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 Johnston Atoll, which consists of " four small man-made islands enclosed in an egg-shaped reef approximately 21 miles in circumference," located 718 miles from Hawaii, is for sale. The current owner, however – the wonderfully named U.S. Office of Property Disposal – wonders if potential buyers might be "unaware that all buildings had been removed" from the island, and that "there were no functioning utilities or water supply, the runway was iffy, the golf course disintegrated, the seawall containing the nuclear waste dump was insufficient, and that nearest services of any kind are over 700 miles away."  If you purchase the island despite all that, your land deed "will contain use restrictions because the atoll was used by the Defense Department for storage of chemical munitions and as a missile test site in the 1950's and 60's. The island can be used as a residence or vacation getaway" – but "the airstrip and the golf course are closed." Today, the Center for Land Use Interpretation tells us, Johnston Atoll is nothing but "a scab of concrete, slowly being covered in bird droppings."  Meanwhile, the atoll's history as a U.S. nuclear test-site is fascinating: "In 1962," CLUI continues, "Johnston was used for a series of nuclear tests as part of Operation Dominic, which included the only U.S. test of an operational ballistic missile with a live warhead. For this test a Polaris missile was launched from a submarine, and traveled 1200 miles through space and the atmosphere, until detonating 11,000 feet above the ocean near Johnston. Also that year, the newly constructed rocket launch pad at Johnston was used for a number of extremely high altitude nuclear tests. On June 20, during 'Starfish,' the Thor rocket engine cut out a minute after launch, and the missile was intentionally destroyed, at 30,000 feet. Large pieces of the rocket, including some plutonium–contaminated wreckage, rained down on the atoll." And so forth. If you buy the island, of course, let me know... (With images from CLUI – and with huge thanks to Mark, who recently tipped me on the island's existence. For more info, there is also this Wikipedia article. And if you're in the market for other strange real estate, consider purchasing this subterranean bunker-city). [Note: Apparently, Johnston Atoll was never for sale. The advertisement claiming otherwise was accidentally put onlin e and then picked up by search engines. Alas...]
  [Images: Sand raked into earthworks, then photographed from above with a kite – a process all but perfected by Lenny, a photographer based on the island of Guernsey, whose art and idea these are. Both photos taken from his Flickr set. The first photo, above, I find almost unbelievably gorgeous]. (Discovered via Xenmate, whose blog will also tell you about starling murmurations).
 Geology.com presents us with a very interesting map of global lightning strikes – high-resolution version available here. Central Africa is clearly the lightning hotspot of the world, and by a fairly stunning magnitude, I might add. (Black indicates the most active regions).  I wonder what you'd do, on the other hand, if your own brain showed up on this map... A moving black spot, crashing harddrives, frying satellites, starting fires in the deserts of sub-Saharan Africa. Or the canyons of Manhattan, funneling frictive clouds of geomagnetic energy down avenues, lighting up this map with darkness. For that matter, if, instead, spinning out in the middle of the Pacific you find a weird eye of unexpected hydro-electrical activity, dooming ships, hiding islands, setting up the storyline for King Kong 2... In any case, yet more information about lightning, etc., can be found at the Center for Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity Research.
 [Image: Via Pruned].
In 2002, Alex Pang of the Institute for the Future published a book called Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions.
In the Victorian era, Pang explains, "British astronomers carried telescopes and spectroscopes to remote areas of India, the Great Plains of North America, and islands in the Caribbean and Pacific to watch the sun eclipsed by the moon." These journeys are referred to as "eclipse fieldwork."
 [Image: Stellar depression, or a total eclipse of the sun; from an astrophotography site].
Victorian eclipse expeditions established "eclipse camps," or instant cities geographically calculated to lie exactly on the forthcoming path of totality. This was, we might say, urban planning as a function of astronomy; or, solar cycles dictating city form.
