Categoriearchief: Geography

The study of the physical features of the earth and its atmosphere, and of human activity as it affects and is affected by these.

Anthropogenic Plastiglomerates

polyglomerates
Characteristics of the two types of plastiglomerate. (A) In situ plastiglomerate wherein molten plastic is adhered to the surface of a basalt flow. Field book is 18 cm long. (B) Clastic plastiglomerate containing molten plastic and basalt and coral fragments. (C) Plastic amygdales in a basalt flow. (D) Large in situ plastiglomerate fragment. Adhered molten plastic was found 15 cm below the surface. Note the protected vegetated location.

Recognition of increasing plastic debris pollution over the last several decades has led to investigations of the imminent dangers posed to marine organisms and their ecosystems, but very little is known about the preservation potential of plastics in the rock record. As anthropogenically derived materials, plastics are astonishingly abundant in oceans, seas, and lakes, where they accumulate at or near the water surface, on lake and ocean bottoms, and along shorelines. The burial potential of plastic debris is chiefly dependent on the material’s density and abundance, in addition to the depositional environment. On Kamilo Beach on the island of Hawaii a new “stone” formed through intermingling of melted plastic, beach sediment, basaltic lava fragments, and organic debris. The material, herein referred to as “plastiglomerate,” is divided into in situ and clastic types that were distributed over all areas of the beach. Agglutination of natural sediments to melted plastic during campfire burning has increased the overall density of plastiglomerate, which inhibits transport by wind or water, thereby increasing the potential for burial and subsequent preservation. This anthropogenically influenced material has great potential to form a marker horizon of human pollution, signaling the occurrence of the informal Anthropocene epoch.

According to the geologic timescale, we are currently living in the Holocene epoch. However, Crutzen and Stoermer proposed the term “Anthropocene” in the year 2000 A.D. to represent the period of time between the latter half of the 18th century and the present day. Although other workers have considered the onset of this informal epoch to have occurred at slightly different times, researchers agree that the Anthropocene is a time span marked by human interaction with Earth’s biophysical system. Geological evidence used in supporting this assertion comes from Holocene ice cores and soil profiles. For example, methane concentrations measured in ice cores display an increase of CH4, which contrasts with the expected decline in CH4 at that time, based on the orbital-monsoon cycle theory. Ruddiman and Thomson propose in 2001 A.D. that this anomalous rise in CH4 can be linked to early agricultural practices in Eurasia. In addition, an increase in atmospheric CO2, as determined from ice cores, was explained by Ruddiman in 2003 as a result of early forest clearance.

Atmospheric compositions and soil management practices are only two indicators of anthropogenic activity, but relatively few examples of solid, human-made materials are preserved in the sediment record. Even rarer are items that are correlatable on a global scale. Given the ubiquity of non-degradable plastic debris on our planet, the possibility of their global preservation is strong. This study presents the first rock type composed partially of plastic material that has strong potential to act as a global marker horizon in the Anthropocene.

Based on a text by Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, Kelly Jazvac
Published in The Geological Society of America.

Digital Doomsday

Leonid Tsvetkov

leonid tsvetkov

Remnants of our digital discoveries are being dumped worldwide by the millions. After stripping off some valuable metal parts, the left overs are worthless. So called ‘Motherboards’, the main circuit board of a computer have a short life expectancy since new chips are developed with singularitarian speed*. When exposed to a variety of chemical liquids they become alive again. Never before I’ve seen so much beauty in discarded trash. Oil refineries and skyscrapers surround city grids which are overrun by unknown fungi and bacteria. The Russian artist Leonid Tsvetkov creates landscapes which could become ours in a not so distant future, or as he describes it himself: ‘My work focuses on reshaping cultural waste and exploration of social and physical processes. I am interested in the moments where the hard edge geometry of the city becomes organic or there random activity begins to take a highly organized form’.

leonid tsvetkov

(*) Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict. Nevertheless, proponents of the singularity typically anticipate such an event to precede an “intelligence explosion”, wherein superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds. The term was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. The concept is popularized by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and it is expected by proponents to occur around 2045.

