sprayed with herbicides.
How about GMO crops? Design these neo-plants to emit a characteristic glow in the infrared or ultraviolet wavelength, and you can be alerted when they've jumped the fence. And don't forget to allocate part of the network to keep a look out for anti-GMO anarchists.
It's entirely possible that future pharms will be as heavily monitored as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and as maniacally firewalled as CIA servers.
Meanwhile, how about using a similar surveillance network to monitor acts of agro-criminality?
As food prices have soared in recent months, farmers in the UK and in the U.S. have started to abandon conservation programs. Through these programs, farmers receive government subsidies for letting some of their fields lay fallow, but not as much if they were to now grow cash crops like wheat, soybeans and corn. Consequently, many of these uncultivated croplands, which have greatly helped restore wildlife habitats and reverse topsoil erosion, are being farmed once again.
Farmers are required to notify the government when they opt out of these programs. But do they really? Could they not be alerting the local agriculture bureau in order to keep their subsidies?
Specially in the U.S., it's rather difficult to tell if a farmer is being honest or not. There is just too much land. To make it easier to detect promises kept and promises broken, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).
NPR had a report on this crop crime unit:
We are told that the maps generated from these overhead reconnaissances aren't released to the public, as doing so might violate the farmers' privacy. But imagine releasing them to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas.
It'd be like Stardust@home or SETI@home, except you're asking the teeming Web 2.0 masses to look for terrestrial counterfeit. Instead of surveying the Martian landscapes for uncatalogued craters and landforms, citizen agro-agents will survey nearer terrains in search of horticultural deviants, the tenuous peace between the urban and the rural be damned.
Persuade Wired, Boing Boing, Engadget, Slashdot and even Land8Lounge to blog about this, and you could have an army of volunteers comparing maps for hours on end, late into the night, during lunchbreaks or boring studio lectures to spot planted fields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment and enjoying the outdoors.
But will England's green and pleasant land become an aviary of sorts for pilotless airplanes (how about solar powered mini-dirigibles?), whose droning bird songs in B-flat will commingle with the melodic twittering of traditional birds, the hypnotic chirping of crickets and the nostalgic rustling of grains against the wind? “Ah, the sounds of summer,” passing urbanites will plaintively sigh.
Will America's majestic horizons darken with a murmuring data cloud kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
POSTSCRIPT #1: Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They form a dialogue that a lot of blogs long for.
On agro
InfraNet Lab: Enviro-veillance
If blanketing UK cities with a thick scopic fog of CCTV cameras weren't enough, the countryside may soon find itself placed under similar heavy surveillance. But this, curiously enough, might be a good thing.
As reported by BBC News last month, researchers from technology firm QinetiQ and from Aberystwyth University flew an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “over fields in England and Wales to map the nitrogen levels in soil, to determine whether fertiliser applications were needed.”
The data collected was then used to create a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map, which “tells you the difference between 'green crops' that are photosynthesising and bare ground.” Where there is bare ground, more fertilizer may be needed.
Equipped with this NDVI map, some GPS locators and a techno-pimped out John Deere, farmers would thus be able to target areas in need of supplemental nutrients and to better estimate how much to use, potentially releasing less fertilizers that otherwise would leach out and pollute water sources down the hydrological line. This is precision farming.
Of course, you can use the same information-gathering technique to monitor other environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, disease outbreaks and pest population.
The ecological impact is potentially huge. Imagine only watering crops that need to be watered (and only when required) instead of flooding the entire field. Imagine as well spraying just those diseased plants with herbicides (and only when there is an outbreak) instead of suffocating acres and acres of fields with poison all the time. Better yet, you send in a cadre of Medusa agrobots networked to GPS satellites to surgically excise these botanical tumors.
With a surveillance network such as this, one wonders if you can re-purpose it to monitor other things, say, the urban poor doing a bit of nighttime grocery shopping while the food crisis and subprime armageddon rage on in the inner cities. When detected, they get sprayed with herbicides.
