Connie Samaras,
"America Dreams"
(page 2 of 7)
These dreams reveal, in part, my aesthetic preoccupation with
SF,science/speculative fiction, mostly as it pertains to how the U.S.
dreams itself at various junctures. Given that SF is a literary genre
central to the United States, some have commented, such as writer Claire
Phillips, that perhaps SF is to this country what magic realism is to
parts of Latin America. Although preceded and influenced by the
writings of the British 19th century futurists, U.S. science fiction was
first formalized in 1926 with the publication of Hugo Gernsback's
magazine,Amazing Stories.[1]
Over the decades, SF has evolved
(as well as de-evolved) past Gernsback's initial editorial dictates that
all stories in the magazine must include accurate portrayals of
technology as well as masculine heroic trajectories. The title of the
series of works I did in Antarctica, V.A.L.I.S. (vast active living
intelligence system), borrows its title from the decidedly
anti-heroic, psychologically-centric science fiction work of Philip K.
Dick, writings which are often populated by failed men and underscore the
fact that technology is, in and of itself, dumb, and that intelligence,
whether organic, mechanical, or a combination of the two, is subject to
multiple forms of symbolic order and slippage.[2]
Figure 1 Connie Samaras
Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
Although Dick's V.A.L.I.S. is part of a semi-autobiographical trilogy
related to his religious conversion in later years, my appropriation of
his title was more out of a shared interest in the overall ideas that
run throughout Dick's writings of transcendence and technology, the
ability to perceive multiple timelines and realities, and the ever
shifting membrane between fiction and the real world. Part of what
interested me at the Pole are the different ways in which the U.S.,
since mid-century, has architecturally envisioned both the future and
the colonizing of spaces where there are no indigenous peoples. While
the U.S. station is optimally positioned should the non-sovereign
Antarctic treaty unravel, few countries can afford to build at the South
Pole given the constant drift and movement of the ice. No matter how
smart the engineering, ice covers any built environment there in 40 or
so years. Moreover, the geographic center of the Pole is also in
constant flux. Even if a building could last more than a century,
within three decades it would no longer be near the geographic center.
While at the South Pole, I felt a poetic relief as I observed and
documented the geological timeline indifferently erasing attempts to
colonize the polar plateau. However, witnessing the ultimate trumping
of the ice over occupation also left me with an overwhelming feeling of
taking on a project that could not be completed. At first somewhat
paralyzing, I later came to (once again) realize that there was no whole
to be had (the mental space of empire) but rather the more "realistic"
approach was to chart the shifting juxtapositions between landscape and
built environment as fragmented and momentary.
Figure 2 Connie Samaras
Detail Figure 1, panel 1 from Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
In some ways this was an intentional counterpoint to the typical,
historical impulse to photograph such vast landscapes panoramically.
For example, one often sees photographs of the Pole shot with a
"fisheye," the widest of lenses, an understandable inclination. Because
photography is driven by realism (much contemporary art photography has
been about disrupting this assumption), the visual desire is to capture
as much of the vista as possible into a single frame. The result is
hardly realistic. The unnatural bending around of the image caused by
the fisheye's optics (as though the curvature of the planet is wrapping
itself in the opposite direction) only underscores the artificiality of
any form of representation. This normalized lure of the panorama can
also be attributed to its longstanding history as the first Western
virtual tourist space. Two hundred years ago, Europeans paid to immerse
themselves in tunnels of painted panoramas of places to which they could
never travel. The South Pole, a location accessible to only an elite
few, seems to "naturally" lend itself to a form of representation
developed in an era when the majority of Europeans rarely ever traveled
more than a few kilometers from home.
Figure 3 Connie Samaras
Detail Figure 2, panel 2 from Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
Although not shot as panoramas, most of the photographs in the
V.A.L.I.S. series are printed in mural size. The images are also
formally constructed using a type of abstraction reminiscent of
mid-century U.S. modernist architecture and painting. Most are shot
with a long lens in order to play to the disorienting sense of scale
between the landscape and structures that occurs when buildings are
viewed close-up.
Figure 4 Connie Samaras
Dome Interior
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
The images are also composed to appear as alternating filmstrips of
abstraction and realism, as a means to visually entangle the binary of
real world and fabrication. Although I draw somewhat from the style of
contemporary German photography first associated with Bernd and Hilla
Becher, and sometimes termed "deadpan," my interest is more in the
paradoxical and interdependent relationships between documentary and the
imaginary than it is to construct a wholly unsentimental
image.[3] Yet,
some of the images, such as the triptych of the new Amundsen-Scott
Station under construction, do appear "cold" and lacking in emotion
(see Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3).
Conversely, others, such as the "Dome Interior," appear "warmer," but no less
visually confusing (see Figure 4). The reason for the
difference in semiotic temperatures between photographs is related to
the variation in design and tropes of modernity during the particular
decade in which a given station was erected.
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