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META exists at the crossroads of art and science and of culture and nature. Tracing the uncommon threads between common topics, META presents its readers with views into the abyss of visual information and with experiments in associative reading. META invites you to browse according to taste.
You may ask, “what?” An archive, a Wunderkammer, a magazine guided by methods of research, collection, preservation, reprint and the linking of topics at their META level.
You may then ask, “why?” To play with information in all its astatic glory. META refrains from attempts at categorization, taking a gamble on dynamic navigation! META eschews the linear in favor of surprise. Each visit starts with a random welcome and ends with an even more random exit.
Attanucci Timothy
TIMOTHY J. ATTANUCCI (1979) was born in Boston, Massachusetts and studies German literature at Princeton and the Humboldt University, Berlin. For META, he contributes his musings on the irony mark in No Irony.
Beth David
DAVID BETH (1974) is a writer and esoteric explorer, and the sovereign Grand Master of the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua. Learn more about his Gnostic involvement in XI. ARS DE REX—Sexual Magic, the Art of the King, where he is interviewed by Ailen Roc.
Brenner Summer
SUMMER BRENNER is an accomplished writer of poetry and fiction, based in Berkeley, California. Her writing has extended beyond the borders of print into performative and musical realms, and she is also involved with literacy and community projects targeted at youths. For META, she reads from her critically acclaimed novel and discusses her motivation for the project in Driving I-5.
Breuning Olaf
OLAF BREUNING (1970) is a Swiss artist, living in New York and working in photography, video, sculpture, installation and drawing. For META’s mini interview series, he shares some of his favorite things in accompaniment to a selection of photographic works. See Mini Breuning.
Buchina William
Illustrations by William Buchina
WILLIAM BUCHINA (1978) is an illustrator with a penchant for portraits of political tyrants. In addition, he is a graphic designer and creator of illustrated guides to English grammar, which are viewable at wgb1978.blogspot.com. He currently lives and works in Istanbul. See his work in The Body of the Event.
Bunnell Dave
DAVE BUNNELL (1952) lives in the small gold-rush era town of Angels Camp, California. This professional spelunker and photographer worked on an Imax film about caves, somewhere beneath Mexico. META interviewed him for Far Beyond Stalactites and Stalagmites.
Coronato Petra
PETRA CORONATO is probably the only author in the world who didn’t only read Alexanderplatz, but also swept it. She is the owner of tongue tongue Hong Kong, a company founded in 1993 with dependences in Berlin, Vienna and Zurich, which recycles fiction profitably and unpunished to this day. In 2006, she commenced the ongoing photography project The Poetry of Document.
Dantini Michele
MICHELE DANTINI’s (1966) work is characterized by its handling of trans-cultural practices and their socio-environmental implications. A widely translated essayist and performative lecturer, he holds a position as Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy. See Chronicles of Deaths Foretold.
Doutreluingne Pauline
PAULINE DOUTRELUINGNE (1982) lived in Beijing for four years, where she co-organized the 2006 Borderline Moving Images Festival. She lives in Berlin and curates projects that bridge European and Asian art. For META, she interviewed Chen Wei in Archeology of the Future.
Doy Gen
GEN DOY is Lecturer at De Montfort University. She is the author of Picturing The Self, Drapery and Black Visual Culture. For META, Doy discusses the sensual politics of photography in the works of Claude Cahun.
Ferrante Denise Palma
DENISE PALMA FERRANTE (1975) is a multi-disciplined artist living and working in Berlin. She is also a self-declared anti-religionist. See Timkat 2009.
Foxwell Adam
ADAM FOXWELL is an American audio engineer who has worked internationally, consulting on acoustical room design, sound isolation and mechanical noise control. For META, he presents a study on noise exposure in On the Hunt for Silence in Dubai.
Fresco Jacque
JACQUE FRESCO (1916) is an industrial designer and social engineer, author, lecturer, inventor and Futurist. Based in Venus, Florida, he is developing the practice of Socio-Cyber-Neering. Read the META interview Back to the Future—The Venus Project.
Gavron Assaf
ASSAF GAVRON (1968) is an Israeli writer, translator and musician. His novel CrocAttack is available in Hebrew, English, German, Italian and Dutch. Find out more on his website and see The Outpost.
Glaser Bruno
Dr. BRUNO GLASER is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Soil Science and Soil Geography at the University of Bayreuth. For over several years he has been conducting Amazonian dark earth research from a soil science perspective including soil fertility, sustainability, and archaeology aspects. See Terra Preta .
Goldwyn Mara
MARA GOLDWYN (1976) calls herself an artist but does not show anywhere and would never actually introduce herself as such. She has an existential allergy to genres, categories and identity constructs. See Showing the Opposite Side of the Death Machine.