How about GMO crops? Design these neo-plants to emit a characteristic glow in the infrared or ultraviolet wavelength, and you can be alerted when they've jumped the fence. And don't forget to allocate part of the network to keep a look out for anti-GMO anarchists.
It's entirely possible that future pharms will be as heavily monitored as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and as maniacally firewalled as CIA servers.
Meanwhile, how about using a similar surveillance network to monitor acts of agro-criminality?
As food prices have soared in recent months, farmers in the UK and in the U.S. have started to abandon conservation programs. Through these programs, farmers receive government subsidies for letting some of their fields lay fallow, but not as much if they were to now grow cash crops like wheat, soybeans and corn. Consequently, many of these uncultivated croplands, which have greatly helped restore wildlife habitats and reverse topsoil erosion, are being farmed once again.
Farmers are required to notify the government when they opt out of these programs. But do they really? Could they not be alerting the local agriculture bureau in order to keep their subsidies?
Specially in the U.S., it's rather difficult to tell if a farmer is being honest or not. There is just too much land. To make it easier to detect promises kept and promises broken, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).
NPR had a report on this crop crime unit:
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We are told that the maps generated from these overhead reconnaissances aren't released to the public, as doing so might violate the farmers' privacy. But imagine releasing them to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas.
It'd be like Stardust@home or SETI@home, except you're asking the teeming Web 2.0 masses to look for terrestrial counterfeit. Instead of surveying the Martian landscapes for uncatalogued craters and landforms, citizen agro-agents will survey nearer terrains in search of horticultural deviants, the tenuous peace between the urban and the rural be damned.
Persuade Wired, Boing Boing, Engadget, Slashdot and even Land8Lounge to blog about this, and you could have an army of volunteers comparing maps for hours on end, late into the night, during lunchbreaks or boring studio lectures to spot planted fields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment and enjoying the outdoors.
But will England's green and pleasant land become an aviary of sorts for pilotless airplanes (how about solar powered mini-dirigibles?), whose droning bird songs in B-flat will commingle with the melodic twittering of traditional birds, the hypnotic chirping of crickets and the nostalgic rustling of grains against the wind? “Ah, the sounds of summer,” passing urbanites will plaintively sigh.
Will America's majestic horizons darken with a murmuring data cloud kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
POSTSCRIPT #1: Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They form a dialogue that a lot of blogs long for.
On agro
InfraNet Lab: Enviro-veillance
Is Landscape Architecture dead?
Editors at kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal compiled by undergraduates at the Landscape Architecture program @ RMIT, are calling for submissions for their 17th edition. They want to know:
Got some thoughts? Then send them to kerb@ems.rmit.edu.au.
The due date for abstracts is only a few days away — 5 September 2008 — but we are told that they will be happy to accept abstracts and full submissions up until 26 September 2008.
And by abstracts, they mean a 100-250 word outline of the proposed submission - be it written, multimedia, photoessay, model images, etc. The format is open; anything submitted will just need to be accompanied by text.
Editors at kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal compiled by undergraduates at the Landscape Architecture program @ RMIT, are calling for submissions for their 17th edition. They want to know:
Is Landscape Architecture dead?
Does Landscape Architecture have the capacity to deal with the potentials of the future?
What is the future of Landscape Architecture?
How can landscape be shaped by concepts/models/ideas/theories that are not normally considered relevant to Landscape?
Got some thoughts? Then send them to kerb@ems.rmit.edu.au.
The due date for abstracts is only a few days away — 5 September 2008 — but we are told that they will be happy to accept abstracts and full submissions up until 26 September 2008.
And by abstracts, they mean a 100-250 word outline of the proposed submission - be it written, multimedia, photoessay, model images, etc. The format is open; anything submitted will just need to be accompanied by text.
Cacti Crime
In Palm Desert, California, we read in BBC News, “$20,000 (£11,000) of golden barrel cacti have been stolen in six months.”
