Year: 2013

[Image: From “Almost Nature” by Gerco de Ruijter].

The previous post reminded me of the work of Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter, whose fantastic images of gridded, altered, and semi-artificial landscapes have been featured here on the blog before, first with a stunning series of low-altitude aerial shots of tree farms, taken with cameras mounted on kites and fishing rods, then with a video of circular crop-irrigation landscapes in the western U.S., and, last but not least, with a disorienting urban video shot by a flying pigeon.

[Images: From “Almost Nature” by Gerco de Ruijter].

For the current project seen here, called “Almost Nature,” de Ruijter took aerial photos of a tree nursery in Boskoop, “the nursery center of Holland,” where nearly 2,200 acres’ worth of controlled tree growth is underway at any given time.

[Image: From “Almost Nature” by Gerco de Ruijter].

Fascinatingly—although unrelated to de Ruijter’s work—we read that “construction in Boskoop is very expensive, because Boskoop sits on an ancient bog.”

Construction must either be anchored into the ancient sea bed, which is about 60 feet deep in this area, or “float” in place on the bog on a special kind of raft. Until fairly recently, heavy structures were built on the top of alternating layers of logs (which float) and cow hides (which seal out the water). Even some old cathedrals were built in this manner. Gouda Cathedral is an example.

The Gouda cathedral is thus a kind of earth-ship, a vessel floating unanchored on a “special kind of raft” easy to mistake for architectural foundations.

[Images: From “Almost Nature” by Gerco de Ruijter].

In any case, the short text de Ruijter wrote for the series points out, in fact, that “all these little plants are clones” and that “each color descends from the same source. Standing in a square tray they resemble the photographic pixel.”

With this in mind, you could presumably undertake a project to plant these trees in a way that would produce an eventual, albeit very low-resolution, JPG—or, given the lifetime growth and seasonal changes of the trees, an animated GIF, combining digital representation with forestry and turning the aerial view into a new kind of living cinema.

[Images: From “Almost Nature” by Gerco de Ruijter].

You can see Boskoop on Google Maps, where the pixellation de Ruijter describes is obvious—if not as immediately captivating as it appears in his own photos—in the carefully managed greenhouses, nurseries, and local agriculture of the area.

The landscape from above is almost more like a series of polychromatic test-swatches, like something you might use to check the sensors of satellites with.

[Image: From “Almost Nature” by Gerco de Ruijter].

Meanwhile, de Ruijter’s CROPS video is currently on display at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C., where he will also be speaking about his work on Tuesday, October 8th, at 8pm, at an event that is free and open to the public, and there will also be a short presentation in the gallery space itself on Friday, October 11th, at 12:30pm.

[Image: From “Almost Nature” by Gerco de Ruijter].

Michel Banabila, the composer for CROPS, will be performing a live ambient music set on Friday, September 20th, at 12:30pm, as well.

If you’re in D.C., stop by.

[Image: From the paper “Lightning-Induced Remanent [sic] Magnetic Anomalies in Low-Altitude Aeromagnetic Data” by Les P. Beard, Jeannemarie Norton, and Jacob R. Sheehan].

While lightning is on the brain, two random articles I stumbled across this weekend, coming off a nearly 48-hour binge of PDF downloads from various academic journals, refer to two examples of lightning strikes mistaken for, in one case, the discovery of unexploded ordnance in New Mexico and, in another, a minor earthquake in Germany.

In the former, from a paper originally published in 2009 in the Journal of Environmental & Engineering Geophysics, we read how an “airborne magnetic survey for unexploded ordnance,” searching for magnetic anomalies in New Mexico, came across a series of inexplicable blips.

[Image: From the paper “Lightning-Induced Remanent [sic] Magnetic Anomalies in Low-Altitude Aeromagnetic Data” by Les P. Beard, Jeannemarie Norton, and Jacob R. Sheehan].

As the paper’s abstract explains, however, these magnetic anomalies were not unexploded bombs; they were, in fact, scars in the data most likely induced by lightning strikes.

“Lightning-strike magnetic anomalies are not necessarily rare,” the authors explain, “but may be spaced so widely as to make their detection unlikely in a ground survey.”

[Image: From the paper “Lightning-Induced Remanent [sic] Magnetic Anomalies in Low-Altitude Aeromagnetic Data” by Les P. Beard, Jeannemarie Norton, and Jacob R. Sheehan].