Observations here could be made of the temporarily extinguished sun, a black star shining over regions so remote they were often entirely unpopulated. On the other hand, Pang writes, locations close to railways were always preferred, as "a small town, easily accessible by railroad, with clear observing conditions and no clouds or dust," could forestall the inconvenience of camping in the middle of nowhere.
"The first step," of course, "was to find out the path of totality. By the nineteenth century, the mathematics required to divine the location of the 'shadow path' was well developed, and predictions to within a few hundred yards were possible, an excellent level of accuracy since the shadow path itself was more than a hundred miles wide."
It was here, within this slim zone of moving darkness, spheres of heaven casting shadows on the earth, that an eclipse camp could be established.
 [Image: A solar eclipse as seen from space; photographed by Mir].
Battling cobras, tigers, cholera, and sunstroke—"less fortunate parties" even faced "epidemics" and "small wars," perhaps suggesting Indiana Jones and the City of Eclipses—these expeditionary eclipse observers soon established a "standard form" for the camps.
Call it eclipse urbanism: cities built specifically to see, and photograph, the absence of solar light, producing highly accurate films of darkness.:
Every camp had shelter for instruments and baggage, and a darkroom for developing photographic plates. Observers setting up in monasteries [like monks contemplating a black sun, or the eclipse as solar adversary], villas, or estate gardens simply occupied existing buildings, while in unsettled areas, tents or huts were erected, and brick foundations and pedestals built. Eclipse stations were also easily identified by the temporary observatories that parties built. These buildings were usually rectangular, and built of wood on a brick or stone foundation; they housed the larger and more valuable telescopes, spectroscopic cameras, and darkroom, and appeared everywhere between Iowa City and Africa.
The architecture itself was hyper-specialized, designed to assist in recording the Apollonian withdrawal of the total eclipse: "The sensitivity and precision of astrophysical instruments created a demand for spaces that protected them from temperature variations, damp, vibration, and other distractions," Pang writes. "Consequently, heating systems were designed to stabilize ambient temperatures and minimize temperature gradients from one room to another, or between rooms and stairwells or closets. As telescopes became larger, vibrations from street traffic or motors became intolerable. Engineers responded by designing massive, vibration-free piers, often made of granite or stone, resting on foundations independent of the floors and other parts of the observatory."
Even "guards were posted" at the peripheries of these specially marked eclipse camps "to keep the curious from playing with instruments, disturbing the astronomers, or even carrying away mementos." Further, decorative individuation was practiced at each camp: "Bunting or flags were sometimes placed over a camp's entrance to emphasize its separate identity."
 [Image: A map of solar eclipses projected, amazingly, for 2981AD-3000AD; many, many more maps at NASA's World Atlas of Solar Eclipse Paths].
As Mircea Eliade writes in The Sacred & The Profane—a survey of spatial practices in "religious myth, symbolism, and ritual"—"some parts of space are qualitatively different from others," and therefore need to be differentiated. Eliade calls these "sanctuaries that are 'doors of the gods' and hence places of passage between heaven and earth." Eliade—whose textual approach to world religions is outdated and translation-dependent but nonetheless totally fascinating—describes how re-organizing space for purposes that exceed the mundane, even becoming supernatural, should be considered a "cosmicization of unknown territories." This means the "establishment in a particular place" of a new form of human inhabitation, with a new purpose, holy or even astronomical in nature, thus re-establishing something called the "cosmic pillar." Eventually that place will be considered "the center of the world."
Etc. etc.
 [Image: A solar eclipse, from this MIT photo collection].
In any case, at least two quick things interest me throughout all of this: 1) Are there any examples of eclipse camps that, once the eclipse was over and gone, did not disband, becoming, over time, fully functioning towns or cities? What marks, if any, did that astronomical origin leave in the urban fabric? 2) Given loads of money and a huge amount of land, could you build a railroad that extends for hundreds of miles down the center of a future eclipse path – even an eclipse that isn't due for decades, or perhaps hundreds of years? You ride from LA to Chicago, or Istanbul to Munich, Beijing to Bangkok, unaware that the skies will turn black along that very route, the train windows will darken, your passage across the earth will enact a moment of astronomy? It's a pilgrimage route for manic depressives, industrially sprawled across the planet.
