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Trevor Paglen’s The Other Night Sky

A scroll back through the recent posts on this site will reveal my fascination with sky surveys, astronomers’ attempts to systematically document in photographs the entire sky.
The broadest such survey, the Palomar Sky Survey, completed in the 1950’s, was also the last to remain unpolluted by manmade objects in space. In a 1995 proceedings discussion of sky surveys, Dr D.H. Morgan noted that survey plate contamination had more than doubled since 1980. Pre-1980, 47% of plates contained an average of 1 satellite trail. Since 1980, though, over 70% of plates are contaminated by satellite trails, with an average of 2.1/plate. Some badly affected plates contain 10-15 trails, which diminishes their effectiveness for astronomical purposes.

Trevor Paglen,
LACROSSE ONYX II, from The Other Night Sky [via]
Ironically, it’s exactly these sky surveys–or more precisely, their contamination–that is the subject of geographer/artist Trevor Paglen’s next exhibition, which opens at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive on June 1st. Similar to his extra-long-distance photographs of clandestine government “black sites” and his tracking and documentation of planes used by the CIA for extra-legal renditions, Paglen uses data from amateur satellite-spotting enthusiasts to photograph top secret surveillance satellites in orbit:

Paglen photographs barely perceptible traces of these vessels amidst familiar star fields, in this way borrowing a language of scientific visualization of the cosmos. The multimedia installation at the center of the exhibition The Other Night Sky gestures toward the popular presentation of scientific knowledge in space centers and natural history museums by offering a large-scale globe animated with 189 currently orbiting satellites. Their orbits are traced via complex algorithmic analysis of data. The density of satellites is surprising, their coverage of the globe nearly complete. But the evidentiary function of the work is thwarted—although photographs are named for depicted satellites, faint streaks verify their existence, and the projections track their real-time movements, there is no information to glean from the images about the satellites themselves or their particular roles. And so again Paglen points us to the physical manifestations of the black world, while the images themselves embody the impossibility of translating such an act of seeing into an act of understanding.

Press release: Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky (June 1 – September 14, 2008) at BAM/PFA [berkeley.edu thanks elizabeth]
Trevor Paglen’s site

Les Satelloons Du Grand Palais

Promenade is Richard Serra’s commission for Monumenta, the contemporary arts program inaugurated last year in the nave of the newly restored Grand Palais in Paris.
Serra’s work consists of five 17×4-meter steel plates set vertically along the central axis of the Grand Palais. The size of the slabs was determined in part by technical limitations of the steel mill, and in part by the dimensions of the massive, open space itself: 35m high, rising to 60m at the cupola, 50m wide, and 200m long.

So Serra Schmerra, that means the Grand Palais is big enough to exhibit my re-creation of NASA’s satelloon. At least the Project Echo I, which was 100 feet in diameter. [Echo II was 135 feet, which might be a tight squeeze.] Unlike with the other two indoor venues capable of housing the work, the Pantheon in Rome and Grand Central Station in Manhattan, Monumenta gives the Grand Palais the advantage of a pre-existing, curated contemporary art context.
In recent high-profile museum building projects from the Guggenheim Bilbao to MoMA, Richard Serra’s multi-ton sculptures have been the default unit of measure; floors must be able to bear and spaces must be able to accommodate a Serra. The continued utility of such Serra Unit-based architecture. Just as screen-based art tests the programmability of art spaces, presenting a gigantic yet inconsequentially light object like a Satelloon as an art object poses an exhibition challenge of a different scale.

Here is a rough artist’s conception:

Now all I need to do to exhibit the Satelloon in Paris is to develop a body of work and a career comparable to Serra’s and last year’s Monumenta artist, Anselm Kiefer. So yeah, let me get right on that.
Hal Foster on Serra at the Grand Palais [lrb]
Monumenta 2008, including photos from the opening by Lorenz Kienzle [monumenta.com]

Matthew Barney: Big Bucks, Many Whammies

Christopher Knight didn’t have as bad a time at the performance/filming of Matthew Barney’s “REN” as the audience members who were injured by flying glass when the backhoe went at it with the Chrysler Imperial in the auto dealer showroom:

When paramedics left, the crowd filed into the tomb — actually the car-lined former service bay. Lila Downs, the great Oaxacan ranchera singer, wailed at a corpse laid out atop a golden Grand Am. A “menstrual shroud” was extracted from the loins of a masked nude woman. Somebody said that locusts were released in the parking lot, but I didn’t see them.
Then we all drove home.
It had been a long evening of checking off source materials: Richard Prince, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, “Cleopatra,” Al Gore, etc. The industrial coupling was pure Survival Research Labs, the Northern California heavy-industrial performance troupe that has been artistically disemboweling the military-industrial complex for 30 years.
Still, most interesting was the crypto-performance going on around the crypto-Egypto main event. Plenty of official cameras promised future “REN” shows, while performance shards were carefully collected.

I used to think that the most interesting thing about Barney’s work was how he made it, or got it made. I’m not surprised that Barney’s pressing his luck in the home the Live Studio Audience.
Matthew Barney’s ‘REN’ [lat via man]

Oh Wow. Captain & Tenille & Lawrence & Welk

Unless they were on a group tour to Italy or something, my grandparents watched the Lawrence Welk show every Saturday night. When I was trying to score the second installment of The Souvenir Series, the one based on my grandfather’s old dry cleaners, I really wanted to find a way to use Lawrence Welk music, and a young composer and I wracked our brains for a way in. But it was just unassailable, impervious to any kind of deconstruction or irony.
But maybe it was just too much and too soon. Watching Bobby Burgess and Cissy King dance to a 1977 big band arrangement of the Captain & Tenille classic, “Love Will Keep Us Together,” I realize that Lawrence Welk is what it is, a wholly realized artform all its own. Somehow only 353 other people have realized it, too. [via archival clothing]

Turns out yesterday was Mr. Burgess’s birthday!

Introducing The Suck Cola Registry

The Suck Cola Registry # SC0005, originally uploaded by gregorg.

In 1996, I went to some weird little Internet expo at the New York Coliseum. The folks from Suck.com were there, and I got this bottle of Suck Classic Cola. It was my first piece of WWW swag [no one really said “dotcom” yet in 1996 who didn’t work for Time Magazine.]
I know of one other bottle. At least until he quit, it was on the bookshelf in a friend’s office at Time Warner [which, ironically, was built on the site of the NY Coliseum]. Except for three <3-hour periods when I moved, and this morning when it dropped on my foot, mine has been in my refrigerator since 1996. 1996 was the year Suck memorialized Coca Cola’s beautiful utter failure of Gen X marketing, OK Soda by calling for OK fans to send them cans, promotional materials, even vending machines.
It is in that spirit, but without a bunch of old Coke bottles coming to me, that I hereby inaugurate The Suck Cola Registry, a virtual gathering of all the world’s remaining bottles of Suck Cola.
If you have a bottle or know of a bottle of Suck Cola, please add it to the Registry. by providing the following data:
Cola Owner
Cola Photo [jpg or URL]
Cola Location [i.e., city/state/country, not “in a box in my storage unit”]
After your Cola information is reviewed and validated, you will be issued a Suck Cola Registry Number. I have designated my bottle SC0005, having reserved the first four Registry Numbers, SC0001-SC0004, for Suck.com co-founders Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman. Thank you.
Related: 10 OK Soda cans [empty] in various designs and excellent condition, currently $1 on eBay

Bloghdad.com: Now Watch This Drive

“Bush’s last round of golf as president dates back to October 13, 2003, according to meticulous records kept by CBS news.”
So glad to know the media is so meticulous. That’s almost two months after the August date Bush claimed to have stopped golfing.
Bush: I quit golf over Iraq war [afp/yahoo]
P.S.: The complete quote from the title, “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.” was made on a tee in Kennebunkport on Aug. 4, 2002. [“Before Golf, Bush Decries Latest Deaths In Mideast |
Upcoming Holiday to Be No Vacation From Strife”, washpost

MUTO By Blu

This is awesome, like OG William Kentridge in real space. MUTO is a new stop-action animation by Blu, a Buenos Aires artist, where I guess/hope they have different etiquette about painting over someone else’s art on the street.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
blublu.org and blublog [via waxy]

Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup, Ch. 1

I wrote a few months ago about making a dining room table following Italian designer and theorist Enzo Mari’s 1974 Proposta per un’autoprogettazione, roughly translated as “A Project for self-design.” Mari’s goal was to effect a critical examination of the objects around us and the system of design, manufacture, distribution, marketing, and commerce that brings them into being. He did this by developing blueprints for a houseful of furniture that could be made from standardized pine lumber, in a day or two. The designs require only the simplest saw cuts and a hammer. And if you get the lumberyard to cut the lengths for you, it just requires a hammer. As Mari explained in an interview:

these items are not intended as alternatives to industrial ones, their creation is intended as a sort of critical exercise on design, and this is the reason why this experiment was called home design, not home production. The user, in repeating the operation, which can never be a slavish repetition…the designs have no measurements and while you are making them you can make changes, variations…when making the object the user becomes aware of the structural reasoning behind the object itself, therefore, subsequently he improves his own ability to assess the objects on the market with a more critical eye.

The EFFE table I want to build requires two sizes of board: 1×2 inch pine for the structure, and 1×8 planks for the top. In 1983, Mari explained that, “As regards material, the easiest to acquire is undoubtedly still the wooden plank.” Undoubtedly. So I headed down to the nearest hardware store, where there were several hundred varieties of curtain rod finials, but no lumber. I was told I could order pine boards of these dimensions, and they’d come in about a week. Couldn’t my contractor get wood for me? So I went to Home Depot, which had pine boards in several grades and dimensions. They were all from New Zealand.
First off, it wasn’t that nice-looking, but buying processed wood from the other side of the world in a 100,000-sf store seemed to contradict the spirit of the autoproggetazione project. Under those circumstances, Jeff Bezos’ critical response to the furniture design industry made more sense. [When he started Amazon, he made the desks out of hollow-core doors and sawhorses, a scrappy tradition the company continued.] But I didn’t want the aggressively cheap improvisation of a Bezos Table in my house.
The place where I saw the biggest piles of untreated pine lumber was, ironically, Ikea. The warehouse section near the store’s exit has palletsful of bookcases, chairs and beds, all flatpacked and ready for assembly [home production?] What would happen if you treat Ikea as your corner hardware store, and use their flatpack-optimized, mass-produced furniture components as the raw materials in an entirely different design?

Looking through the Ikea hacking communities, it seems no one had tried to make an Enzo Mari table from Ikea parts before. While Ikea publishes detailed dimensions for their assembled products, there’s no information on part specs. Over the course of several trips to Ikeas outside New York and Washington, DC, I identified every Ikea product that looked like a promising source of pine parts, and I measured each piece of wood.
Though there are many pine products at Ikea, there are just eight products or series whose parts come close to standard 1-by lumber dimensions. I’ll put them in the next post. Then I’ll calculate the various combinations to figure out things like the optimum use of material, the least amount of cutting, the cheapest/most expensive, the closest to Mari’s design, and the most successful table. We’ll see how it goes.

related: the 2002 reprint of Autoprogettazione from Corraini is much harder to find than it should be [abebooks]
previously: Autoprogettazione: The Making Of An Enzo Mari Dining Room Table

On The Sky Atlas And The NGS-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

The Palomar Observatory Sky Survey was sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Over ten years, between 1948 and 1958, astronomers at Cal Tech’s Palomar Observatory used a 48-inch Schmidt Telescope to create the most advanced sky survey ever, a comprehensive portrait of most of the visible universe as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. [Actually, the survey detected objects of a magnitude of +22, one million times fainter than the limits of human vision.]
When completed, the 935 pairs of glass plates, one filtered red, and one blue, were compiled into the Sky Atlas, which was published over the years on paper, glass, and film.