In other words, surveys elsewhere have likely also recorded lightning strikes as anomalous magnetic formations in the landscape—as physical landforms, whether mineral (metal in the ground) or artificial (in this case, unexploded bombs)—when, in reality, they are side-effects of storms.

Lightning here takes on a mapped, physical presence, whereas, in reality, it is nothing but an event in the sky mistaken for something terrestrial.

[Image: From the paper “Lightning-Induced Remanent [sic] Magnetic Anomalies in Low-Altitude Aeromagnetic Data” by Les P. Beard, Jeannemarie Norton, and Jacob R. Sheehan].

Fascinatingly, the authors hypothesize that this might be because lightning often leaves remnant magnetic effects in the landscape, or “remanent magnetization,” for days after the original strike.

It leaves glitches, fingerprints, or marks, in other words, that can only be read and deciphered by specialty equipment. So, on certain maps, something is there—some aspect of the landscape—but, in reality, it was just a passing electrical event. It was just a cartographic error, a kind of electrical time-object mistaken for the Earth.

The second paper worth mentioning here describes the fortuitous coincidence of a lightning strike hitting a poplar tree on the grounds of a seismological research station at Cologne University in Germany.

According to a short paper published in Seismological Research Letters, we read that the lightning strike “exploded” a poplar tree, whose fragments then “impaled” themselves in the trees around it. This sequence of events was mistaken, however, or recorded, as a minor earthquake.

[Image: The stricken poplar tree, from “Seismological Analysis of a Lightning Strike” by Klaus-G. Hinzen].

In the words of Klaus-G. Hinzen, the paper’s author, “the electrical field of the lightning induced a signal, most likely in the seismometer cable, that the instrument electronics interpreted as the command to start calibration.” The equipment thus began to record as if a “real” seismic event was taking place. However, Hinzen goes on to explain, “the signal of the lightning and the thunder is visible after the application of a highpass filter”—that is, you can filter out the Earth from data and you will find pure sky.

So there was no earthquake—at least not tectonically speaking—but the precise moment at which an event in the sky (lightning and thunder) intersected with a landscape on the ground (the poplar tree outside the laboratory) was both recorded as and equipmentally mistaken for an earthquake.

There’s no point in going on about this at great length, but I was interested to see how, in both cases, a fleeting moment of electricity in the atmosphere could be misinterpreted by machines constructed for reading the earth. Or, putting this in mythological terms, the sky temporarily deceived the earth by way of electricity, entering human awareness as something apparently terrestrial, a measurable feature in the landscape.

New archaeological discoveries continue to be made as glacial ice patches melt, revealing their previously unknown contents. Teams of archaeologists and historians have taken to wandering around newly exposed ground in locations as diverse as Norway, the Alps, and Glacier National Park.

Animal bones and cultural artifacts, including 3,000-year old woven bark baskets and old wooden tools, are most prevalent.

[Image: Courtesy Oppland County Council. Photo by Johan Wildhagen/Palookaville, via Archaeology].

“Prehistoric ice is melting and revealing artifacts and organic materials like wood, feather, and bone that have been frozen within the snow for thousands of years,” Kevin Grange writes in National Parks magazine. “As temperatures continue to rise, researchers and Native people are racing to find these materials before they vanish.”

“Enter the ice patch archaeologist,” Grange continues. “These explorers don’t sift through the dirt for artifacts—they prowl the retreating edges of ice patches and glaciers, searching for ancient tools, weapons, wood fragments, bones, and even animal dung. Glaciers move, sort, and grind material down, but ice patches—the result of windblown snow accumulating on alpine slopes—are unique for their ability to stay put and preserve anything frozen within them.”

But there is a justified sense of urgency, as many of the organic materials begin to decay as soon as they’re exposed; if they aren’t found soon after being revealed, they might not be found at all.

The loss of cultural heritage as ice patches give up their archaeological goods was the subject of a 2011 letter to the editors of Nature Geoscience by Kathryn Molyneaux and Dave S. Reay. “In the central Asian Altai Mountains,” Molyneaux and Reay write, “approximately 700 tombs have been preserved for 2,500 years by ice lenses or permafrost. They contain frozen mummies, wood, leather and textiles, which are very rarely preserved and can provide a unique insight into the culture of prehistoric societies in this region. As a result of increasing ground and surface temperatures over the past century, these tombs and their deposits are now within only a few degrees of melting.”

Although I suppose this sounds like the set-up for a new supernatural thriller—in which ancient kings arise from the ice of Central Asia, stepping forth from their melting tombs—in reality, it often has tense emotional and political consequences.