 [Image: From the BBC. What unearthly flowers would grow by the light of a suicidal sun?].
"A novel, glass-like form of carbon dioxide has been created in the laboratory by Italian scientists," New Scientist reports. "Under extreme pressures the researchers found that CO2 forms a crystalline solid, dubbed 'amorphous carbonia' (a-CO2)." This new material "could shed light on the way CO2 behaves under pressure inside planets." Instead of bedrock, for example, on these alien planets, you'd have miles and miles of transparent carbon dioxide glass spiraling downward beneath your feet, forming fissures and caves; a San Andreas fault of windowed canyons, shattering over millions of years. Glass continents. As Jules Verne once wrote: "Look down well! You must take a lesson in abysses." In this case, those abysses may well reflect you.  After being compressed under artificial, near-planetary pressures – or "400,000 to 500,000 atmospheres" – "CO2 molecules react to these conditions by forming an irregular crystalline, or amorphous, structure with oxygen molecules. The resulting material is transparent, tough, and has an atomic structure resembling that of ordinary window glass." Although amorphous carbonia "cannot [yet] exist outside of a pressure chamber," some scientists have already imagined using the material for "new, less environmentally harmful ways to dispose of CO2." This could mean, for example, creating huge transparent cubes of carbon dioxide glass; these would then store excess CO2, locking it into perfect Euclidean forms, instead of letting more gas escape into the atmosphere where it would trap solar heat. The more cars and factories are put into operation anywhere in the world, pumping out yet more carbon dioxide, the larger these cubes will get, growing, reflective, looming on the edge of the city. Peripheral, abstract geometries of the purest architectural avant-garde. Create enough and you could build whole cities with them. Or, airlifted into the desert and buried there, future caves of glass will soon form, eroding from the surface down, abraded by sand-heavy winds. Years later, you'll take walking tours of the Glass Caverns of Utah, staying in towns such as New Carbonia – even Carbonia an der Oder, or Carbonia-on-Thames – where everything is made from weird glass blocks, and windows look out upon a faceted abyss of crystalline landscapes, cubed mazes of self-generating reflections where future backpackers of the world will re-discover existentialism, writing abstract poetry in old notebooks before being driven mad. A confrontation with your double that never ends. Meanwhile, the skies have cleared of all excess carbon dioxide, and these cubes around the world continue to grow...  (With a nod, of course, to J.G. Ballard; of similar concern: BLDGBLOG's A Natural History of Mirrors).
 [Image: What is it? Who knows. Though, as Mervyn Peake describes the buildings of Gormenghast: "Standing immobile throughout the day, these vivid objects, with their fantastic shadows on the wall behind them shifting and elongating hour by hour with the sun's rotation, exuded a kind of darkness for all their color." Cantilevered structures self-supported over the void. Via Archinect].
"In 2003," Cabinet Magazine tells us, "Berlin-based sound artist Christina Kubisch began an ongoing project called 'Electrical Walks.'" For this project, Kubisch has employed "specially built headphones that receive electromagnetic signals from the environment," transforming those signals "into sound." In the process, "Kubisch maps a given territory, noting 'hot spots' (ATM machines, security systems, electronic cash registers, subway systems, etc.) where the signals are particularly strong or interesting." In other words, she performs a kind of audial psychogeography, zones of the city turned into MP3s, "very beautiful, very dense sounds... like a movie, an audio movie." The images, below, represent the sound files those sounds produced, digital noise-maps of urban space.  Whether you're listening to the mellow, down-tempo techno of this light advertisement from Japan, or the sci-fi drone of a Taiwanese subway (which Cabinet covertly, and somewhat fascistically, editorializes as a region of China) – or even the minimal, repetitive heartbeat of this security gate in Oxford, England, the mournful buzz of a Bratislava tram, which Kubisch describes as "almost like a choir," or the empty Ballardian hum of a control tower at Heathrow airport – these are the electromagnetic sounds of modern urbanism. "What I would really like to do," Kubisch says, "is to make a map of several cities and continents. In a large city, for example, where are the electromagnetic fields? Where are the security gates? You could just mark them with little dots. They even have the same sound systems all over the world. It's the globalization of sound. This is something that I think would be very interesting: to see a network of little dots showing where things are and where they are spreading. Every time I do an 'Electrical Walk,' it adds to this general map of sound that I'm collecting. It's artistic work, but it's a kind of social research, too." There are thirty tracks in all. Knock yourself out. (Related and elsewhere: we make money not art discusses Kubisch's project as well as " sound performances produced by people scanning their Oyster cards as they access London tube stations.")
