Reflecting on the trip to Rangitoto a few weeks ago (study week thoughts)
I intentionally started looking at Rangitoto as a point of information and exploration for a couple of reasons. One is that I grew up in Auckland (for a significant part of it on the North Shore) - my grandmother had a house that overlooks the island from Mission Bay and my dad grew up sailing on Auckland harbour, so it has always been a familiar sight from one point or another to me. (On the other side of my family my mum comes from the Timaru/Christchurch region, somewhere with very different in terrain to Auckland, so that idea of travel and familiar unfamiliarity, especially around landscapes, has been something fairly constant in how my family and I navigate the spaces we've moved through over the years). However, it wasn't until a few years ago that I actually stepped foot on the island for the first time and became curious about the weird and wonderful mosses and plants on the volcanic terrain.
A second reason for the interest in Rangitoto, and the most related to my studio practice, is that after looking at the history, plant life, and regeneration program on Manawa Tawhi/Three Kings I was curious about what could be happening on other islands. We are in a really unique position as a country in terms of our native plant species and environments, and many of the islands around the country are home to unique species and protected spaces (as sad as it is that they now have to be protected against further loss). This is something I'm continuing to look into, with the specific purpose of investigating how regeneration is occurring in these localized spaces, and how unfamiliar the familiar appears when explored up close... Rangitoto to me is both incredibly relevant by proximity and completely alien in many ways. Being able to encounter and visualise these neighbouring entities and this relationship between proximity, ecology and strangeness is something I want to continue to explore... Rangitoto, like many of the islands visible from the mainlands, occupies the liminal space between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’ to me.
In terms of technology/media, I'm still very curious about how we image, encounter and experience the unfamiliar, and how technologies like photogrammetry, animation, etc. can offer new ways of viewing the world - opening semi-fictional spaces to consider reality. In looking at both the animations I've made using the Rangitoto LiDAR scans and at the imaging coming out of the Mars rover expeditions (translated via satellite over miles of space), I'm drawn to the idea of how we image things at a distance, and how that proximity can be collapsed, explored, rendered... strange strangers. It is my intention to re-visit Rangitoto and continue taking scans and collecting via these tools, but also to begin looking outside what I can gather myself. If I can figure out how to create at a distance, or make use of what others have captured/created from distance places, that could be an interesting extension of that technological facet of things...
On a personal/historical note, even my family's presence in Mission Bay is something I find myself drawing parallels with when it comes to colonisation, landscape and proximity; and in relation to considering the similarities between Mars and Rangitoto's lava caves, the idea of being an alien presence in a place. My dad's side of my family bought land in Mission Bay when my grandparents emigrated from Australia in the 1940s - knowing the history of land occupation and seizure at Ōrakei from local iwi, this history is something that comes to mind whenever in the area. This isn't something I feel the need to drill into in my work, or a theme I'm trying to explore within my practice, but as a person of Pākehā descent it's something that I'm conscious of when exploring and documenting these landscapes, especially from a Western/scientific/technologically-based standpoint and especially in proximity to space I've grown up in and near to.
Strange strangers
Reflecting on the strangeness of ecology, there are a few elements to Rangitoto that drew my attention in particular. The soil and volcanic structures themselves, the small mosses, lichens, and rare plants (orchids, ferns, etc.) and the pioneer species legacy that they help form, and sound - the sound of the birds is very different from what I'm used to hearing; the tui on the island, being distanced from the mainland, have completely different calls than I've heard before, and the population of saddlebacks and other native birds sound very different to what I usually hear on a regular basis... There's something curious to me about how they tui in particular pick up bits and pieces from sounds they hear; they're collectors and curators in a funny way... To me, their sound is another example of how nature shifts and changes. I'd like to capture and experiment with this, but I'm unsure how to at this stage. When the weather clears, I'd like to get back to the island and capture some sound myself.
In terms of dealing with this ecological content in a technological way, I'm still asking myself how to balance the hierarchy between presenting these entities authentically versus creating a visual narrative that explores the relationship we have to their strangeness... still figuring that one out.