In an effort to conserve water in drought-stricken southern California (and money in economically anxious times), the city substituted its “lush lawns” with native desert plants. Now their xeriscaped roadside verges and median strips are lined with cactus, agave, red bird of paradise and lantana. Unfortunately, the “slow-growing varieties, such as golden barrels and agaves, have been targeted” by thieves. The large golden barrels, in particular, “can fetch up to $4,000 (£2,200)” while the smaller ones, with a wholesale price of $100, can be resold in the black market for $50 to $60.
So now “hidden security cameras monitor places where large numbers of the plants are located, while officials will start putting microchips in some cacti, so that stolen ones can be identified.”
They will also soon start recruiting migrant workers for their new Cacti Scene Investigation task force, unfortunately undoing their fiscal conservation.
This crime fighting unit, of course, will inspire a new police procedural drama on network television. CSI: Botany. In each episode, using state of the art gizmos and plain old human insight, dashingly photogenic botanists will hunt down horticultural deviants: orchid thieves; rogue pharmers hired by Iran to breach America's food security; identity theft rings hacking into the wireless networks of major retail stores using outdoor fake shrubbery; guerrilla gardeners; Ken Smith and many others.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The U.S. Department of Agriculture's crop cops doing some forensic aerial photography.
In Palm Desert, California, we read in BBC News, “$20,000 (£11,000) of golden barrel cacti have been stolen in six months.”
In an effort to conserve water in drought-stricken southern California (and money in economically anxious times), the city substituted its “lush lawns” with native desert plants. Now their xeriscaped roadside verges and median strips are lined with cactus, agave, red bird of paradise and lantana. Unfortunately, the “slow-growing varieties, such as golden barrels and agaves, have been targeted” by thieves. The large golden barrels, in particular, “can fetch up to $4,000 (£2,200)” while the smaller ones, with a wholesale price of $100, can be resold in the black market for $50 to $60.
So now “hidden security cameras monitor places where large numbers of the plants are located, while officials will start putting microchips in some cacti, so that stolen ones can be identified.”
They will also soon start recruiting migrant workers for their new Cacti Scene Investigation task force, unfortunately undoing their fiscal conservation.
This crime fighting unit, of course, will inspire a new police procedural drama on network television. CSI: Botany. In each episode, using state of the art gizmos and plain old human insight, dashingly photogenic botanists will hunt down horticultural deviants: orchid thieves; rogue pharmers hired by Iran to breach America's food security; identity theft rings hacking into the wireless networks of major retail stores using outdoor fake shrubbery; guerrilla gardeners; Ken Smith and many others.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The U.S. Department of Agriculture's crop cops doing some forensic aerial photography.
Michael Jackson as Landscape Architecture
Taking inspiration from Michael Jackson — that creature from a future “world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation“ — let's fantasize the modified body becoming a legitimate site for landscape architecture.
Landscape design begins to infuse recombinant DNA techniques into the creative process. To be licensed as landscape architects, interns must be well-versed in advanced genetic engineering. To be able to deform and reconstruct, they may even be required to get a medical degree.
Urban agriculture then takes a provocative turn. We become our own self-fertilizing, mobile edible estates. Locavores measure distances not in miles but in feet and inches, if not at all. Transporting food achieves zero carbon footprint, which becomes negative if the pollution-eating properties of our neo-organs get factored in.
But what of our food service sectors, such as restaurants and supermarkets and the infrastructure that supports them? What of the clothing, personal grooming and home furnishing industries? Will we dwell as usual? No, the urban grid needs to be radically reconfigured.
And what of our parks? There are still large ones, but an instant Central Park can be constituted anywhere and anytime there's a large crowd, for instance, during rush hour traffic on the “streets” or inside/outside the Olympic stadium watching the fireworks of the opening and closing ceremonies. It's the parkless park. Organize a rooftop “barbecue” summer party, and a temporary rooftop garden in the form of blobby geo-bodies gets landscaped. In other words, parks and gardens are still a physical manifestation of urban sociability and diversion.