In 1987, Canadian photographer Robin Collyer began documenting houses that aren't houses at all – they're architecturally-disguised electrical substations, complete with windows, blinds, and bourgeois landscaping.
"During the 1950s and 1960s," Collyer explains in a recent issue of Cabinet Magazine, "the Hydro-Electric public utilities in the metropolitan region of Toronto built structures known as 'Bungalow-Style Substations.' These stations, which have transforming and switching functions, were constructed in a manner that mimics the style and character of the different neighborhoods."
   
[Images: Robin Collyer].
Simulacra meant to reflect how it looks to be domestic and Canadian, "there are about 100 of these structures located on residential streets in the central and the suburban parts of the greater Toronto area." Pictured here are only five of them. So if you live in suburban Toronto and your neighbor's house is humming – perhaps now you know what's really going on inside.
Meanwhile, the address 555 Spadina – i.e. the third image, above – shows up in this list of 322 properties owned by the city of Toronto. If anyone out there knows something about the other 321 buildings, be in touch!
(Note: These images come courtesy of the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art – with the exception of the first, which appeared in Cabinet Magazine).
Motorola has patented a Feng Shui detector: "The device houses a camera that checks the colour of the property, a microphone that listens for noise from nearby roads and factories and a compass to find north – a crucial factor for Feng Shui enthusiasts. It can also measure the strength of AM and FM radio signals from local radio transmitters and connect to the nearest mobile phone base station to check for indications of cellphone signal strength." Read the patent application here. Perhaps coming soon: a field unit, designed for landscapes – gardens, campsites, caverns... Attachable to airplanes, so the flight can adapt in progress to the most psychologically calming path... Or, Feng Shui for Machine Gun Nests.
What does the earth have in store for itself? The next million years, Discovery Channel News informs us, will be just like "the last million years. That means plenty of meteor impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, megaquakes and worse."  As Steven Dutch, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, claims: "Events that are rare or unknown in recorded history become almost inevitable, even frequent, in the near geologic future." This means that some unbelievably exciting things will happen on an Earth that I, certainly, will not be around to see – and that, perhaps, no human at all will witness. These landscape futures include the relocation of Niagara Falls. The hard, dolomite cliffs over which the Falls currently plunge "are eroding at a rapid clip," we read. "Once worn away, the softer rock upstream will erode even faster until it encounters another layer of hard rock at Tonawanda, NY, and creates another set of falls there in about 14,000 years." Then, in California, "the temperamental San Andreas fault will set off about 7,000 earthquakes of magnitude eight in the next million years, offsetting the geography of San Francisco more than 15 miles. That will split the San Francisco Peninsula into a fork. Over the same million years the Hawaiian Islands will have moved about 60 miles northwest." This will happen at the same time that Loihi, a currently active undersea volcano, will grow into "a new island rivaling today’s Mauna Loa." Elsewhere, "the Mississippi River outlet will shift in location many times, leaving today's New Orleans far from the river, but still sinking." Potentially more interesting still, "even the stars will show obvious signs of change in as few as 10,000 years." In other words, "our solar system will have moved 7.5 light years in its orbit around the center of the Milky Way, altering the shapes of familiar constellations." This, of course, opens up the possibility of naming this future zodiac in advance – even devising moving constellations, animated images shifting as the planet moves, astral films starcasted across a million years. But it is also worth remembering that London is sinking – indeed, the whole of southeast England is sinking – roughly 8" every century. That may not sound like much, but there are 10,000 centuries in a million years; so, providing such a rate remains constant, London – amazingly, sadly, absurdly, excitingly – will be more than 6500-feet below ground, buried more than a mile in the muck and clay. The whole city will then fossilize. Elsewhere, Taiwan will continue to move toward mainland China, setting off earthquakes – and complicating any long-term hopes of political independence; the Alps will continue to rise as the Mediterranean is squeezed shut by the northern approach of Africa; and, if recent information is to be believed, most of Italy could be adrift with Saharan dunes, the equatorial deserts of the world expanding both north and south. Rome, abraded with overheated breezes, where statues of saints are reduced to sand.