I first found out about the NGS-POSS about ten years ago I was visiting a physicist friend at her university office. There was a reception in the department library, and we wandered off to explore, and ended up in a rear stairwell, where she showed me a large, grey, metal flatfile on a landing. Inside each drawer was a stack of large, slightly curled photographs. They were printed in the negative; instead of glowing stars on a black sky, each page was light silver, flecked with linty black specks. There was a string of numbers–right ascension and declination, it turned out–on the top of each print.
Two print versions of the POSS were published, one 14×17″ format in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and another, 14×14″, in the 1970’s. The version I saw was the former. Paper turned out to be the least useful format for astronomical analysis; glass and film were much better, and since the POSS plates were scanned into the Digitized Sky Survey in the 1990’s, the print version of the Sky Atlas is obsolete by several generations.
So besides finding an extant copy gathering dust and taking up space in a university physics department somewhere, the logical [sic] thing to do is to print an entirely new set from the original plates.
Two sets of original plates were created, one to work from, and the other to be “stored, unused, in the dome of the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, where it will be available in the even that the plates in Pasadena should be damaged or destroyed by some catastrophe.”
At least that’s where they were in 1963 when R.L. Minkowski and G.O. Abell wrote about the NGS-POSS for K. Aa. Strand’s Basic Astronomical Data, Vol. III of Stars and Stellar Systems. They described in some detail the characteristics of the Survey, as well as the making of the prints. [Strand’s compendium also includes descriptions of earlier sky surveys, which I might get to later.] After the jump, some excerpts from Minkowski & Abell’s paper, pp.481-6, on the production of the Sky Atlas

Continue reading “On The Sky Atlas And The NGS-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey”

Eli Manning, The Manchurian Sforzian Backdrop

The hand that picks the nose shakes the hand that rules the world. For another seven months. [ap via wonkette]

EE Barnard’s Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way

Edward Emerson Barnard was a self-taught astronomer who built a house for himself and his new bride with money earned spotting comets. [A patent medicine magnate was offering $200/comet in the 1880’s; in one year, Barnard spotted eight.] He was the first person to discover a new moon of Jupiter since Gallileo.
In 1895, he became a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, which gave him the observatory access he needed to complete one of the first photographic sky surveys. He spent decades, up until his death in 1923, photographing the Milky Way and nebulae, and overseeing the printing of photographs for his survey.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of his cataloguer and assistant Mary Calvert, A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which was finally published in 1929, in an edition of around 700. It’s a stunning achievement, a handmade artist’s book in the form of pioneering science.

Georgia Tech’s library has digitized their copy of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which allows broader access, and reduces wear and traffic on the $8-10,000 books. [The example above sold at Skinner’s scientific instruments auction in 2006 for around $7,000. Can’t find the exact number right now.]

Now That’s An Addition

I finally pulled some pictures off my camera from last summer. That’s when I noticed this little bungalow–with a sweet, vertical addition–just off the mainstreet in Morehead City, NC.
There are a couple more shots on flickr.

Dude. Olafur Eliasson Has A Blog

Well, he and his studio do. Spatial Vibration documents a series of collaboration/experiments concerning the relationship of sound and space. Several of the experiments are on view in a show of the same name, “Spatial Vibration, String-Based Instrument, Study II,” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through mid-June.
The Endless Study translates the sonic vibrations of a single-string instrument into a drawing by means of two pen-equipped pendulum arms, which record [sic] the sounds onto a rotating sheet of paper. It’s an update of a 19th century invention known as a harmonograph.

It remains to be seen what range of aural and visual effects emerge from the public’s access to the experiment. But the Studio crew, who have clearly been practicing, seem quite proficient at producing elegant, spiral drawings. But can you dance to them? Are beautiful drawings the happy accident of a particular type of performance, or is the musical composition–and the experience of listening to it–now incidental to the production of a desired drawing?

Meanwhile, another, even more ambitiously scaled experiment involves a 3-dimensional harmonograph, with a pendulum on each axis, which translates sound+time [i.e., a performance] into movement in 3D space. This path is then translated into a model. Olafur says it better:

By linking each pendulum to a digital interface I can ascribe to them the coordinates of x, y and z, and then digitally draw the spatial result of the three frequencies. They are easily tuned to a C major chord, for instance, one pendulum sounding the note C, one E, and one G. If they are given the correct frequency, the chord is harmonious and the vibrations form an orderly whole. This solidifies over time, thus drawing the contours of a three-dimensional object in space. In other words: sound vibrations can be turned into a tangible object. It is almost like building a model. One could develop this experiment into vast spatial arrangements by turning harmonious chords into spatial shapes. If we were to use a whole concert, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, we might build an entire city.