One thing remains unchanged as well. The body, like gardens, is still a terrain manipulated by the demands of style, fashion and pretense. The body, like gardens, is the site and object of consumption. Grooming your GMed anatomy, like gardening in the aristocratic landscape of Versailles or in the cul-de-sac frontyards of Orange County, is a tactical game of social one-upmanship. No one wants to be caught dead using cheap turf or with a dry patch or having less alterations than Michael Jackson, unless it's considered au courant in your socioeconomic milieu.
In any case, if we find ourselves landless in the crowded city of tomorrow, perhaps amidst the future ultramegametropolis of New Tokyo-Beijing-Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Manila, we can cultivate our own epidermic Eden.
Bouffant Topiary
Taking inspiration from Michael Jackson — that creature from a future “world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation“ — let's fantasize the modified body becoming a legitimate site for landscape architecture.
Landscape design begins to infuse recombinant DNA techniques into the creative process. To be licensed as landscape architects, interns must be well-versed in advanced genetic engineering. To be able to deform and reconstruct, they may even be required to get a medical degree.
Urban agriculture then takes a provocative turn. We become our own self-fertilizing, mobile edible estates. Locavores measure distances not in miles but in feet and inches, if not at all. Transporting food achieves zero carbon footprint, which becomes negative if the pollution-eating properties of our neo-organs get factored in.
But what of our food service sectors, such as restaurants and supermarkets and the infrastructure that supports them? What of the clothing, personal grooming and home furnishing industries? Will we dwell as usual? No, the urban grid needs to be radically reconfigured.
And what of our parks? There are still large ones, but an instant Central Park can be constituted anywhere and anytime there's a large crowd, for instance, during rush hour traffic on the “streets” or inside/outside the Olympic stadium watching the fireworks of the opening and closing ceremonies. It's the parkless park. Organize a rooftop “barbecue” summer party, and a temporary rooftop garden in the form of blobby geo-bodies gets landscaped. In other words, parks and gardens are still a physical manifestation of urban sociability and diversion.
One thing remains unchanged as well. The body, like gardens, is still a terrain manipulated by the demands of style, fashion and pretense. The body, like gardens, is the site and object of consumption. Grooming your GMed anatomy, like gardening in the aristocratic landscape of Versailles or in the cul-de-sac frontyards of Orange County, is a tactical game of social one-upmanship. No one wants to be caught dead using cheap turf or with a dry patch or having less alterations than Michael Jackson, unless it's considered au courant in your socioeconomic milieu.
In any case, if we find ourselves landless in the crowded city of tomorrow, perhaps amidst the future ultramegametropolis of New Tokyo-Beijing-Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Manila, we can cultivate our own epidermic Eden.
Bouffant Topiary
Solar Towers
As reported by SciDev.net earlier this month, Namibia may soon construct its own solar updraft tower outside its capital city. This renewable-energy power plant isn't going to be a prototype to test the technology's engineering and economic feasibility; rather, it is proposed to be an actual working plant plugged-in directly to the country's electrical grid.
Not to be confused with a solar power tower, to which sunlight is focused by mirrors arrayed at its base, this one produces energy by “heating air inside a vast transparent tent, several kilometres in diameter, at the base of the tower. This hot air rises inside a tall concrete chimney, driving wind turbines linked to generators. The tent can also be used to grow crops.”
We should state that questions of its feasibility don't so much interest us as the image of hundreds of these Apollonian axis mundi dotting the desert, puncturing both sky and land.
It may be one and a half kilometres high and 280 metres wide, but is that enough to meet the desired energy output?
Will its power be as cheap as coal power?
Can Namibia and its partners afford the $900 million price tag?
Somehow contemplating these and other issues can't be as fascinating as imagining an arid rainforest of solar towers mechanically evapotranspirating in the Kalahari, divining the surrounding air into static mini-hurricanes, their whirring blades immitating the mating rituals of imagined fauna. No one will doubt that this new landscape is as much a natural part of the country's ecology as the boabab tree. In fact, so vast is it that it may be considered a new terrestrial biome and given its own Köppen classification.
