Massive abstract land forms in the northern desert of China. Is it military-complex land art? Structures for mining? Targets for satellites? QPC codes for space? Alien forms? And, of course, it has to be proposed…an internet hoax using Google earth software? No one is sure. Gizimodo broke the story here and then Huffington Post picked it up, which is where I heard about it. I “verified” it by doing my own google searches near Dunhuang, China.
Besides the fact that I am a sucker for government conspiracy theories and truly believe that we have no freaking idea what is actually happening at the level of the CIA and above, the reason this story interested me at all is due to Trevor Paglen.
He is the scientist/journalist/photographer who became well known within art history circles a few years ago for his telephotography of secret military bases (above bottom right: Large Hangars and Fuel Storage, Tonopah Test Range, NV, Distance - 18 miles, 10:44 a.m.). I first learned about his work from the article of my advisor Karen Beckman: “Telescopes, Transparency, and Torture: Trevor Paglen and the Politics of Exposure” (Fall 2007, Art Journal). She writes, “Paglen’s photographs allow us to begin better to glimpse…what the aesthetics of photography can offer the sphere of ethics and politics beyond evidence, in a moment where ambiguity and otherness constitute two of the targets of the war on terror.” (see Ben Davis’s review here)
In late September, I saw Trevor talk about his new project The Other Night Sky at MIT (see a review of the talk here). He cited the amazing statistic that there are about 8,000 satellites (space trash and usable ones) orbiting the earth and about 250 of those are secret. He tracks these satellites (along with a cohort of amateur astronomers) by taking long exposure pictures of the night sky and then determining which of the visible satellites (bright lines in the photos) are listed by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), removing those and, thus, revealing the secret satellites, the other night sky (above bottom left: Four Geostationary Satellites Above the Sierra Nevada, 2007). He told incredible stories of a communication satellite launched to literally sit next to a Middle East communications satellite and of an enormous unidentified communications satellite possibly launched by the CIA to control future drone wars. He moved through the talk with the best mix of rigorous research, speculation, and beautiful visual evidence.
And so here I am pondering these abstract forms in the Chinese desert, made visible by Google earth satellite photography. Cameras pointed the other direction but revealing just as ponderous and potentially hazardous abstract forms with real, physical and political effects.