[Image: A shot of the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site by Gleb Raygorodetsky, courtesy of Our World 2.0].

Here, the authors refer to the rise of “rescue archaeology,” where artifacts are rapidly and even haphazardly removed from an endangered site, in operations “carried out under less than ideal conditions with limited funding and a lack of long-term goals. For example,” they add, “a coastal cemetery near Barrow, Alaska is eroding at rates of up to 20 [meters per year], because the sea ice that used to protect the coastline has receded. As a result, indigenous people’s remains that date back to the fourth century AD are being exposed at a rapid rate. At present, rescue work is carried out annually in an attempt to document, stabilize and relocate the cemetery material that is being washed away owing to high beach erosion.”

In the Altai region itself, meanwhile, the exhumation of a “princess” led to “political unrest in the local shaman community,” Molyneaux and Reay write. These disturbed and literally geopolitical circumstances are only set to grow.

[Image: Two shots from the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site by Gleb Raygorodetsky, courtesy of Our World 2.0].

Writing for the somewhat unfortunately named publication Our World 2.0, Gleb Raygorodetsky reiterates the point that the changing ground conditions of the region that once so effectively “preserved the remains of the Altai’s ancestors in burial kurgans [or tombs] for thousands of years is disappearing, melting away because of steadily rising air and ground temperatures in the region. Climate change is literally melting away the cultural heritage of the Altai people, a rich and irreplaceable part of the global heritage.”

It’s worth noting that there have been some architectural proposals for helping with the in-situ preservation of these frozen tombs. As Raygorodetsky writes, “UNESCO and Ghent University, along with their Russian partners, have been cataloguing the Altai’s frozen tombs to help develop conservation and preservation plans. Some of the proposed solutions include elaborate schemes to shade each individual tomb from direct sunlight to stabilize its temperature.”

[Image: Diagram of the thermal effects of an Altai rock tomb or kurgan, from “Saving the Frozen Scythian Tombs of the Altai Mountains” by Jean Bourgeois, Alain De Wulf, Rudi Goossens and Wouter Gheyle].

Here, Raygorodetsky refers to a 2007 paper originally published in World Archaeology, called “Saving the Frozen Scythian Tombs of the Altai Mountains,” where the possibility of constructing thermal shading devices to protect the tombs from melting is explored.

However, considering the visually intrusive nature of such shelters, not to mention the expense of construction and upkeep, the authors instead suggest what amounts to refrigerating the ground: proposing a solution that would involve “self-regulating seasonally acting cooling devices or thermosyphons. They act like refrigerators but without needing an external power source. By extracting heat from the ground and dissipating it into the air, they lower the ground temperature and prevent the degradation of permafrost.”

As such, these would be not unlike the ground-refrigeration columns currently used to artificially englaciate the ground beneath the epic Beijing-Lhasa high-altitude, pressurized train in China & Tibet, or artificial glaciation as a form of architectural design.

[Image: Diagram of archaeological ground-refrigeration techniques, from “Saving the Frozen Scythian Tombs of the Altai Mountains” by Jean Bourgeois, Alain De Wulf, Rudi Goossens and Wouter Gheyle].

But perhaps precise cataloging of the exposed artifacts really is all that can be done in most locations.

In the most recent issue of Archaeology, journalist Andrew Curry tags along with a team of surveyors and archaeologists as they explore the Jotunheim Mountains of Norway.

As the ice fields recede due to changing temperatures, ancient artifacts, such as 3,400-year old leather shoes, are being uncovered more and more frequently, now found just sitting there on the rocks. Finding these and other soon-to-be-disturbed objects is, Curry writes, “an effort that combines high-tech mapping, glaciology, climate science, and history. When conditions are right, it’s as simple as picking the past up off the ground.”

[Image: Courtesy Espen Finstad/Oppland County Council. Photos by Johan Wildhagen/Palookaville and Andrew Curry, via Archaeology].

Growing beards and loaded down with survey gear, the archaeologists Curry traveled with hiked up into the mountains, following meltwater streams to the ice patches they came from. At one of their camps, sleeping inside “Everest-rated” tents, one of the scientists tells Curry of an experience from a prior year’s survey work.

They had been ready to return home, the archaeologist explains, hiking carefully through a heavy fog, when they noticed a woven tunic and scattered leather goods lying on the rocks down at their feet.

Then the fog lifted and they saw the landscape around them, “littered with leather, textiles, wood, and animal dung”—artifacts everywhere—an archaeological site newly exposed from its frozen burial like a fully-stocked stage set dramatically revealed, dream-like, on all sides, an ancient open-air exhibition that had only recently been hidden from view.

