Month: October 2014

[Image: Tokyo subway map, via re:form].

“Just as postal systems remade geographic places into zones determined by politics and history,” Amy Johnson writes for re:form, “social media technologies are remaking them today.”

“Historically,” Johnson writes, “the categories of both who helps in natural disasters and who is helped have largely been organized around place, in this case mapped according to its political and geographic dimensions, by government agencies and relief organizations with parallel structures. Recently, social media has broadened the category of who helps—and in doing so, new technological places have joined political and geographic ones.”

Johnson is describing the various spatial metaphors at work in Japanese disaster response plans following the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, and the communication of those plans to the public via social media platforms. Evacuation zones defined by “suspiciously round numbers,” so-called geocasting (“when a producer targets publishing to a particular region or location”), and the abandonment of traditional post codes in favor of “device locations” all play a part in her analysis.

After all, Johnson continues, “this is a decidedly different moment of history and politics, and the power balance among people, corporations, and states has shifted. The resultant new zones—and new configurations of zones—will further change this balance.”

The internet of things, we might say, is also an emergency network of things, marking our spatial locations more efficiently than previous methods of territorial administration.

Read the rest over at re:form.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)

[Image: Real estate development or avant-garde earthwork? The future streets of Ascaya; courtesy of Ascaya].

The website for the stalled Las Vegas development known as Ascaya—which we saw in the previous post through the aerial photographs of Michael Light—is itself quite remarkable and worth a quick visit.

At first glance, the site could actually be mistaken for some kind of strange new media art project, a near-future ad for an interplanetary terraforming corporation dedicated to selling huge geometric shapes directly to consumers.

Slow transitions drift from shot to shot as we peer out over these strangely beautiful, unfinished landforms in the desert, seemingly endless in number as they step back—and back, and back—toward the horizon.

It’s like a planet reconfigured by obsessed geometricians—where, surreally, each individual form is actually for sale.

[Image: Another view of the abstract landforms of Ascaya; courtesy of Ascaya].

Accordingly, the website presents us with Romantic shots of uninhabited geometry, the gleaming towers of Las Vegas only barely visible in the background, catching the final rays of an arid sunset, as if this is actually the sprawling backdrop for a more interesting remake of Total Recall.

[Image: One more glimpse of Ascaya; courtesy of Ascaya].

In any case, my initial reaction in seeing the Ascaya website was that it could actually pass as a kind of online art auction for the world’s most ambitious land art installation—not a real estate site at all—selling the work of someone far ambitious than, say, Michael Heizer or James Turrell.

After all, surely Ascaya, specifically in its unfinished state, is more seductive—and more interpretively exciting—than the, by comparison, almost absurdly boring “Spiral Jetty“?

Perhaps, next to the work of people like Walter De Maria, we should be studying Ascaya—and a pilgrimage to these weird black steps in the desert should be on the list of any collector of American land art.

[Image: “Looking east over unbuilt Ascaya lots, Black Mountain beyond, Henderson, Nevada,” 2010; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

Photographer Michael Light has a new book coming out this fall, published by Radius Books, with work documenting the construction and large-scale terrestrial formatting of two housing developments in the American southwest, one unfinished, one gaudily over the top.

They are known as Ascaya and Lake Las Vegas.

[Image: “Unbuilt Ascaya lots and cul-de-sac looking west, Henderson, Nevada,” 2011; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

Ascaya was meant to ascend into the desert hills like a vast residential staircase, its plots patiently shaped and awaiting their architecture—but these ambitious plans were radically decelerated into a state of suspended animation by the economic collapse of 2008.

It is now something more like a stalled earthwork, a vast land art installation made all the more amazing when seen from above.

[Image: “Unbuilt Ascaya lots and culdesac looking northwest, Sun City MacDonald Ranch development beyond, Henderson, Nevada,” 2012; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

The resulting landforms—huge berms, winding streets, flat-capped foundation piles, and carefully graded podiums of dirt and gravel—look at times like hard drive platters, chocolate bars, or even the tailings piles of a colossal mine.

This latter comparison was made by Light himself in a long interview Nicola Twilley and I recorded with him for Venue.