 A project I've been meaning to write about ever since it won first place at RIBA's 2005 President's Medals awards is Luke Pearson's maritime exploration of "the ship as a 'dry-docked' architecture."    "The scheme is a retirement home for elderly fisherman that also houses a working men's club for members of Newcastle’s fishing community," Pearson writes. "As a reflection of the separation and torpor of this unique society, the scheme takes the notion of the ship in an architectural context, to create an ersatz environment which interacts with the city around it as if it were a dry docked vessel. The environmental technologies and the ways in which the notional ship has been translated into an architectural system are the focus of this study."   In other words, you dock the ship for so long it becomes architecture, an extension of the earth's surface into the sea. Pearson's ship/building – perhaps ship.bldg – would include a " heated superstructure" and a " microcosmic ocean upon deck" (both pictured above). Then there is Pearson's technique of " Alephographic drawing." Pearson describes this part of the project as having been "inspired by Borges"; the image, below, "sees everything revealing the technologies and notorieties that exist within the Vessel."  Now a similar such project needs to be worked out with a train, stopped for so long in the center of a city it becomes architectural, permanently anchored and settled there on tracks, perhaps with moving rooms, parts of a building detach then reattach to other buildings; then further projects with other forms of transport: helicopters, lorries, school buses, hovercraft... The future architecture of stalled vehicles. Or, to quote Thomas Pynchon, who is here referring to a missile if I remember correctly: "The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall." (Luke Pearson's project spotted long, long ago on Archinect; see also Student projects 4, 3, 2, and 1).
Whilst once again finding myself on the same intellectual wavelength as Pruned's Alex Trevi, who posted today about the shimmering and explosive self-resurfacing outer loops of the sun, I spent yesterday evening copying down solar-descriptive quotations from an old book by Guy Murchie, called The Music of the Spheres. Now out of print, as well as scientifically outdated, I can still hardly believe how exciting the 2-volume book – about "the material universe, from atom to quasar, simply explained" – is to read, and how interestingly poetic Murchie's take on the subject really is. His chapter 6, for instance, is an "Introduction to the Sun," our local star in which "something much more profound and basic than fire is blazing."  I get light-headed when I read that the surface of the sun "is really a thousand times more vacuous than a candle-flame on Earth, and even the concentrated moiling gases hidden a thousand miles below it are a hundred times thinner than earthly air." Indeed, some stars, such as E Aurigae I – a star so huge that it could "contain most of our solar system, including the 5.5-billion-mile circumference of Saturn's orbit" – "are sometimes described as 'red-hot vacuums' because their material, though hot, averages thousands of times thinner than earthly air and is normally invisible, so that you might fly through them for days in your insulated space ship without even realizing you were inside a star." Meanwhile, in the sun's whirling interior, "the highly compressed gassy matter is ten times as dense as steel." Then, of course, there are "magnetic hurricanes thousands of miles in diameter" – which would be a lot more exciting if those magnetic hurricanes were not "commonly known on Earth as sunspots." As the sun unceasingly explodes in arching structures of storm and prominence, "glowing veils of gaseous calcium" escape. In others words, the same mineral responsible for animal bones bursts outward from the sun in astrophysical shells that "look like gnarled trees with blazing rain pouring downward from their branches in beautiful magnetic curves that have been clocked at speeds up to 400 miles a second."  