Guo-Qiang Cai
Artist CAI GUO-QIANG (1957) was born in China’s Fujian Province. While living in Japan between 1986 and 1995 he began to experiment with gunpowder as a medium, gaining international attention. He has gone on to exhibit world wide and to produce large scale pyrotechnic art works. See On Explosions.
Hill Patrick
Sculptor PATRICK HILL (1972) has exhibited widely in the US and internationally as an important representative of the contemporary Los Angeles art scene. David Kordansky Gallery provided META with images of Hill’s work for Patrick Hill—Sculpture, Associated.
Horvitz David
ASDF Makes founder DAVID HORVITZ (1983) is a man of many ideas. One could say this American artist’s medium is the Internet, though it may be more accurate to say that he works in interactive projects. See ASDF—Read On.
Hugo Pieter
Artist PIETER HUGO (1976) has spent his whole life in Cape Town, South Africa, though travelled extensively pursuing his characteristic brand of documentary photography. A 2002-3 residency at the Beneton Group Communication Research Center, Fabrica, also led to work with Colors magazine. In 2006 he was awarded first prize in the World Press Photo competition’s Portraits section. Welcome to Nollywood explores a recent project carried out with the Nigerian film industry.
Idnert B. Zlatan
ZLATAN B. IDNERT is an audio engineer who has worked in the fields of modelling for outdoor noise propagation, building acoustics and ground borne vibrations. He has widely consulted on acoustical engineering projects. See On the Hunt for Silence in Dubai.
Kempenaers Jan
JAN KEMPENAERS (1968) is an artist and documentary photographer based in Antwerp. He creates mute images of semi urban-places. Regardless of geographical context, his photographs speak powerfully to the post industrial condition and of the technologized human subject. See Spomenik, the Monuments of Former Yugoslavia.
Lin Tao
TAO LIN (1983) is an American poet, novelist and short story writer. He is the author of Shoplifting from American Apparel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, and Bed, as well as two poetry collections, you are a little bit happier than I am, and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Lin’s second novel, Richard Yates, was published in September 2010.
See Tao Lin’s Crossword Puzzle.
Maisel David
DAVID MAISEL’s (1961) photographs chronicle the complex relationships between natural systems and human intervention. His work is included in many permanent collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maisel lives and works in the area of San Francisco. See Blooming Souls.
Maximishin Sergey
SERGEY MAXIMISHIN (1964) photographed for the Soviet Military Force Group on Cuba from 1985 to 1987. A learned physicist, he worked in the scientific and technical expertise laboratory in the Hermitage Museum and has gone on to become an award winning press photographer.
See The Dostoevsky of Photography.
Mendoza Connie
CONNIE MENDOZA (1971) is a media artist, working between Berlin and Barcelona. Fata Morgana and Other Optical Phenomena discusses her film, in which Mendoza travels back to her birthplace to trace the complex relationships of her childhood to Chilean history and space travel, thereby producing images that mediate the perception of time as a highly subjective matter.
Minx Rua
RUA MINX is Donna Huanca (1980), an artist who deals with clothing as shelter, transportable homes for nomads and cultural and genetic traces. Her various projects have received a range of support, from the Dallas Museum of Art to Städelschule, Frankfurt; from the Incehon Women’s Biennale Korea to British Vogue. She launched META’s downloadable artist piece series with Mask Maker.
Morrison Rachael
RACHAEL MORRISON (1981) is an artist, curator, and a librarian at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is the creator of an art work and a documentary film about the blind telephone hacker Joybubbles, as she describes in 718-362-9578.
Neutelings Jan
Architect WILLEM JAN NEUTELINGS (1959) has taught at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and Harvard University. His firm, Neutelings Riedijk Architects, is located in Rotterdam. He wrote Spomenik, the Monuments of Former Yugoslavia on Jan Kempenaer’s photo-documentation.
Nielsen Nikolaj
Nikolaj Nielsen is a Brussels-based journalist. For META, Nielsen considers the provocative film "Enjoy Poverty Please" by Dutch artist Renzo Martens in regards to the <The Lucrative Business of Chaos and Aid. For more of Nielsen's writing, visit his website.
Okón Yoshua
Yoshua Okón was born in Mexico City in 1970 where he currently lives. In his often absurd and provocative art, Okón stages partially scripted scenes using non-actors whose own identities and histories make up the true, underlying story. See Octopus. Okón founded the artist-run space La Panadería in 1994 and the artist-run space and school SOMA in 2009, both in Mexico City.