leonid tsvetkov

leonid tsvetkov

Christal Cave

Roger Hiorns
Seizure, 2008

roger-hiorns-seizure

In his latest installation, “Seizure”, British artist Roger Hiorns has turned the idea of sculpture inside out. Rather than present a sculpture inside an architectural space, he’s turned every surface of the architectural space into sculpture. Mixing installation art and chemistry, he’s taken an entire abandoned apartment near London’s Elephant & Castle and transformed it into a gemstone. Covering the inside with blue copper sulphate crystals, he’s created an other-worldly, mineralized, glinting mirror of an everyday apartment. Jewels literally glowing from the ceiling and lining the floors…

The scale and production of “Seizure” is ambitious. After reinforcing the walls and ceiling and covering them in plastic sheeting, 80,000 litres of a copper sulphate solution was poured in from a hole in the ceiling. After a few weeks the temperature of the solution fell and the crystals began to grow. The remaining liquid was pumped back out and sent for special chemical recycling.

roger-hiorns-seizure

‘Caves are the earliest forms of dwelling and crystal caves do occur naturally in the form of salt and gypsum caves,’ Roger Hiorns says. ‘And in a way this project is converting a concrete modernist building into a cave. The work isn’t about architecture but there is that element of architectural reversion about it. Plus I am originally from Birmingham, so, for me, being surrounded by concrete is natural.’

roger-hiorns-seizure

Encased in ice-cooled orange suits, scientists explore the Cave of Crystals, discovered a thousand feet (304 meters) below Naica, Mexico, in 2000.

chrystal caves

Simon Ruehle
O.T., 2005 (speakers, radio)

simon ruehle

Modern Fossils

Hester Oerlemans
Modern Fossils in asphalt, 2003

modern fossils

Recognisable objects like a wind rose, a mobile phone, a key, a pair of scissors, a safety pin, a ring and also words and poems were rolled into the still hot asphalt of the constructed footpath. They are ‘modern fossils’ that carry the past with them in a playful way. Hester Oerlemans collected these ‘fossils’ together with the residents and personnel of nursing home ’t Laar and had them placed over the entire stretch of the two hundred meter long footpath, connecting the new and the old part of nursing home ’t Laar.

modern fossils

Inland Islands

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83

Christo

On May 7, 1983 the installation of Surrounded Islands was completed. In Biscayne Bay, between the city of Miami, North Miami, the Village of Miami Shores and Miami Beach, 11 of the islands situated in the area of Bakers Haulover Cut, Broad Causeway, 79th Street Causeway, Julia Tuttle Causeway, and Venetian Causeway were surrounded with 585,000 square meters (6.5 million square feet) of pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water, floating and extending out 61 meters (200 feet) from each island into the Bay. The fabric was sewn into 79 patterns to follow the contours of the 11 islands.

For 2 weeks Surrounded Islands spreading over 11.3 kilometers (7 miles) was seen, approached and enjoyed by the public, from the causeways, the land, the water and the air. The luminous pink color of the shiny fabric was in harmony with the tropical vegetation of the uninhabited verdant island, the light of the Miami sky and the colors of the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay.

Christo

Photo: Wolfgang Volz ©1983 Christo
The World Dubai

The World is a man-made archipelago of 300 islands constructed in the rough shape of a map of the landmasses of the Earth, located 4 kilometres off the coast of Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Industrial Gardening

Panamarenko
Hofkes, 1967

Panamarenko Hofkens

Three thick sheets of cardboard of about 1m2 are filled with a variety of inorganic trash and debris. From a prophetic kind of future vision Panamarenko nostalgically tries to restore and reconstruct the long lost city-gardens. These city-gardens functioned as urban alternative for life on the countryside and provided additional food for the unfortunate. By the steady increase of city residents (in 2008 a remarkable event took place: the majority of the world population lives now in a city) the necessity to have physical contact with the earth and live from the land is gone. People are used to this new, self-created landscape and recognize the urban environment as their natural habitat.

The Invisible Line

Gordon Matta-Clark
Splitting, 1974

Gordon-Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943 – 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his “building cuts,” a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls. Over a period of about three months in 1974, he made two parallel vertical cuts straight through the middle of a nondescript two-story suburban house in Englewood, New Jersey, removing the material left between the cuts as well as some of the foundation blocks on which the house stood so that one half slightly tilted away from the other, creating a wedge-shaped aperture between them.

