the sisyphus project
the energy crisis | mythical thinking by clint langevin amy norris chester rennie
The Sisyphus Project was a proposal for Land Art Generator Initiative’s 2012 competition which invited teams to produce site-specific installations which provide aesthetically and pragmatically compelling solutions for the twenty-first century energy crisis. In 2012 the selected site was Fresh Kills Park, formerly Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten Island in New York City. The Fresh Kills site is a key monument to the relationship between aesthetics and amnesiac consumption. It is a topography drawn from a massively distributed world of objects which were consumed centrally by New York and then hidden from view. Like a retreating glacier depositing till or a river moving silt, the deposit of garbage at the Fresh Kills landfill has had a transformative effect upon the topography of the former marshland. Though occurring over a 55-year time span, rather than the geologic time scale of these natural phenomena, this downstream accretion of the by- products of human life and industry from the neighbouring city has nonetheless resulted in a comparable transformation of the landscape. The daily iterations of this type of industrial erosion and deposition have formed strata of compressed epochs on Staten Island. The most recent strata added to the site is the synthetic overburden designed to contain and conceal the 150 million tons of waste deposited at the site. When the engineered cap is complete, what was once the world’s largest landfill will be mistaken for a grassy drumlin. Field Operations’ proposed park design for the site compellingly calls for the introduction of diverse local ecosystems and for the activation of the park as a cultural landscape through human agency. The proposal’s recognition of the role of human agency in the creation of this landscape however, begins in the present. It ignores the historic relationship that led to the creation of this alien geography. While the proposal technologically acknowledges the requirements of the evolving anthropic geology beneath the landfill cap, the design fails to engage visitors in a conversation about this nature. Instead the design employs a strategy of picturesque concealment. The Land Art Generator Initiative’s desire for clean energy generated by an infrastructure that poses as art is driven by the same desire to forget both the sources and remains of objects that led to the capping of the landfill. Design conceals the infrastructure of energy production by making the generation process aesthetically powerful and thereby under the cultural purview of art. It becomes sublime but inconsequential. It is rendered visually inert and distant from its connection to work. The aestheticisation of renewable energy asks us to forget two ways in which renewable energy remains intractably connected to the mode of consumption which produces objects like Fresh Kills. First of all, high technology requires a massively distributed material supply chain which hides the true carbon cost of production in faraway places. Most importantly however, the contract implicit in the production of renewable energy that argues that energy should be produced and consumed automatically and at increasing levels, is not questioned when the nature of consumption appears to be transmuted into an inert matter.
opposite, top: The newest infrastructure at Fresh Kills, a network of boulder alleys and pedestrian pathways, is opportunistically embedded into the steepest areas of the two slopes in order to har- ness maximal energy from the falling rocks. right: Options for longer or shorter climbs and a natural variation in boulder size accommodate a variety of Visitor-Lifters, giving rise to recreational opportunities such as fitness classes or annual competitions to see who can produce the most power in the shortest amount of time.
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