Patt Lise
LISE PATT is the founder of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, a peripatetic visual think tank currently headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. Over the years she has treated ‘collaboration’ as an artist medium, in the development of a non-profit organization that embraces ‘collective camouflage’ in their ongoing projects. See Inquiry into the Institute of Cultural Inquiry.
Petrovszky Konrad
KONRAD PETROVSZKY (1977) is a historian specializing in the intellectual history of Southeastern Europe. He wrote a PhD thesis on early modern historiography in Ottoman Europe at the Free University, Berlin. He talks Romania and reenactment in The Body of the Event.
Rameau Max
Haitian-born, DC-raised MAX RAMEAU is a pan-African theorist, organizer and founder of the group, Take Back the Land. He has worked on issues ranging from economic development to ex-felons. He discusses the US housing crisis in Desperate Times, Desperate Measures.
Rau Milo
MILO RAU (1977) is a journalist, essayist, historian, playwright, translator, teacher, film-maker, blogger, reenactor and director of IIPM (International Institute of Political Murder, or Institute for Theoretic and Artistic Reenactments). See The Body of the Event.
Roc Ailen
AILEN ROC studied various esoteric fields such as ceremonial Magick, Sexual Magick, Tantra, Astrology, Tarot, the Quaballah and different astral-levels along with Psychology. She is currently working on her own tarot deck and a book combining certain occult fields with elements of psychology. See XI. ARS DE REX—Sexual Magic, the Art of the King.
Shapiro Alan
ALAN SHAPIRO (1956) is a key contributor to the fields of idea philosophy, software engineering and social choreography. At 15, he began studying at MIT and has more recently published a book on Star Trek and given talks at the Transmediale and Ars Electronica festivals. In an interview with META, he explains why “Being against work as it is constituted today is fundamental.” See A New Computer Science is Underway.
Situ Studio
SITU STUDIO was founded in 2005 while its partners were studying architecture at The Cooper Union. Operating at the intersection of architecture and a variety of other disciplines, Situ Studio’s work has been enriched by close collaborations with geologists, writers, engineers, biologists, activists and artists. See Out of Control.
Small Gary
GARY SMALL, M.D., is the Director of the UCLA Memory and Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He is the author of iBrain Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. See This is Your Brain on Technology.
Thompson Cosette
COSETTE THOMPSON is a French-American human rights consultant and freelance writer based in Arizona, USA, where she directed Amnesty International for many years. Her current interests focus on the contribution of artistic expression to the field of human rights and on the protection of threatened languages. See Sentenced to Read.
van Haarlem Dr. Michiel P.
DR. MICHIEL VAN HAARLEM (1964) is the Managing Director of the LOFAR Foundation in the Netherlands, a part of the ASTRON Institute. The astronomer discusses the next generation of telescope in META’s Harmony of the Spheres.
Vanden Eynde Maarten
Belgian-born MAARTEN VANDEN EYNDE (1977) lives and works between Rotterdam, Brussels and Saint Mihiel. His projects span all art media, focussing on topics of ecology, archeology, biology and zoology. In 2006 he founded Enough Room for Space for “the creation of physical, virtual and mental space for cultural initiatives by initiating and coordinating events and residence/research projects worldwide.” He enlightens META on plastic in Plastic Reef.
Wei Chen
Artist CHEN WEI (1980) works in Beijing and Hangzhou, incorporating influential objects and happenings from his past into the realities of modern China. He is represented by the Platform China Contemporary Art Institute in Beijing. See Archeology of the Future.
EDITORIAL
Rachel de Joode
Emilie Florenkowsky
Hili Perlson
Anja Wiesinger
DESIGN
Aleksandar Todorović
CODING
Veit Wießner
Anja Wiesinger
META MAGAZINE
www.meta-magazine.com
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| Octopus |
| 718-362-9578 |
| Inquiry into the Institute of Cultural Inquiry |
| The Lucrative Business of Chaos and Aid |
| The Outpost |
| Driving I-5 |
| The Clothing of Nature |
| Back to the Future—The Venus Project |
| Welcome to Nollywood |
| Mask Maker |
| Blooming Souls |
| Patrick Hill—Sculpture, Associated |
| Tao Lin’s Crossword Puzzle |
| Chronicle of Deaths Foretold |
| Claude Cahun—A Sensual Politics of Photography |
| Sentenced to Read |
| The Harmony of the Spheres |
| Plastic Reef |
| Out of Control: Experiments in Participation |
| XI. ARS DE REX—Sexual Magic, the Art of the King |
| The Nine Lives of Kaufhaus Jonass |
| Showing the Opposite Side of the Death Machine |
| A New Computer Science is Underway |
| Spomenik, the Monuments of Former Yugoslavia |
| The Poetry of Document |
| ASDF—Read On |
| The Body of the Event |
| This is Your Brain on Technology |
| Timkat 2009 |
| No Irony؟ |
| Desperate Times, Desperate Measures |
| On Explosions |
| Stories of Life and Love in Today’s Actual Arctic |
| Photography and the Invisible |
| Fata Morgana and Other Optical Phenomena |
| On the Hunt for Silence in Dubai |
| The Dostoevsky of Photography |
| Archeology of the Future |
| Far Beyond Stalactites and Stalagmites |
| Mini Breuning |
| Terra Preta—Amazonian Earth |
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Fata Morgana and Other Optical Phenomena By Anja Wiesinger
By Anja Wiesinger
In 2009 we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Enthusiasm for travel to planets afar remains unbroken, and continuous advances in technology are employed in reaching this goal. We witness an ever-increasing use of imagery for providing evidence of newfound knowledge and truths. Scientific tools promise deeper insights at both the micro and macro levels, bringing to life images that could otherwise never be seen by the human eye. All of this is applied to the exploration of the sources of our universe.
