Portions of this image were taken in the summer of 2005, when the Antler River overflowed its banks in one of the prairies’ periodic floods; other portions date from 2003. They have been composited together by Google Earth’s automated image capture and processing workflow.
The two landscapes represent two distinct but related prairie geographies, one terrestrial, the other aqueous; one controlled by human artifice (engineering works can be identified along the river bank just north of the border) and one escaping that control utterly. This image speaks of the natural cycles of the prairie and our inability to control them. But another phenomenon is also apparent in this image: an inundation of another order encroaches from the north.
What is this flood really about?
The prairie shares a disruptive temporality with that of media.
100º 57’ 29” W, 49°N. Arthur, Manitoba
Imaging infrastructures seem to have built into them the shadow of any technological system: systems whose purpose is to function inevitably imply failure: the condition of not functioning, of breaking, of going off the rails.
Charles Waldheim has used the term representational domestication to describe the satellite image. But these images are not tamed; instead, they have become wild. Andreas Broeckmann has referred to a transgressive disruption of codes as ‘the wild’ in media. For him it is about the excess,and the animation, of our technological culture.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 7
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