Give them a geometrically interesting facade, and everyone will want to cultivate their own rainforest, with the enthusiasm never given to wind farms.
Meanwhile, The New York Times will have to rewrite their recent Namibian travelogue to include this “dazzling geological display” and “otherworldy landscape.”
As reported by SciDev.net earlier this month, Namibia may soon construct its own solar updraft tower outside its capital city. This renewable-energy power plant isn't going to be a prototype to test the technology's engineering and economic feasibility; rather, it is proposed to be an actual working plant plugged-in directly to the country's electrical grid.
Not to be confused with a solar power tower, to which sunlight is focused by mirrors arrayed at its base, this one produces energy by “heating air inside a vast transparent tent, several kilometres in diameter, at the base of the tower. This hot air rises inside a tall concrete chimney, driving wind turbines linked to generators. The tent can also be used to grow crops.”
We should state that questions of its feasibility don't so much interest us as the image of hundreds of these Apollonian axis mundi dotting the desert, puncturing both sky and land.
It may be one and a half kilometres high and 280 metres wide, but is that enough to meet the desired energy output?
Will its power be as cheap as coal power?
Can Namibia and its partners afford the $900 million price tag?
Somehow contemplating these and other issues can't be as fascinating as imagining an arid rainforest of solar towers mechanically evapotranspirating in the Kalahari, divining the surrounding air into static mini-hurricanes, their whirring blades immitating the mating rituals of imagined fauna. No one will doubt that this new landscape is as much a natural part of the country's ecology as the boabab tree. In fact, so vast is it that it may be considered a new terrestrial biome and given its own Köppen classification.
Give them a geometrically interesting facade, and everyone will want to cultivate their own rainforest, with the enthusiasm never given to wind farms.
Meanwhile, The New York Times will have to rewrite their recent Namibian travelogue to include this “dazzling geological display” and “otherworldy landscape.”
Spatial High Jinks
Last week, Phronesisaical reminded us again of Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension, a piece of performance art, which they describe as “a brilliant commentary on war and the complicity of those for whom distance creates a sense of false reality and moral neutrality.”
From The National:
While it won't be as powerful or even catch the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, how about installing webcams to watch over landscapes as their mineral wealth gets extracted? Next to it would be a garden hose, with which you could target passing miners. Dirt clinging onto them will be washed away; they may even be refreshed by its cool waters. And you, the direct beneficiaries of their labor, will also be cleansed of your consumerist sins. Tele-absolution.
This performance art will be titled It's the least that I could do.
Also last week (and on the same day), Design Under Sky pointed us to TRASH: anycoloryoulike, a public art installation in which “standard piles of trash are replaced with artist-created bags” to decorate the streets of New York. The project simultaneously “beautifies the city and calls attention to waste consumption.”
Next summer, artist Adrian Kondratowicz, with Miuccia Prada's patronage, will cloth the homeless with green ready-to-wear, thus “beautifying urban parks and calling attention to human waste.”
Continuing on with this last week meme, here are two items posted the day before Phronesisaical and Design Under Sky published theirs.
Firstly, BLDGBLOG covered a “bouncy chapel” for the penitent on vacation on the beaches of Sardinia. It “comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional.”
It also reminded us of another inflatable church installed this May on a parking lot in Troy, New York. Though not built for traditional worship, it was a 1:1 scale reproduction of the church — “a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery” — that once stood on the same site.
According to Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald:
Seen through the diaphanous walls of this ghost church, visitors themselves appear ghost-like, ectoplasmic, haunting the same space as the past.
Lots more photos here, via Critical Spatial Practice.
Secondly, Dezeen showed some photos of a stair-like viewing platform, which the Office for Subversive Architecture attached to the 17-kilometer-long, blue fence surrounding London's future Olympic Park. Climb up, and for a moment you can infiltrate “the secrecy surrounding preparations for the 2012 Olympics.”