Traces and records of sounds and stars, which existed at the beginning of fathomable time, are aggressively sought out and turned into knowledge. Science has become the keeper of this knowledge. The truth is close enough to grasp within one’s point of view. To these ends, it seems that the rationalist sovereignty of the visual sense has won at last. But, a critical approach to the use of images is all but met in science today. According to Kant, illusions strengthen the mind—but he surely couldn’t have imagined that people would produce images of the universe with mega telescopes. And, as per Vilém Flusser, we lost our control over the power of images. In the Eighties, he noted: “The omnipresent technical images have begun magically to restructure ‘reality’ into an image-like scenario. What is involved here is a kind of oblivion. Man forgets that he produces images in order to find his way in the world; he now tries to find his way within images. He no longer deciphers his own images, but lives in their function. Imagination has become hallucination.”
The film Fata Morgana—and Other Optical Phenomena by artist Connie Mendoza is part of a larger project which explores the perception of time. The piece deals with three different types of “magical” images, each related to a specific time/space mode. The first type is made by the camera itself, which captures a schizophrenic view of the world; the second comes from photo material from the artist’s childhood; and the third from scientific images. The material (digital video, analog photography, and visual representation of numerical data) is connected to the present, past, and future, all of which overlap in the piece. The artist’s only guides were the photographs taken by her father in the Seventies, when she was a preschool child. The family was later exiled to Spain. Equipped with her father’s memories, she traveled to Chile in a return to places of which she herself has no recollection.
Structured according to a countdown, descending from 10 to 0, this piece references Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Moon. Lang wrote film history when he implemented the countdown to illustrate the end, or rather, the beginning marked by the lift off of the starship. Although Mendoza’s countdown suggests a linear timeline from past to present, other modes of time are applied in the editing, such as time reversion and jumps. Time circulates de facto between Earth and outer space, with the astronaut—the agent for the human being - linking these two spheres.
Each section of the film depicts a specific place, connected to an optical phenomenon. One could call these mind maps. They are introduced by written definitions of these optical illusions, the first being Mining/Fata Morgana —Fata morgana is a superior mirage which results from a temperature inversion. This introduces the film’s point of departure: the world’s largest copper mine, Chuquicamata, where her father worked as an engineer in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The mine was founded in the middle of the desert by Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1917 and is still active today. (Without copper, there would be no Guggenheim art empire). The viewer witnesses an explosion of the mine in 1973, the same year that President Salvador Allende was removed from power by Pinochet’smilitary coup. In the following picture, the camera captures a rocky desert landscape, which recalls the surface of the Moon. In accompaniment to the imagery, the o-tone of Allende’s 1972 speech to the UNO is played, revealing a statement made just a few months before the putsch.
He speaks of the nationalization of the copper industry, which had been crucial for Chile’s economic independence, and of the threat by the western capitalist states. As the movie makes clear, copper is inexorably linked to the history of Chile. Discovery of the resource initiated the country’s industrialization, along with its increased dependence on the USA, which owned and controlled the mines. When the mines were nationalized under Allende’s governance, IBM and ITT helped the dissident parties to overthrow his power. Allende built the first and only socialist internet, Project Cybersyn, using copper to construct a secret communication system that could work independently of the mistrusted military. Today, and more than ever, copper is an essential resource for the computer industry. Mendoza sees a new form of scientific colonialism arising with the territorialization of the Atacama Desert by the space research endeavor called ALMA—the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Both copper and space research are controlled by capitalist states that absorb and export profit and knowledge. We next follow the camera high up the Chajnantor Plateau to the ALMA site. “Observatory/Diffraction—Diffraction is normally taken to refer to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle.” We look inside the US American observatory hangar, where the body of one antenna is hanging, not yet functional.