Doris Salcedo
Shibboleth, 2007
doris salcedo

As the very first representative of a non-European tradition to be commissioned by the Tate Modern Unilever Series, Doris Salcedo has chosen an understated technique: that of inscribing into the ground of the Turbine Hall. The scar that begins like a thin, almost invisible line, at the main entrance gradually becomes a chasm in the earth at the far end of the former power station. This earthquake-like insertion evokes the brokenness and separateness of the post-colonial cultures of a non-white, non-European legacy. The installation is a metonymy for the term absence – an absence that negates the space of post-colonial peoples. The construction of a ‘negative space’, or emptied out space, corresponds to the trajectory of the history of post-colonialism. It is in Shibboleth (2007), where space is occupied silently and discreetly, not via a sense of domination or empowerment, that this trajectory can be traced.

An ‘imaginative landscape’ is at work in the heart of what Salcedo states is a monument to a European and modernist tradition of Western art; the Tate Modern. Shibboleth disrupts the Western view of landscape that creates a sense of things being in place and emphasises ‘a visual scape in which the observer stands back and distances himself or herself from the thing observed.’ In reversing the role of the viewer as not only witness but accomplice in an act of silence, Shibboleth proposes a different take on the role of Western art practice and traditions of art: here the earth opens up under the viewers’ feet, evoking an earthquake, an eruption of space, time and place. The view is negated by its downward spiralling motion, bringing to mind a story in Borges’ Labyrinths; negativity has become one with the ground, forcing a glance into an abyss that is disquieting in its silence.

– Abstract from a text by Stella Baraklianou, 2008

doris salcedo

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Restauration du Lac de Montbel, 2003

Maarten Vanden Eynde restauration

When Faith Moves Mountains

Francis Alys (in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina)
When faith moves mountains,
2002

Francis Alys

On April 11th 2002, 500 voluntiers were called in order to form a line to move a sand dune situated in the surroundings of the city of Lima. This human comb progressed pushing forward a certain quantity of sand with shovels in order to move the dune from its original position. The actual displacement was of an infinitesimal proportion, but not its metaphorical resonance.

Francis Alys

Maasvlakte 2, Rotterdam, NL (2008 – 2033)

Maasvlakte2

© Michiel van Raaij

New land is being created to extend the port of Rotterdam in The Netherlands. After an international call for tenders the contracting consortium PUMA (Project Uitbreiding Maasvlakte) was contracted to build the first sites. PUMA is a consortium consisting of Koninklijke Boskalis Westminster NV and Van Oord NV, notoriously known for The Palm Islands and The World in Dubia, and will deliver the first sites for the first customers in 2013.
The vital statistics of Maasvlakte 2 provide a picture of the scale of the project. The site will cover a total area of around 2,000 hectares, half of which will be for industrial sites. Division between the main areas of activities includes 630 hectares for container storage and throughput (with a total container handling capacity of 17 million teu annually), 190 hectares for the chemicals industries and 180 hectares for distribution. The infrastructure includes 13 km of roads, 14 km of rail lines and 13 km of quay walls. The construction of the ‘new land’ will require a total of 365m m³ of sand over the whole project period (up to 2033), 240m m³ of which will be for the first phase of construction due to be completed in 2013. There will be 10.8 km of sea defences and the access channel for shipping will be 10 nautical miles long with a depth of up to 20m, a 600m wide port entrance and 700m wide turning basin. The sky is the limit…

Marjolijn Dijkman Maasvlakte2
Virgin Island, 2009
© Marjolijn Dijkman

The Possibility of a Mountain

Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács
Manifest Destiny, 2009
Serie of silkscreens, 120 x80 cm.

Persijn-Broersen&Margit-Lukács

Persijn-Broersen&Margit-Lukács

Persijn-Broersen&Margit-Lukács

Persijn-Broersen&Margit-Lukács

Persijn-Broersen&Margit-Lukács

In the silk-screens one sees an imaginary sky that is silkscreened over photographs of a barren desert where some of the Mars mobiles have been tested. In these works Broersen & Lukacs investigate the notion close up and distance, of horizon and the frontier, in relationship to the American tradition of the sublime landscape.

