Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

Using the highest-resolution satellite imagery available to anyone outside the U.S. or Russian military or intelligence community, I am interested in creating digital images of the monochrome landscapes which represent some of the most vulnerable sites of the 21st century. The landscapes look familiar, even stereotyped - blue (the Atlantic Ocean), green (the Cameroon rain forest), yellow (the Iraqi desert), and white (the Alaskan tundra). But they are produced with instruments and materials (commonplace and yet still extraordinary ones) that in their very construction call into question the material which constitutes a landscape. These landscapes, these images, ask profound questions about their own future -- and ours --even as they adopt the formal strategies of the most abstract, non-referential, 'aesthetic' of the last century's museum pieces.