It recalls to mind Heavy Trash's viewing platforms for gated communities in Los Angeles. Some photos here.
To borrow language from Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, they are framing devices for a staged aesthetic experience and to suit a sociopolitical agenda.
Many have posted Michel de Broin's Superficielle before, and it was Vvork's turn last week. It's a lovely sculpture that renders the landscape into a Cubist puzzle.
Quoting de Broin:
A horrible, horrible last sentence, but a marvelous, marvelous installation nonetheless.
Last week, Phronesisaical reminded us again of Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension, a piece of performance art, which they describe as “a brilliant commentary on war and the complicity of those for whom distance creates a sense of false reality and moral neutrality.”
From The National:
For 30 days, Bilal lived in a 4.6 by 9.8 metre performance space [at Chicago’s FlatFile Gallery], while people around the world watched – and targeted him – through a webcam attached to a remote-controlled paintball gun, capable of firing over a shot per second at the Iraqi in question.
While it won't be as powerful or even catch the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, how about installing webcams to watch over landscapes as their mineral wealth gets extracted? Next to it would be a garden hose, with which you could target passing miners. Dirt clinging onto them will be washed away; they may even be refreshed by its cool waters. And you, the direct beneficiaries of their labor, will also be cleansed of your consumerist sins. Tele-absolution.
This performance art will be titled It's the least that I could do.
Also last week (and on the same day), Design Under Sky pointed us to TRASH: anycoloryoulike, a public art installation in which “standard piles of trash are replaced with artist-created bags” to decorate the streets of New York. The project simultaneously “beautifies the city and calls attention to waste consumption.”
Next summer, artist Adrian Kondratowicz, with Miuccia Prada's patronage, will cloth the homeless with green ready-to-wear, thus “beautifying urban parks and calling attention to human waste.”
Continuing on with this last week meme, here are two items posted the day before Phronesisaical and Design Under Sky published theirs.
Firstly, BLDGBLOG covered a “bouncy chapel” for the penitent on vacation on the beaches of Sardinia. It “comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional.”
It also reminded us of another inflatable church installed this May on a parking lot in Troy, New York. Though not built for traditional worship, it was a 1:1 scale reproduction of the church — “a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery” — that once stood on the same site.
According to Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald:
Spectres of Liberty is a public memory, site-specific art project. Beginning with a sense of loss about the changing built environment of Troy, New York, we set out imagining ghosts of demolished buildings and structures. Through imagining inflatable sculptural extensions to buildings whose facades have been destroyed to thinking about recreating vanished historic sites, we decided on creating a ghost of the Liberty Street Church.
Seen through the diaphanous walls of this ghost church, visitors themselves appear ghost-like, ectoplasmic, haunting the same space as the past.
Lots more photos here, via Critical Spatial Practice.
Secondly, Dezeen showed some photos of a stair-like viewing platform, which the Office for Subversive Architecture attached to the 17-kilometer-long, blue fence surrounding London's future Olympic Park. Climb up, and for a moment you can infiltrate “the secrecy surrounding preparations for the 2012 Olympics.”
It recalls to mind Heavy Trash's viewing platforms for gated communities in Los Angeles. Some photos here.
To borrow language from Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, they are framing devices for a staged aesthetic experience and to suit a sociopolitical agenda.
Many have posted Michel de Broin's Superficielle before, and it was Vvork's turn last week. It's a lovely sculpture that renders the landscape into a Cubist puzzle.
Quoting de Broin:
Upon invitation to reflect on the notion of transparency, that led me into the forest to envelop the contour of a large stone with fragments of mirror. The large stone, tucked away deep in the woods, became a reflective surface for its surroundings. In this play of splintered radiance, the rock disappears in its reflections. Because it reflects one cannot be mislead by its presence, yet we cannot seize it, rather it is the rock that reflects us.
A horrible, horrible last sentence, but a marvelous, marvelous installation nonetheless.