James Turell
Roden Crater, 1979 – 2011

James Turrell

Roden Crater is an extinct volcano crater northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. Artist James Turrell purchased the 400,000 year old, 3 km wide crater in 1979 and has been transforming it into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed specifically for the viewing of celestial phenomena. He stated that he plans to open the crater for public viewing in 2011.

TIMES-ONLINE: Man-made volcanoes may cool Earth
August 30, 2009

THE Royal Society is backing research into simulated volcanic eruptions, spraying millions of tons of dust into the air, in an attempt to stave off climate change. The intervention by the Royal Society comes amid tension ahead of the United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen in December 2009 to agree global cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. Preliminary discussions have gone so badly that many scientists believe geo-engineering will be needed as a “plan B”.

The interest in so-called aerosols is linked to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century. The explosion blasted up to 20m tons of tiny sulphur particles into the air, cooling the planet by about 0.5C before they fell back to earth.  The Royal Society is Britain’s premier science institution and its decision to take geo-engineering seriously is a measure of the desperation felt by scientists about climate change.

Based on a text by Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor of The Times.

Neutral Bunkers

Leo Fabrizio
Swiss Bunkers, 1999-2004

leo-fabrizio

Switzerland is riddled with hidden and disguised military installations. What appeared to be a rock face in a lay-by beside the road were actually steel and concrete doors painted like rock. A five years study by, questioning landscape and identity. Is the territory surrounding us influencing our identity? What happens then when this territory, reputed to be wild and pure, is in fact completely manipulated by humans?

‘After the cold war ended many of the bunkers became obsolete. The tendency is to forget them or even to renounce them, my approach on the contrary, aims to expose them from a new angle. This approach has led me to discover a great number of bunkers, some in remote areas, sometimes difficultly accessible, covering the whole of the Swiss territory. The relations between these basic shaped bunkers and the often-sumptuous landscape surrounds them became an essential part of the study. I looked for the most spectacular bunkers, notable for their camouflage devices, true theatre scenery made with the utmost care. A quality indeed fully Swiss.’ – Leo Fabrizio –

leo-fabrizio

leo-fabrizio

leo-fabrizio

Ocean Earth

Peter Fend
Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation, 1980

peter fend

The aim of the Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation is research on alternative energy sources. They use satellite imaging to monitor and analyze global ecological and geopolitical hot-spots, largely for media clients. Considering the world a living earthwork, ecological aspects are linked to and interconnected with artistic aspects. Ocean Earth was conceived as an instrument for implementing the goals of the environmental art movement, directly building upon the ideas of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark. Through inter-disciplinary collaborations and by connecting ecological imperatives with experimental new technologies, Fend asks ‘How far can art go?’, in drawing attention to a belief that artistic research can generate productive dialogue about global ecological problems and that it can be used to develop effective solutions.

Local Fuel Production – Afganistan Iran Holland, 2009

peter fend

Maquette of Afganistan basin as skatepark

peter fend Local Fuel production - Afganistan Iran Holland

peter fend

Coral Crocheting II

Eleanor Kent
Electroluminiscent Coral, 2007

Electroluminicent Coral

This work by Eleanor Kent was part of a larger display at Track16 Gallery in Los Angeles (02/2009) of the ever growing Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef made by The Institute For Figuring and crocheting fans all over the world. (See also previous post)

One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland Australia, in a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile marvel that it may well be gone by the end of the century. In homage to the Great One, Christine and Margaret Wertheim of The Institute For Figuring have instigated a project to crochet a handmade reef, a woolly testimony that now engages thousands of women the world over.