The ALMA area is located on the Chajnantor plateau, where 66 antennas are currently being installed. ALMA is an international collaboration between the USA, Europe and Japan. Not far away from the Large Millimeter Array, the Very Large Telescope project is already in operation. Technologies for the measurement of the universe are distinguished by their superlatives. ALMA seeks to measure radio waves, which are invisible to the human eye. Its telescopes are able to receive radiation at long wavelengths from low energy, astronomic objects—objects which have yet to form. In order to achieve results comparable to the ALMA antennas, a single telescope the size of an 80 kilometer-area would be needed. The project’s primary goal is the exploration of the universe’s source. How do stars form? How has the galaxy evolved? And when did the universe begin? Those questions naturally imply belief in the Big Bang hypothesis and thus willingness to see its proof in images. ALMA’s basic subordinate aim is to get rid of the blur. Until recently, telescope-produced images could only show stars in nearby galaxies with all their surrounding stardust. In this sense, ALMA is no technological revolution; but the progress lies in the tiny differences: exact temperature measurements, exact millimeter declaration and the recording of anything beyond the human senses. The production of images out of numeric data is fairly simple. The data received from the antenna field is translated into pixels and colored in a final procedure. It is a bit like painting by numbers.
The generation of evidence from visual information is a fairly new field in the sciences. Image ambiguity functions as a tool for imagination about the world, on one hand, while obstructing this on the other hand. Recalling Flusser’s thesis, images are always abstractions and truncations of time-space to a two-dimensional surface, allowing for the necessary vacuum of interpretation. For Mendoza, Chile seems to be as far away as the Moon. Her mission was to comprehend her father’s narrative according to the photo material memories that she inherited. These are views of a past of which she has no memory, but of which she lives the consequences, nonetheless. The photographs serve as numerical data, in their own right, like the images generated by the ALMA telescopes.
Images are nothing without an observer to make meaning of them. In addition, in Fata Morgana, the multiple producers of the images remain unknown. The camera changes between an objective, static and an active, subjective view, sometimes disappearing altogether, thus negating what is in front of the lenses. It scans photographs but fails to reclaim more depth from their surfaces. Images are, by definition, illusions, as they show something that is not present. The more one tries to capture within an image, the wider the gap between the image and its referent grows. The landscapes’ (and the concepts’) dimensions are just too gigantic for the screen.
The conviction that images speak for themselves—despite all knowledge of the manipulative nature of digital imaging—is persistent in our time. With mega calculators, men will continue to handle data and produce images that are well beyond our imaginations. In the process, the dependence upon technology and its results will grow, along with our belief in what technology and its results have proclaimed as true.
In this context, Mendoza creates a space for non-knowledge or for the possibility of a science that is independent of what we have been educated to understand. She critiques that the dominance of western science simultaneously usurps and disqualifies other cultures of knowledge. It is nevertheless a human need to explore and to reach for the foreign, for the origins, for the non-space and for death. This is common to all cultures: the search for the source of our existence and for an understanding of the nothingness that preceded us. “Desert/Mirage—Mirage is a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects.” A long sequence of a moon-still functions almost as a mirror image of the desert, which symbolizes nothingness—a non-space, like the moon, where life cannot exist. 5000 meters up, the air is deadly dry and lacking oxygen. One feels pressure on the chest. Yet, the desert’s clean air and the endless views cause distances to vanish, and one is set into a state of trance where it is possible to feel infiniteness. A final shot depicts a human body and its long shadow thrown on a distinct horizon line, dividing earth and sky.
These images play out a total disintegration of the borders of human common sense. Then, the movie finishes with a close up of the first female astronaut, Valentina Tereschkova, hidden in a helmet. Then the screen remains black for long seconds. Not only does this sequence transport the uncanny feeling that Man’s quest for discovery and for truth has thrown him back into his own existence, but also that he has failed to break free of it. “Astronaut/ Hallucination—Hallucination is a perception in the absence of a stimulus.”
Mendoza’s piece points to the question of who has sovereignty over imagery, and in the service of which “truth?” If an awareness of methodology is the crucial matter in forming and establishing scientific disciplines, what, then, are the essential settings for art and science and for their relation to one another? The forthcoming battle has not yet been decided. Nor has the direction of its course. Even if it seems that science appropriates the traditional fields of art and philosophy, this will, hopefully, not lead to the end of both. Yet again, it would not be the first time that such a claim has been made.
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