(For more things locked in ice, suddenly revealed, see Ice Patch Archaeology earlier on BLDGBLOG).

[Image: A SWORDS unit firing; photo via National Defense Magazine].

A U.S. ground combat robot has been accessioned by the Smithsonian Institution to form part of a future museum display, National Defense Magazine reports. The robot, one of the first to be sent into live combat—specifically, into Iraq in 2007, where the machines were seen “roaming the streets… carrying guns”—is part of the SWORDS system, or “special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system.”

While this should come as no surprise, considering the already exhaustive collections of arms and armor found in museums around the world, it’s nonetheless interesting to watch as semi-autonomous combat machines become subject to the Q-Tip-wielding fragility of museum restoration techniques, which will no doubt seek to preserve these machines as if they were never meant to be altered or broken.

But it’s also a slightly haunting conceptual moment in military history, as the earliest examples of armed ground devices less than a decade old now stand shrouded in the halls of national memory, like returned soldiers from a war no one wants to think about, encased alongside medieval knights holding onto their own swords well into the afterlife.

[Image: Knights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

The news also makes it hard not to imagine a Museum of Military Robotics on the horizon somewhere, its displays filled with heavily armed sentinels standing there, polished and dormant, behind glass, sleeping artifacts that unstoppably emerged from cracks in the laws of war and the possibilities of sentient machinery.

Google Glass-wearing parents take their kids to the Tomb of the Unknown Robot, while algorithmically patterned bursts of artillery soar over the laser-leveled landscape, a former test range for ground drones.

Perhaps we’ll even see 4-star generals someday buried with their favorite combat machines, like Viking conquerors, not lying next to loyal falcons or warhorses but SWORDS units and Raven drones.

[Image: Ancient Egyptian jewelry made from meteorites; photo courtesy of UCL Petrie Museum/Rob Eagle].

X-ray analysis has found that “ancient Egyptian iron beads held at the UCL Petrie Museum were hammered from pieces of meteorites, rather than iron ore,” Science Daily reports. “The objects, which trace their origins to outer space, also predate the emergence of iron smelting by two millennia.”

By scanning the beads with beam of neutrons and gamma-rays, the team were able to reveal the unique texture and also high concentration of nickel, cobalt, phosphorus and germanium—which is only found in trace amounts in iron derived from ore—that is characteristics of meteoric iron, without having to attempt invasive analysis which could potentially damage these rare objects.

The “meteoric ore”—that, presumably, at least in some instances, had been seen falling from the sky like heavenly precipitation—was hammered and rolled into pieces of ceremonial jewelry to be worn like gifts from the sky.

This brings to mind the famed “space buddha” of last year: “An ancient Buddhist statue which was first recovered by a Nazi expedition in 1938 has been analyzed by a team of scientists,” Science Daily wrote last summer, revealing “that the priceless statue was carved from an ataxite, a very rare class of iron meteorites.”

[Image: Space buddha! Photo by Dr. Elmar Buchner, via Science Daily].

Fabricating objects from chunks of metal that have fallen from space—or humans artifacts emerging from astral wreckage scattered across the surface of the planet—is a pretty compelling design scenario, I have to say, and to read that some of humanity’s “earliest known iron artifacts come from outer space” only adds a new, strange gleam to an already fascinating civilization.

However, we can only speculate what it might like in several generations’ time if industrial super-projects like offworld mining and post-planetary extraction do, in fact, take off—if geochemical reserves on the moon, for instance, are harvested for use in terrestrial power stations, batteries, and other pieces of electrical infrastructure—to know that, in that power plant humming away quietly in the forest north of New York City, surrounded by old trees and cliffs on the riverside, pieces of the moon and captured asteroids are burning, becoming fuel and light for our cities. Our devices will glow with the light of alien worlds, rocks alchemically scorched and purified in huge ovens run by ConEd.

And, in 5,000 years, archaeologists will uncover the crumbled dust of other planets in our factories, still glistening amongst the ruins in which they burned, perhaps wondering what religious connotation the power system played for us, this shining network where we ritually incinerated the heavens, computational clouds run with unearthly fuels that, like the Egyptian jewelry this post started with, can “trace their origins to outer space.”

[Image: “Cavity Mechanism #12 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

We’ve looked at the work of Bay Area sculptor Dan Grayber here before, but he’s got a small show of new work opening up at Oakland’s Johansson Projects gallery next month and it seems worth stopping by.