There, Light told us that “the more work I do in Las Vegas, the more I see parallels between the mining industry—and the extraction history of the west—and the inhabitation industry.”

They do the same sort of things to the land; they grade, flatten, and format the land in similar ways. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between a large-scale housing development being prepped for construction and a new strip mine where some multinational firm is prospecting for metals.

“In other words,” he continued, “the extraction industry and the inhabitation industry are two sides of the same coin. The terraforming that takes place to make a massive development on the outskirts of a city has the same order, and follows the same structure, as much of the terraforming done in the process of mining.”

[Images: (top) “The Falls at Lake Las Vegas construction road looking north, Henderson, Nevada,” 2011; (bottom) “Future house lots and abandoned mattress at The Falls at Lake Las Vegas, looking west, Henderson, Nevada,” 2011; both from Lake Las Vegas by Michael Light].

“That was a revelation for me,” Light added. “The mine is a city reversed. It is its own architecture.”

The mine is a city reversed.

[Images: “Unbuilt Ascaya lots looking northwest, Henderson, Nevada,” 2012; both from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

“Until 2008,” the book’s accompanying press release explains, “Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop in the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered.”

They call these homes “castles on the cheap,” and one look at the houses of Lake Las Vegas reveals how apt this comparison can be.

[Image: “V At Lake Las Vegas pool complex, Via Visione at left, Henderson, Nevada,” 2010; from Lake Las Vegas by Michael Light].

In one of the book’s two essays, veteran landscape activist Lucy Lippard writes that the images offer “a disturbing juxtaposition of geologic and current time that the Surrealists could only have imagined.”

[Image: “Monaco Lake Las Vegas home and foreclosed neighbor, on guard-gated Grand Corniche Drive, Henderson, Nevada,” 2010; from Lake Las Vegas by Michael Light].

Honestly, these shots blow me away; it’s as if Light has captured an act of topographical blackout—a whole landscape, redacted—as what should be hills and valleys are erased and obstructed by this imposed crystallography of settlements that never arrived.

[Image: “Ascaya Boulevard looking south up Black Mountain, morning, Henderson, Nevada,” 2012; from Black Mountain by Michael Light].

In any case, the forthcoming book is already generating quite a bit of buzz—for example, being chosen as one of the “Best Fall Photo Books” of 2014 by Time Magazine.

[Images: Some shots of the books, which are actually bound together, back-to-back].

The reproductions look fantastic, as well; consider pre-ordering a copy (and, while you’re at it, consider reading our interview with Michael Light over at Venue).

The book comes out somewhat appropriately on Halloween—a kind of economic horror story of landscapes gone awry.

[Image: From the original research paper (PDF), via Popular Science].

Popular Science reported last week that a “weird crystal”—a “salt made from cobalt”—can “absorb all the oxygen in a room,” and, more crucially, release all that oxygen later, at which point it can safely be breathed.

I will confess that I initially thought this sounded more like some terrifying new air-weapon: after all, if “just a spoonful of the stuff can suck up all the oxygen in a room,” then you’re looking at a very potent, seemingly instantaneous method for causing mass suffocation. Drop a few spoonfuls of these crystals into a building’s ventilation system, and… Well, you get the idea.

But the actual, far more productive implications are incredible (assuming further tests with the material pan out). The University of Southern Denmark-based researchers suggest, for example, that this could revolutionize SCUBA diving, “as the material can absorb oxygen from the water around the diver and supply the diver with it,” meaning that “scuba divers could potentially leave their tanks at home,” gearing up with just a few grains of salt. “

Extrapolate from this for a moment, however, and imagine all of the other confined spatial environments in which oxygen-emitting cobalt salts could upend conventional thinking. Long-term submarine missions; underwater scientific bases or other submerged structures of any kind; mines, collapsed buildings, and other underground spaces; or, perhaps most interestingly, even offworld space missions could all be equipped with radically minimalized oxygen storage systems, reducing costs.

You can thus imagine some strange new everyday reality several decades from now in which deep-sea divers or long-haul astronauts turn to a chewing gum-sized pack of salt crystals which they pop open as needed for emergency oxygen.

Think of this portable atmospheric crystal as the gateway to new spatial possibilities, letting us bring our atmospheres with us in just a few handfuls of salt.