The universe is loud with intercelestial thunder; there are "vast magnetic influences" at work across all scales of matter; "ionic 'noise storms' at radio frequencies" scream ceaselessly through antenna'd headsets of home astronomers; there is even a sunspot cycle that "corresponds to a '212-day cycle noted in some studies of human pulse rates'." Incredibly, some "outlying clusters" of stars at the edge of the Milky Way "overlap each other so densely they are literally buried in light." In any case, I think every child in the world would become a scientist if they read Murchie's 2-volume book – but it's out of print. Alas. Perhaps, instead, we can all just watch this extraordinary short film, wherein sound art meets video art meets solar astronomy. [Note: All emphases added. Elsewhere: Pruned's Sunscapes (where reader comments tipped us off to the film link, supplied above). Other elsewhere: The Surface of the Sun, a website claiming that the sun is, in fact, solid – furthermore, that it contains something called " solar moss." Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Podcasting the sun].
An old issue of The Wire introduces us to a synthesizer called the ANS, built in 1950s Moscow by Eugene Murzin and "constructed around a unique and incredibly intricate photoelectronic system."
 [Image: The ANS].
The ANS functioned through an "array of tiny chisels" that engraved "lines and points on rotating black enamelled glass discs." These engravings would then "regulate the brightness of light rays" that passed "through the discs onto photoelements," like the sun streaming through carefully shaded windows. The "level of intensity" of this light then produced specific sounds. Elsewhere (scroll down in this link till you hit the COILANS review), we read about the ANS's unique compositional process: "The composer inscribes his visual 'score' onto a glass plate covered with sticky black mastic, slides it through the machine, which reads the inscribed plate and converts the etchings into sound produced by a system of 800 oscillators." It's a machine that reads windows.  [Image: A representative musical score for the ANS – but what if you fed it architectural diagrams?].
The Wire then explains that, in 2002, British band Coil visited the synthesizer in Moscow and recorded nearly 4 hours of music using the machine. Listening to what they produced, we're told, sounds "like travelling through the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt – glitting slivers of distant white light and vast, nebulous spaces populated by inchoate radioactive matter." As you'll notice in these three, 3-minute samples, the effect is certainly weird – but unbelievably mesmerizing: 1, 2, and 3 (all MP3s). Light, chisels, glass plates, oscillators, enamelled surfaces, engravings on windows – with these elements it is not at all hard to imagine a kind of ANS architecture, rebuilt on the scale of a building. Windowed lobbies and escalators; sunlight; entire lift shafts full of glass discs, inscribed and black-enamelled, emitting music like light. Whole rooms of sound, angelic, the windows slightly trembling. Moving panes of glass, washed clean at the end of the day, pass slowly behind curtains, casting shadows. A symphony for glass escalators. Chamber music. Entire cities, made from nothing but windows, tuning to each other – like the sound of orchestral sunlight. (Note: The ANS was apparently used to soundtrack Andrei Tarkovsky's films Solaris and Stalker).
"Is it painted?" Park asked. "Most people don't think about pigments in paint. Most white-paint pigment now is titanium. Red is hematite. Black is often magnetite. There's chrome yellow, molybdenum orange. Metallic paints are a little more permanent. The pigments come from rocks in the ground. Dave's electrical system is copper, probably from Bingham Canyon. He couldn't turn on a light or make ice without it."
 [Image: Bingham Canyon, Utah, photographed by the Center for Land Use Interpretation].
