To Icarus
Views of the oddly titled site specific installation by Iranian artist Seyed Alavi: fifty miles of the Sacramento River woven onto a walkway bridge at the Sacramento International Airport. A beautiful pairing for sure.
And then the lights come on: why not use less arcadian, more politically charged satellite images as well. Fifty miles of the US-Mexico border fence, for instance. Or fifty miles of the San Andreas Fault coated onto an actual vehicular bridge, say, a Calatrava. Or fifty miles of Fisk’s Mississippi or the future underwater trenches of the Arbonian Sea inside the corridors of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Or fifty miles of the Israeli security barrier inside perhaps this very brave synagogue.
Or even less as a sanctioned public art and more as a mode of political protest. The bombed out shell of the al-Askari Mosque unfurled on sites heavily trafficked by Halliburton executives. The scarred landscapes surrounding an African diamond mine on the sidewalks of Chicago’s Jewelry Row. The parched terrain of Mexico City during that city’s ongoing 4th World Water Forum.
TerraServer appropriated as a guerilla tactic. Google Maps as acts of civil disobedience.
I can certainly imagine scenarios in which disaffected but still idealistic young students preparing for rallies by entering sets of longitude and latitude coordinates into TerraServer. Then a westward, eastward scopic drive in a drone of clicks. Icarus as an anarchist. Click. Click. Click. And then, their downloaded patches of terrestrial ecologies stitched together on Photoshop, they head out to Kinko’s for a late night print run. That is, of course, if the plotters are working.
Rosemary Laing and the Marvelous
(Via Pruned.)
[tags]maps, politic, satellite, photography[/tags]
