{"id":5319,"date":"2014-10-15T13:42:56","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T13:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=5319"},"modified":"2019-11-22T15:51:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T15:51:38","slug":"the-new-geography-earth-music-and-land-art-version-2-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=5319","title":{"rendered":"The New Geography: Earth Music and Land Art, Version 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oblivion to me is a state when you\u2019re not conscious of the time or space you are in….Places without meaning, a kind of absent or pointless vanishing point.
\n–Robert Smithson, \u201cFragments of a Conversation\u201d (1969)1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The apologists for \u201cBig Data\u201d seem to be everywhere these days. In forums ranging from TED talks to marketing campaigns, we are now being bombarded by the just-on-the-horizon possibilities of Total Information. It is no surprise that a particular articulation of these ideas has also surfaced in the world of contemporary art practice. With the promise of accessing a Borgesian map composed of digital data, artists and composers are newly attempting to translate information at a sublime scale for visual and auditory consumption. We may think of these works, animated by evolving visualizations of seismic, atmospheric, or demographic data, as groping toward a new kind of geography, a new way of writing and picturing the world as such. While these projects certainly transcend the boundaries of the self-conceived art world, this discussion will focus particularly on those for which the primary site of reception is a gallery context. This is not to suggest the irrelevance of other examples, but rather that the larger culture of data analytics receives a particular kind of expression when figured as part of an artwork. This narrowed frame allows us to understand the larger stakes of the new data Weltbild<\/em> all the more clearly.<\/p>\n

Artistic data visualizations have indeed become almost ubiquitous within the last few years. While web-based works such as Aaorn Koblin\u2019s Flight Patterns<\/em><\/a> or Fernanda Vi\u00e9gas and Martin Wattenberg\u2019s Wind Map<\/em><\/a> have gained enormous followings through social media channels, other, more traditionally object-based installations have brought large-scale mapping into the space of the museum. One of the first of the present generation of projects is The Place Where You Go to Listen<\/em> (2008), an installation at the Museum of the North by the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning composer John Luther Adams that translates information about local geological activity into a constantly shifting visual and auditory environment. More recently, Jana Winderen\u2019s Ultrafield<\/em><\/a>, a sixteen-channel soundscape of the northern waters, represented sonic geography at MoMA\u2019s 2013 Soundings<\/em> exhibition, while Greg Niemeyer\u2019s Polartide<\/em><\/a>, a visual\/aural representation of the data concerning the world\u2019s ocean levels and the profits of the world\u2019s largest oil companies, was on view at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Though one could certainly work toward a more comprehensive list, the projects of artists ranging from Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin<\/a> to David Bowen<\/a>, Daniel Crawford<\/a>, Terreform Studio<\/a>, Shawn Brixey<\/a>, and Matt Roberts<\/a> represent a partial sample of the work being done in this terrain.<\/p>\n

While these works address themselves primarily to pressing, contemporary issues\u2014the pervasive sense of disconnection from the natural world, the imminent threat posed by global warming, and of course the rise of Big Data\u2014I would argue that to understand the grammar and ultimately the meaning of these gestures it is necessary to remove them from the immediate present. As a corrective to the kind of presentism that can all too often dominate discussion of this field, this project will present three case studies, unfolding from September to December 2014, that pair contemporary investigations with relevant antecedents. Though much of the work is characterized by a digital cleanness that would have been anathema to earlier producers, many of the most significant predecessors of this new geography can be found in the ferment of the 1960s. While composers such as La Monte Young and Robert Watts sought to transform the processes of the earth into open-ended and largely unauthored pieces of music, other artists such as Nam June Paik envisioned the technological interconnection of the world as a means to bring about the dawning of a new global consciousness. However, the imbrication of contemporary practice within this trajectory of transparency and harmony enables us to see how \u201cthe new geography\u201d tends to distance itself from other, potentially relevant histories. Whereas the above projects were animated by a notion of coherence and legibility as underpinning the structure of the world, the work of artists such as Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson were predicated on the idea that the world as a system may not be fundamentally coherent, and it is certainly not legible within its own terms.<\/p>\n

The forgetting of the critical distance between terrain and data, between site and non-site, may not be an entirely fair criticism to lay at the feet of practicing new media artists. The computer, after all, is particularly suited for what Bruno Latour has described as \u201cdrawing things together,\u201d gathering dispersed sets of information and translating them so that they may be compared with one another2<\/a><\/sup>. Nevertheless, the key insight provided by the critical artists and writers of the 1960s is that to arrogate to our own conventions the ability to grasp \u201cthe world as it is\u201d is a kind of anthropocentric blindness. What we need is an art, as well as an art theory, that reveals the hidden rhythms of the globe while also pointing toward the contingency and historicity of our present means of picturing them.<\/p>\n

Paring 1: John Luther Adams\u2019s The Place Where You Go to Listen<\/em> (2009) \/ Robert Watts\u2019s Cloud Music<\/em> (1974)<\/h1>\n