I'm also still thinking about the idea of language in relation to these spaces and entities. "Colony", "pioneer", etc. have uses in both history and biology, with different meanings and connotations... I am curious about the biological use of these words, but am also conscious of their other uses and meanings in other fields, particularly in a New Zealand historical context and in relation to ecological regeneration efforts at present. (Though in saying that, I'm also conscious of a potential othering effect that using them in relation to viewing/presenting the strangeness of a landscape with this particular colonial history could entail...)
Colony
a community of animals or plants of one kind living close together or forming a physically connected structure; a group of fungi or bacteria grown from a single spore or cell on a culture medium.
a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country; a group of people living in a colony, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors; all the foreign countries or areas formerly under British political control
a group of people of one nationality or race living in a foreign place
Pioneer
a person who is among the first to explore or settle a new country or area; a person who is among the first to research and develop a new area of knowledge or activity.
develop or be the first to use or apply (a new method, area of knowledge, or activity); open up (a road or terrain) as a pioneer.
"the species that first colonize new habitats created by disturbance. Although the term is usually applied to plants, microbial and invertebrate pioneer species are also sometimes recognized. For terrestrial habitats two groups of pioneers can be distinguished: those that colonise sites lacking developed organic soil and initiate primary succession and those that initiate secondary succession, often via recruitment from propagules in the soil."
Skillbuilding - DuckyCG alien landscape tutorial
Can't remember if I've already posted this on the blog (I can't find it if so), but here's a small alien landscape tutorial I followed a while back - practicing node-based animation and landscape building... Best played on continuous loop.
Lava caves
I've been thinking a lot about caves after visiting Rangitoto - as metaphorical, spiritual, and geological spaces of emergence...
- as mythological sites, home to spirits, deities, ghosts...
- as places of emergence (allegory of the cave, Orpheus and Eurydice, portals between dimensions)
- as places of spirituality (entry into the underground, the spirit realm, death realms, burial sites)
- as places of geological/ scientific discovery (volcanoes, ancient structures, science fiction, Mars and lunar tunnels)
- as places of shelter (cave dwellings, Martian lava tunnels proposal, ancient humanity)
- as places of preservation (tar pits, cave painting, unique biomes)
- as places of transition (lava channels, portal spaces with exits and entrances, a substrate; association with night, death, rebirth etc.)
...There's a lot wrapped up in these formations!
Something that I found after researching lava cave formation was that lava caves also exist on other planetary bodies - the closest being the moon and Mars. These structures have been theorised to be the most likely to be habitable should humans ever make it there. While I'm not incredibly interested in the prospect of Mars colonisation, I do find that narrative and the geological similarities between there and here really curious. One particular lava tunnel on the planet's surface, the "skylight" tunnel, has a similar structure to the largest publicly accessible tunnel on Rangitoto. It makes me wonder, while looking up through the 'skylight' opening on that one, what it would be like looking up from that Martian landscape; what the rocks there would be like; how the volcanically made structures would look; what lifeforms might be there, or may have been there,... It's such a familiar idea and landscape, but at the same time totally alien. This is what I connect in my thinking on Rangitoto...
Interesting find - "View from the Field":
- thinking of images from multiple points of view; multiple ways of seeing; and the field if images we're immersed in
- created from three separate views of buildings designed by Walter Netsch, photographed, upscaled and volumetized
- this produces multiple views and experiences as one moves around and through these objects
- started in an interest in the overlap between physical and representational space; forgrounded in the contemporary visual experience - we are constantly looking back and forth between the physical space we're in and the small screened devices we own
- tried to approximate this through layered realism rather than visual abstraction
- Walter Netsch's "field theory", intricate patterns and geometries overlayed on one another on often two dimensions to create a cellular type of space; looked at the kinds of cells and volumes that emerged in this layering process
- perspective as a representative technique of taking a 3D space and flattening it; how can this be thought of differently? Thinking about the object as constructed as a series of layers; building materials around the idea of real and virtual qualities, and combining those physical qualities with those existing in the photographs themselves
- the face of every object is made of wood, metal, mirror and cork; shapes derived from the contours of the digital image
- photography of these spaces were originally in black and white; these were colorised and applied to the substrates
- the framing of the interior becomes questioned as the object is moved through and developed; the silhouette constantly shifts as one moves around the space; wanted to create a sense of circulation
- how do multiple views contribute to the idea of authorship (a single photograph creating multiple views of a space etc.) when the views and images are constantly shifting when encountered?
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