Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today

 

“Postcards from a Green Future” depicts an insightful peep into an unrevealed spectacle. Though the beautiful images are so very indicative of a sustainably green future, a certain element of disarray still prevails owing to unspecific boundaries that are supposed to exist in the future. Both the artists, Liam Young form Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and Darryl Chen, have remained as secretive as they could be in their projections.

 

The postcards attracted my attention mostly because of my graduation project, which my few last entries were also relevant to. My project covers a utopian narrative of a city, with different zones, all recycling themselves and the other zones in the city that they’re related to within a garden like environment. I was influenced, ideally, by the garden-city utopia of Le Corbusier; it’s about the possibility and sustainability of a dense setting in a park/garden city. To make the city dense yet less crowded is defined in his utopia as ascending or growing vertically; hightening the buildings yet now they’re far away from one another, different from the settling in these above and below scenes of a green future.

“These speculative scenes of “a green future” show us an over-the-top, solar-powered utopia of detached single-family houses and wind turbines, woven together with light rail and renewable energy technologies; it’s an Eden of sprawl spreading out into London’s most distant scattered cityscape.”

la ville contemporaine

This reminded me naturally of Le Corbusier’s La Ville Contemporaine, which I found not really feasible for the already alienating modern society. He proposes a 3-million populated urbanization within a park. That clearly why it’s utopic since there are hundreds of meters of distance between the buildings which renders neighborhood and socialization impossible; and leaves public space as a rotten concept. (below are the images)

Big Brother Is Watching You or The Existence of Aerial Supervision

Ancient days were when the world was too big of a place for homo sapiens. Their relatively stronger minds and physical abilities have triggered them to create —predictably human species-made— geoglyphs greater in magnitude. Their animistic worldview connotes that they have devoted a soul for any co-existing species. They all are considered as a part of nature; not superior to, neither separate from it. Their loyalty on their agriculture and their gods is the nurture of their beliefs, and their beliefs are of their art.
The gigantic exercise on nature in Nazca’s is theorized as a consequence of the shaman’s hallucinative exercises inwhich they enter such state to worship their Gods for the growth and fertility. In order to have them see the images, they should have been horizontal and enormous.

|figures: (all stylized) hummingbird, spider, monkey, lizard, fish, orca, llama

|more geometrical shapes

|figurative spider

Nazca’s  predicted methodology in performing these figurative and mostly geometrical images is by the removing of the reddish pebble stones on earth and revealing the ground in lighter color beneath. It is stated that some of these figures cover a 200×200 (in meters) area, which requires a good sense of linear perspective when there’s a lack of aerial perspective. One strong prediction by the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken states that the figures are drawn by ancient astronauts for communication purposes and the more broad and long pieces of the figures were for landing their vehicles.

|the hummingbird has a considerably long beak

Not as charming and mysterious as the Nazca lines, the geoglyphs reminded me of some contemporary and inanonymous landscape designs and designers. Although there are some common touchpoints, today’s state of mind has the advantage of at least a chance of using aerial supervision to achieve the perfection of figures. If perfection is not a necessity, at least the documentation of the works are mostly done by birdview. Nazca people may never have had the chance to see what they have actually inherited on Peru territory dedicated to their beloved Gods.

Below is the open air performance of two Japanese guys in Berlin, Mai Yamashita & Naoto Kobayashi, called the Infinity Run. It took 15-18 hrs for them to finalize their infinity sign. The geoglyphs is predicted to take days, or even weeks to be completed.

The scale of the Infinity Run performance is much more humanist compared to those of the geoglyphs. Once again, they were made to worship the gods. The contemporary statement in art seems to have been shifted far away from the ancient theological scale, just as the physical scale shifted from god to human.

Hubert Blanz, a digital photographer and digital media artist has a typological work of highway photography under the name Roadshow. There are helixes of highways in his photographic work, forming chaotic, organic at the same time monstrous shapes.

In his digital city designs, the birdview images have a resemblance to alligator and lizard-like reptiles. Though I think that there’s a strong influence of the geoglyphs in content, still the work is not to worship gods in the new age.

Semiotics, as a significant argument in arts&design and any other visual-audial existences since Roland Barthes, is the study of sign processes and subjects the relation between signs and the things to which they refer to and their effects on people who are using those signs. The ancient signage process was through figurative images or body part prints on any writable surface, mostly rocks and stone. The cro-magnons communicated through the stains of animal figures and their handprints on the cave walls since they were hunting and gathering, whereas today people communicate through formed structures called words and a more cummulative and communalized form of it called ‘language’ for resolving and revealing thought.

A mixed media artist, Nicole Dextras, has a bunch of outdoor installations on land, what he calls the “Palimpsest” done by his devotion to words and ancient history of signage. He leads the voyeur to read the landscape, thus read the history through the landscape and his so-called “ghost words” as ice installations.

“Palimpsest is a new series of photographs documenting outdoor installations created during the cold months of the Canadian winter. The images are arranged as diptychs, presenting macro and micro views of ice, suggesting the transformative element of this fugitive medium.
Palimpsest refers to the ancient practice of erasing and writing over parchment, so that the previous text appears as a ghost on the page. The word also alludes to the act of deciphering traces of time and is therefore an apt analogy for the process of photographing the ephemeral nature of ice.”

Most earthwork artists like Robert Smithson, architect of the huge coast circles, and Alexander Heilner, the photographer of constarined aerial landscapes in Utah reveal a strong influence of the ancient geoglyphs in their works of different mediums. Smithson’s addiction in perfect geometrical shapes with the method of carrying and moving land directs our minds to those of Nazca’s. Yet another considerable point of the Nazca earthwork is that the climate and geography has been pre-observed so that the figures would be durable- the climate was stable just like they probably thought.

Althought the works were accepted as a fatal mystery by many, observation and experiment have been helping people a lot throughout the history. One artist I’ve recently met on the online platform, Theo Jansen, had the most amazing kinetic sculpture, moving with the wind energy and built accordingly. There’s no use of any sensors or electronic mechanism to make the sculpture robotic rather than kinetic. The work is called Strandbeest(beach animal), has a statement of creating new forms of life with the utilization of natural events.

After watching the video and see how the handmade skeleton moves, I believe that every aspect of human history has a logical explanation. Or else, mystery has been hiding itself for the past 4000 years.