[Image: Another view of “Cavity Mechanism #12 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

Grayber describes his work as a study in “self-resolving problems,” where highly-tensioned devices hold themselves aloft inside glass vitrines, as if floating in space, fighting their own weight while pushing relentlessly against the walls that contain them.

[Images: “Cavity Mechanism #9 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

Graybar uses an over-arching description for many of pieces seen here, writing, for example, that each piece is “a counterweight driven mechanism that wedges itself into the inside of a cavity (the glass dome in this case), suspending itself.”

[Image: “Cavity Mechanism #11 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

They are as much displays of gravitational potential energy—like staged moments in some avant-garde machine-ballet whose only plot and purpose is to resist the pull of the earth—as they are “art objects.”

[Images: “Cavity Mechanism #10 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

While the highly contained, desktop scale of each piece adds to the overall feel of pent-up force and concentration, it’s hard not to want to see this guy working at Richard Serra-like proportions, scaled-up to the point of architecture.

[Image: “Display Case Mechanism #1” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

You walk into Madison Square Park in Manhattan only to see a giant steel mantis weighing five or six tons, painted in fluorescent construction orange, poised kite-like inside a polarized glass dome, holding boulders the size of Fiats, sprung, tensioned, and impossibly buoyant, as if somehow lighter than air.

[Image: “Cavity Mechanism #7 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

There is an artist’s reception and opening on October 4, so mark your calendars ahead of time and stop in to meet the machines. More examples of his work can be seen here on BLDGBLOG or at the artist’s own website.

The previous post, looking at the possibility of an object that could be carved, whittled, and reduced infinitely, each section revealing new, fractal details, reminded me of two short films we showed several years ago at the Silver Lake Film Festival, both by architect Bradford Watson.

An over-literal description doesn’t really do Watson’s work justice. In the first one, embedded below, you are looking at nothing more complicated than a series of 768 sectional cuts taken through a 96-inch 2×4, after which the resulting wooden blocks were used to make black & white prints, and the prints were then played in sequence, like a flipbook. In the second film, you’re watching something even more straight-forward, which is a “matched pair” of 2x4s that have been cut down, photographed, and filmed in order until there is no more 2×4 left to cut through.

And that’s it.

But they’re both well worth watching, if for no other reason than the sensation they give, in the first video’s case, of flying forward through space, complete with weird astronomical bursts of energy shooting diagonally and comet-like across the wood grain (for example, the moment captured at 00:09-00:10).

In the second video, below, the wood seems to mimic the rings of Saturn, a planetary concentricity occasionally crossed and streaked by foreign objects (for example, see the event at 00:18-00:19 or rewatch the weird knotted prominence, like a solar storm in wood, that appears at 00:51-00:59).

It’s as if the wood itself all along had been filming the sun somehow, capturing that solar exposure in wood and documenting the star whose radiation and light had helped it to grow in the first place—as if, when you slice down into something as simple as a 2×4 normally used to construct suburban houses, you can find films of the universe, weird short loops of the skies exploding, splintered by comets and solar storms.

In fact, I’m reminded of a quotation I’ve always liked, from a book called Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail by A.R.T. Jonkers: “In 1904 a young American named Andrew Ellicott Douglass started to collect tree specimens. He was not seeking a pastime to fill his hours of leisure; his motivation was purely professional. Yet he was not employed by any forestry department or timber company, and he was neither a gardener not a botanist. For decades he continued to amass chunks of wood, all because of a lingering suspicion that a tree’s bark was shielding more than sap and cellulose. He was not interested in termites, or fungal parasites, or extracting new medicine from plants. Douglass was an astronomer, and he was searching for evidence of sunspots.”

The idea that an astronomer seeking to study the sun would proceed by making incisions into trees, as if looking for solar fossils there—an astral forensics of the forest—is mind-bogglingly beautiful and seems also to form the poetic subtext that makes Bradford Watson‘s short films so captivating.

[Image: From The Fountain, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

A few years ago in Wired, meanwhile, veteran science journalist Steve Silberman wrote about the special effects created for Darren Aronofsky’s film The Fountain. Aronofsky, Silberman explained, stumbled across the photographic work of Peter Parks, “a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London”:

Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks’ technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water—gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices—are happening in outer space.”

I mention this simply because it would be interesting to experiment with ultra-low-budget 2001-like astral effects using nothing but sequential shots of wood grain, with its stuttering bursts of spatial events constantly branching out from within.