As a response to the ecological crisis facing marine environments, the Crochet Reef project has been called by Ren Weschler “the Aids Quilt of Global Warming.” What began as a tiny seed in the Wertheim’s home in Highland Park has morphed organically into a worldwide movement – Sister Reefs have now been made in Chicago, New York and London, with other efforts currently under way in Sydney, Arizona and Latvia. For the first time, in this exhibition, Crochet Reefs are brought together from around the globe, massing into an archipelago of stunning craft finesse.

coral-crocheting

coral-crocheting

coral-crocheting

THIS IS THE FUTURE BEFORE IT HAPPENED…

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Platic Reef – sample, 2009

Maarten Vanden Eynde Coral Reef

Maarten Vanden Eynde Coral Reef

THIS IS THE FUTURE BEFORE IT HAPPENED…
(title of exhibition curated by Julie Deamer – Glendale, USA, 02/2009)

A “floating landfill”, twice the size of Texas and made up of plastic particles was swirling about 1,000 miles west of California and 1,000 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands. The trash collected in one area, known as the North Pacific Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that circulated along the Pacific Rim. While the plastic trash floated along, instead of biodegrading, it was “photodegrading,” — the sun’s UV rays turned the plastic brittle, much like they would crack the vinyl on a car roof. They broke down the plastic into small pieces and, in some cases, into particles as fine as dust.
Charles Moore, marine researcher at the Algalita Marina Research Foundation in Long Beach who discovered the plastic in 1997 and has been studying and publicizing the patch for the past 20 years, said the debris — which he estimates weighed 3 million tons and covered an area twice the size of Texas —was made up mostly of fine plastic chips and impossible to skim out of the ocean. Also, it was undetectable by overhead satellite photos because 80 percent was plastic and therefore translucent. The plastic moved just beneath the surface, from one inch to depths of 300 feet, according to samples Moore collected .
Ironically, the debris was re-entering the oceans whence it came; the ancient plankton that once floated on Earth’s primordial sea gave rise to the petroleum, being transformed into plastic polymers. That exhumed life, our “civilized plankton,” was, in effect, competing with its natural counterparts, as well as with those life-forms that directly or indirectly fed on them. Inside the North Pacific Gyre the natural plankton was outnumbered 6 to 1 in favor of the plastic plankton. The scale of the phenomenon was astounding. Plastic debris became the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. What could be done with this new class of products made specifically to defeat natural recycling? How could the dictum “In ecosystems, everything is used” be made to work with plastic ? So far no organism was able to digest plastik plankton or transform it again into something organic, closing back the broken chain of life.

Maarten Vanden Eynde Food Chain

In February 2010 the Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde (1977), based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, went to the North Atlantic Gyre with a boat to collect 5 tons of plastic debris. He melted it into a huge plastic coral reef and shipped it to Oman. There, in the middle of a dried out sea, located in a dessert called ‘Mother of All Poisons’ (due to the hazardous environmental conditions), he placed the new coral reef as a landart sculpture, a remnant of a forgotten present discovered in a possible future.

Time as a Vertical Dimension

Walter De Maria
Vertical Earth Kilometer, 1977

Walter De Maria Vertical Earth Kilometer

A km-long rod of metal was buried vertically in the ground. The boring of the shaft, which goes through six geological layers, took seventy-nine days. The continuous metal rod is made of 167 m-long rods, screwed tightly together. The sandstone square which surrounds the top of the shaft is at the intersection of two paths which traverse the Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, Germany, site of theinternational contemporary art serveys, Documenta. The work is only visible in section: the kilometer of metalplunged into the earth can be seen as a representation of time in a vertical dimension.

- from 'Land and Environmental Art' by Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, PHAIDON -

Walter De Maria
The Broken Kilometer, 1979

Walter De Maria The Broken Kilometer
Courtesy Dia Art Foundation © the artist. Photo: John Abbott
500 brass rods, permanently installed at 393 West Broadway, New York City
Each rod 200x5cm

With The Broken Kilometer, De Maria had put in place the fourth and last stage of his multi-part sculptural system. While the solid brass work in Kassel plunged a kilometre into the ground and The Lightning Field in New Mexico marked out an area of one kilometre by one mile with poles that all reached the same, absolute height, in 1977 he created The New York Earth Room – apparently permanently – by covering the entire floor of a room in Friedrich’s other SoHo gallery with an even layer of earth. The work can still be seen on the second floor at 141 Wooster Street. Two years later, when The Broken Kilometer – filling the whole floor space of a gallery – was installed as a permanent exhibition, it was clear that the viewer who encountered the piece in astonishment could only respond in one way: silent contemplation. – Thomas Kellein director Kunsthalle Bielefeld.