An entire city. But that returns me to my previous question: would you want to live in Beethoven’s Fifth? What if the highest quality of city life is produced by something musically awful, like Mariah Carey’s third comeback album? Or an annoying corporate jingle? Do you lay down a heavy bassline to produce your city’s street grid? What would be on Jane Jacobs’ iPod?
Spatial Vibration, includes video, photos, and exhibition info [spatialvibration.blogspot.com]
Spatial Vibration is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through Jun. 7 [tanyabonakdargallery]

Wholphin [!] Interview on Wonderland Stream [!!]

Very interesting. Stream Magazine, part of Wonderland, is a new venue for online filmmaking, or an online venue for new filmmakers. Not quite sure yet. Alls I know is, Austin Bunn has a nice interview with Brett Hoff editor of Wholphin. It all looks fresh as a daisy, even though the pieces they’re discussing are all a few issues old now. [Note to self: finally start watching Wholphin #6.]
The World According to Wholphin [wonderlandstream.com via bigscreenlittlescreen]

Thomas Ruff’s Sterne Series

From around 1989-92, the German photographer Thomas Ruff created a body of work using astronomical survey photos from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. There is very little discussion online of this series[1], even though I believe it’s the first time Ruff uses a found image in his work. [Before the Sterne series, Ruff was known for his very large portraits of his friends, which he described as “a construct based on identification photographs.” Since then, he has appropriated and manipulated many types of photos, including industrial catalogue illustrations and internet porn.]
Ruff talked briefly about the Star photos in a rather painful 1993 interview with Philip Pocock:

Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?
Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?
Pocock: No.
Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over. For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn’t used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It’s also a homage to Karl Bloßfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes. So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.

All interesting enough, but given the photos he uses, I think the most relevant perspective comes earlier in another part of the interview, where he distinguishes between photographing to “capture reality” and “to make a picture.”
Ruff definitely makes an awesome picture. The Sterne photos are stunning, at least the largest prints–185cm wide by 250cm tall–are. They generally do well at auction, though it sometimes feels like the ones that do better are the “starrier” ones, a notion that seems to play right into Ruff’s interest, inherited from his teachers, Berndt and Hilla Becher, that photographs are cliches, constructs of expectations [“my idea of what stars look like,” even.]
The photos Ruff used came from a project so conceptually ambitious and subjectively constrained, it’d do the Bechers proud. The ESO Southern Sky Atlas was a massive undertaking, an attempt begun in 1972 [images were taken from 1974-1987] to document the entire visible universe. Or at least the half of it visible from the Southern Hemisphere. And just the objects of enough magnitude to show up with the then-new 100-inch UK Schmidt Telescope and the 1m ESO telescope at La Cilla, Chile. And which could be seen on Kodak’s then-new, experimental, hypersensitized emulsion.
The resulting 1,000+ photos are at once evidence of photography’s futile limitations, and one of its greatest artistic achievements; they out-Becher the Bechers. The Sky Atlas is just one of several sky surveys over the 20th century. Each starts out with the same ambitious goal; each takes years of painstaking work; each results in images and objects that exhibit conceptual rigor and contemporary visual appeal in equal amounts; and as technology progresses, each is rendered utterly obsolete by the next survey. Particularly as astronomical data is digitized, the era of producing objects–glass negative plates and photographic prints–has died. Now it sits, at best, forgotten and neglected in university libraries and on storeroom shelves. At worst, it will be cleared out and dumped, replaced–people think–by a small stack of CD-ROMs or a web server.
For such projects, once-scientific milestones that represent an era’s pinnacle of our achievement, the literal attainment of the capacity of human vision, maybe the best thing for them is to stop being science and start being art.
Note to astronomical librarians: if you’re clearing out old sky surveys and atlases, please dump them my way.
[1] At least in English. Henning Engelke wrote about the Sterne series and the science-to-art spectrum, but it’s in German and locked in a in pdf. maybe this google translation of the reformatted html version will be comprehensible.