This text is all via John McPhee: "The nails that hold the place together come from the Mesabi Range. His downspouts are covered with zinc that was probably taken out of the ground in Canada. The tungsten in his light bulbs may have been mined in Bishop, California. The chrome on his refrigerator door probably came from Rhodesia or Turkey. His television set almost certainly contains cobalt from the Congo. He uses aluminum from Jamaica, maybe Surinam; silver from Mexico or Peru; tin – it's still in tin cans – from Bolivia, Malaya, Nigeria. People seldom stop to think that all these things – planes in the air, cars on the road, Sierra Club cups – once, somewhere, were rock. Our whole economy – our way of doing things. Oh, gad! I haven't even mentioned minerals like manganese and sulphur. You won't make steel without them. You can't make paper without sulphur..."
Rearranging planets into TVs. Producing objects from geology.
 German artist Martin Kippenberger once proposed a subway system for the entire world, connecting Los Angeles to Helsinki, Tokyo to Rome, Münster to Dawson City. Greek islands, Canadian towns, Swiss lakes, pharaonic tombs – there would be entrances everywhere.  So Kippenberger actually began building these things – doors in the earth, leading nowhere – including this portable subway entrance. But then he died. The project ended.  Here are some construction specs and photo-speculative images to ponder.    So who's up for re-starting this thing? After all, an entrance was built on the roof of the World Trade Center – but, even though the towers have been destroyed, the entrance is still there, hovering invisibly above Manhattan. It leads to an unexplored subcavern deep inside Mammoth Cave – where you'll find a door to the Vatican. Which leads to the International Space Station. Which leads to the aerotropolis. Which connects onward to Cape Farewell, via the Cabinet Magazine National Library. Rumor has it, an Australian bone surgeon once uncovered another entrance in a patient's rib. Eve was an entrance. Etc.  (Thanks to Brand Avenue for pointing out Kippenberger's project to me – nearly seven months ago. And thanks to Andrew Blum for reminding me of The New Yorker cover, above, which I've been saving in a box of files since August 2002).
   [Images: An ingenious ad campaign by Y&R for preserving America's National Parks: landscapes blueprinted, seeds diagrammed, arches shock-absorbed. Here are Delicate Arch ( PDF), Yosemite Falls ( PDF), and Giant Sequoia ( PDF)]. (Thanks to Eric Jamieson for the tip!)
There was a short article in the August 2004 issue of The Wire about sound artist Mark Bain. "Equipped with seismometers," The Wire writes, Bain "can turn architectural structures into giant musical instruments and demolish buildings with sound alone." His installations have included "sensing devices, oscillators and the occasional sculptural element" – such as the "six metre high inflatable speaker" featured below.  This is the Sonusphere, formerly installed in the Edith Russ Haus, Germany. The Sonusphere musicalizes the effects of plate tectonics: "Modified seismic sensors pick up the normally unheard movements of the earth and are channeled through the entire building until reaching a 'crescendo' in Bain's sonusphere. Unique in its purpose and design, the sonusphere is essentially a wired, inflatable ball that fills the entire upper floor and takes signals generated from an acoustic network running through the entire architecture. It acts as a low frequency, 360 degree, acoustic radiator translating the sound to its curved walls as physically pulsating sound pressure." Bain's work, The Wire explains, references "the ideas of maverick engineer Nikola Tesla." Tesla's prolific output and avant-garde electrical ideas inspired Bain to develop "a system for resonating buildings that allowed him to 'play' structures. 'The multi-resonator system I designed could drive waveforms into buildings,' Bain comments, 'like giant additive synthesis where you get different beatings of frequencies and shifted harmonics. I was basically designing systems that turned a structure into a musical instrument.'" Elsewhere, we're told, "the portable earthquake machines [that Bain] showed in Holland in 2001 produced severe tremors that spread through the surrounding area. Then there was Het Paard, a large music venue in The Hague slated for demolition. The oscillators he attached to the building activated the entire structure, inflicting severe damage on parts of the walls and ceilings." Of course, Bain has been on BLDGBLOG before, where we discuss a musical composition of his made entirely from seismic data recorded during the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11 – the trembling of Manhattan turned into a roar of sound. (Listen to an excerpt here). (Similar ideas are taken up in this post).
