Monochrome Landscapes - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 95

7 Monochrome Landscapes

My attention was then attracted by brighter colors
and by other sorts of contested territories

New York, 2012 — In the cloudy images from Kosovo, I had stumbled on the fact
that something abstract was happening in the databases I examined. My atten -
tion was then attracted by brighter colors and by other sorts of contested terri -
tories. Included in a show called Architecture by Numbers at the Whitney Museum
of American Art at Altria, the images that I called Monochrome Landscapes were
designed to converse formally with the work of another artist in the Whitney
collection, Ellsworth Kelly. His monochromes were Green , Black , Red , and Blue , and
screenprinted with ink. 48 My monochromes are White , Blue , Green , and Yellow .
They are Cibachrome prints, based on digital files, displayed as forty-by-eighty-
two-inch panels on the museum wall. They show four spots on Earth, captured by
Ikonos and QuickBird at high resolution, in which almost nothing but snow, water,
trees, and sand is visible. Now they are photographs: information, surface, pattern,
chance encounter, event, memory, field of color.
There is more than a formal aesthetic at stake here—these are vulnerable ecol -
ogies and politically charged landscapes. My insistence on representing them as
art and from above, at a distance, was a choice; the resolution of the pixels and the
networks of knowledge I used to select the scenes resulted in some surprising dis-
coveries. I was interested in the idea that the places on Earth that appeared from
above as more or less a single color were also places that were contested, fragile,
and subjected to an increasingly thorough surveillance apparatus.
The white image, of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) in Alaska,
was in the news at the time. The debate over opening this protected space to oil
drilling coincided with the larger debates surrounding the Bush administration's
plan to go to war in Iraq.
The blue of the Atlantic—with the sensors aimed at the spot where the
Greenwich meridian intersects the equator, the “zero-zero” point of latitude and