Media resources have their own, complex, relationship to time. They are created in time (almost ‘just in time’ – they do not exist for the user until rendered active by a CPU) and evolve over time (like a wiki); they carry information which is potentially eternal, but which can decay over time with their media substrate, or can be zeroed-out in an instant. Media systems all have clocks, and record their activity over time in logs and archives. As one such archive, Google Earth documents not just changes in the physical environment but also developments in the imaging systems recording that environment.
The juxtaposition of worlds can provoke imagination and speculation. What would happen were you to cross across the boundary between one time and another, one season and the next? A homestead always implies a boundary: a fence or a row of trees marking the line between us and our neighbours. Imagine riding along this road and glancing across the fence at the advance of winter - or its retreat. What will happen if that other time crosses to our side?
What might that change bring? What fence might we build to keep it out?
102º 15’ 05” W, 49°N . Eniskillen No 3, Saskatechewan
Like the image representing it, the prairie is broken down into elements manipulable by a technological system. Native plants are replaced by domesticated (and today genetically modified) crops. These units are laid out in a grid and rendered up to transportation networks which carry them to markets across the globe.
Strange that what we do to the Earth, we do to its image too.
To use a term from Martin Heidegger’s writing on technology, both imaging systems and agricultural systems expedite their object; they unlock it, expose it, direct it toward an end. In these images, para||e| systems from the nineteenth and twenty-first century confront and fold into each other.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 5
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