 [Image: The supercomputer pictured above is the MareNostrum, "meaning 'our sea,'" New Scientist writes; "it is housed in a 1920s chapel at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, and built from commercially available parts." Photo by Simon Norfolk]."The supercomputers I'm showing here are powerful almost beyond human understanding," photographer Simon Norfolk explains, describing his extraordinary new images of supercomputers and their architectural settings. "They can map every molecule of the billions on a human DNA string; scrutinise at the atomic level the collision between two pieces of plutonium in an exploding bomb; or sketch the gravitational pull of every star in the galaxy upon every other star in the galaxy. These are not questions that humans could grapple with given plenty of time, a notebook and a sharp pencil." Norfolk has also photographed computers used for "mapping and predicting global virus outbreaks" and for "simulating automotive crash tests."  [Image: "Modeling physics inside an exploding nuclear warhead." Simon Norfolk].These computers, Norfolk continues, "are omniscient and omnipresent and these are not qualities in which we find a simulacrum of ourselves – these are qualities that describe the Divine. The problem is not that these computers might one day resemble humans; it is that they already resemble gods."    [Images: Simon Norfolk. The top image is titled "Mapping the human genome." The others are the TERA-1 and the TERA-10].In almost supernaturally sterile rooms, these angelic landscapes of silicon quietly hum their way through introspective worlds of calculation: derivatives, logorithms, advanced topologies. One could, in fact, imagine a whole new series of Duino Elegies, written by a posthumous Rainer Maria Rilke, in terrified praise of these cloistered machines – machines Rilke seems to describe preemptively in his "Seventh Elegy," where the "annihilator" meets the "Angel." Rilke writes that "the external shrinks into less and less": Where once an enduring house was,
now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely
belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain.
Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power,
formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Temples are no longer known. In this context, it seems almost like an act of religious sarcasm that the MareNostrum computer – pictured at the top of this post – has been housed in a chapel. (Of course, a consecrated supercomputer is certainly a stunning intellectual possibility – perhaps setting up the plot of Da Vinci Code 2, wherein future archaeologists discover that the Vatican is not a complex of buildings at all but a fully functioning Jesuit supercomputer). In any case, because all harddrives are actually geological objects – careful rearrangements of minerals under the influence of manmade magnetic fields – then these are mathematical terrains in the most exciting sense: the surface of the earth dreaming of spherical velocities inside otherwise undetectable stellar detonations.   [Images: Two close-ups of cerebral machines. Simon Norfolk]. Finally, Giordano Bruno, following Giulio Camillo, wrote extensively about the idea of a Memory Palace, or Memory Theater. As Victoria Nelson tells us, the basic idea was that an "esoterically trained memory was a godlike vessel for encapsulating the entire universe within a single human mind." This was part of what Nelson calls a Neoplatonic "quasi-religion" that "venerated memory as an organ possessing magical and world-ordering powers." Neoplatonists believed that "the whole cosmos could be 'memorized' in a much more overt imitatio dei and by this act magically incorporated into the human organism" – or, of course, into the air-cooled circuits of a supercomputer. So if I were forced to take issue with the existence of these machines, it would not be because of their use in modeling new nuclear warheads – as Norfolk makes clear they do – but in something far more secondary, even faintly absurd: what I'd call the lack of a supercomputer poetics, or a more imaginative role for these machines to play in our literary and even religious lives. Oracular, Delphic, radically non-secular: they are either all or none of the above. (With sincere thanks to Simon Norfolk, who supplied all the images that appear in this post. And don't miss BLDGBLOG's later interview with Simon Norfolk, in which he discusses his war photography in much greater detail).
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