[Synapse elist] elist Digest, Vol 7, Issue 2

[Simeon Lockhart Nelson]

Hi List

Simeon here, thank you for kick starting this Esther. It is a busy  
time and making space for these discussions can feel more difficult  
than it should. I remind myself what a privilege and opportunity such  
a structured global interaction is!

I found several things very interesting about your project.
One might be raising the farmers level of self awareness toward how  
they are inscribing and creating the landscape, I wonder how much  
they are aesthetically motivated and what relationship this has with  
their utilitarian motives as farmers trying to make a living. To have  
an artist come among them and engage with this might make them more  
reflective of wider implications of what they are doing.

In my work  I am as interested in the way land use is represented in  
maps as much as the land use itself. I wonder how much the farmers  
imagination or global picture of what they do affects what they do?  
An interesting feedback loop.

The notion of maps as a balance between subjective and objective  
representation is also important to me. I researched historical maps  
at the Royal Geographical Society in London
- http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/Exhibitions/Cryptosphere/crypto01.htm
as their artist in residence recently and this relationship between  
trying to represent something external and the map as diagram of the  
world view of the mapmaker was something I was investigating. I was  
looking at maps from the late medieval to the Enlightenment and I  
became fascinated by cartographic representations of mythical places,  
especially the Earthly Paradise. This biblical location appeared in  
thousands of maps up till the 18th century in a bewildering variety  
of permutations. It was initially placed in the utmost east but when  
found not to be there during the age of European discovery it was  
moved back to Iraq and supposed conveniently to have been erased by  
the flood.

I was very interested in the way that these maps, these competing  
mytho-poetic cosmological diagrams encoded particular belief systems  
and also the way that scientific knowledge and method became  
implicated in promoting a promoting a particular world view as much  
as the more religious ideas. I feel that there is a resonance with  
the competing claims for truth today between science and religion.

There is further discussion of this and documentation of my work at  
the RGS at www.simeon-nelson.com > exhibitions > cryptosphere

I have just scrathed the surface but I hope that some of these ideas  
have a resonance.

best wishes

Simeon


On 5 Jul 2008, at 03:30, elist-request at synapse.net.au wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Souvenir I The landscape as a place of work (Esther Polak)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 10:17:59 +0200
> From: Esther Polak <epolak at dds.nl>
> Subject: [Synapse elist] Souvenir I The landscape as a place of work
> To: elist at synapse.net.au
> Message-ID: <66123EA2-1574-4C65-B378-06DF4BA07CC1 at dds.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Hello list
>
> When invited for this list, I first thought I needed to be able to
> write an opening post in which I could explore the use of mapmaking
> as artistic tool, and its relevance for contemporary art in general
> and mine specifically. But I decided instead of generalizing to focus
> on one specific project and to be open about its development, success
> and maybe even failures.
>
> Last year I was invited by The Bewaerschole in Zeeland to do a GPS
> project together with Ivar van Bekkum. As it turns out we will be
> executing this project in July mostly, (the opening is July 27, you
> are ALL invited to come over!) I thought it would be interesting to
> post on this list a regular journal of its proceedings.
> In order to be able to also post pictures in the text, I decided to
> set up a blog, where the same texts will be published but
> illustrated: http://souvenirzeeland.wordpress.com
>
>
> The Zeeland province of the Netherlands is economically used mostly
> for agriculture and tourism (as it is a series of islands) and these
> activities determine the use of land and space and thus the landscape
> and its perception. The concept behind our project is to confront, or
> balance if you wish, these two totally different perspectives of the
> landscape: the tourist?s and farmer?s gaze. Each has a different
> relationship to the land: to give one obvious example; the farmers
> hope to make a living, whilst the tourists expect mostly to spend  
> money.
>
> So we will use this opportunity in Zeeland to do something I have
> wanted to do for a long time: to collect and visualize GPS data of
> farmers that work the fields for crops. I have been working with
> dairy farmers, but crop growing has a different relation to space:
> the plots of land being worked are really scanned rhythmically: for
> sowing, plowing, harvesting, different moments in the year bring
> different tasks and probably different machineries are being used?
> all resulting in use of space and land: landscape. To me working the
> land seems fascinating: working with the forces of nature, earth,
> moisture, temperature and the visual impact it has, all those
> straight lines, a sculptural statement almost! But also utterly
> boring at the same time? you really need to learn to appreciate this
> and I plan to do so..! Travelling a road from one destination to
> another, as opposed to working a plot of land, are fundamentally
> different concepts of mobility. This is one important aspect that
> fascinates me.  The other thing that mattered to me was the fact that
> the farmers? GPS data would provide essentially different visual
> imagery than the GPS data of city dwellers, or travelers. The
> relationship between the visual pattern and spatial concept of
> different kinds of mobilities is something fascinating to me.
>
> And this brings me to a generalization:  I figure the most
> interesting aspect of working with GPS and mapmaking is the balance
> between objective and subjective representation. Also empowerment.
> Who is empowered to give certain maps credibility, and who does the
> empowering. And what sets these, sometimes-unconscious, dynamics in
> motion. These aspects always play a role in ?classical? cartography
> as well as in locative media and/or art projects.
>
> This was also the basis of my desire to collect the farmers? GPS
> tracks. To record the mobility patterns of field work, and represent
> them as attractively as possible: as tourism scenery even. The
> exhibition space, located in one of the villages also plays a role to
> give the work its context: it is more likely to be visited by
> tourists than by farmers, and we plan to present the farmers patterns
> to the tourists as desirable souvenirs.
>
> I started to talk to the farmers to invite them for collaboration,
> but instead of questioning me about my project, my mapmaking and the
> possible visual outcomes, they started rather to tell me about their
> own use of GPS: they explained that they use GPS themselves a lot: in
> order to help to make real nice straight lines in the field they use
> special systems, developed for farming to help to steer the machines!
> They even invest a lot in this, as it results in more efficient
> farming. Also in this farming area I heard an interesting rumor:
> there was a newly started farm that invested the price of a new car
> in a GPS system with which they can now work the fields with a
> precision of 2 cm! So the farmers we spoke with clearly have no
> problem at all working with us and sharing their GPS tracks.
>
> In order to execute the project we did not need so much data and we
> have decided to work with two farmers: one farm of moderate size, a
> cooperation of three men, and one really small farm, run by one
> farmer on his own.
>
> With the first farm we decided to record the preparing of one potato
> field: it was done in two days, as the work was disrupted by heavy
> rainfall. With the second farmer we decided to give him a GPS device
> for a couple of weeks as he has different plots of land, with a
> variety of crops, the moments he would work the fields were not so
> predictable, and it would be a couple of hours this day, a couple of
> hours that day. It was going to be easier to explain to him how to
> turn on the device and how to turn it off and leave it with him.
>
> So yesterday I received the device from him - its memory was 95 %
> full! The visualized data was beyond my expectation. For now I will
> enjoy the beauty of the tracks and leave the interpretation to a
> later post!
>
> Best, Esther
>
>
>
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