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Satellite Lamps
Satellite Lamps

Satellite Lamps is a project that reveals one of the most significant contemporary technology infrastructures, the Global Positioning System (GPS).[1]

“Satellite Lamps shows that GPS is not a seamless blanket of efficient positioning technology; it is a negotiation between radio waves, earth-orbit geometry and the urban environment. GPS is a truly impressive technology, but it also has inherent seams and edges.”[1]

Satellite Lamps is a series of lamps that change brightness according to the accuracy of received GPS signals, and when we photograph them as timelapse films, we start to build a picture of how these signals behave in actual urban spaces.[1]

Spectra Spectra Spectra Spectra
Ross Manning - Spectra III (2012), via QAGOMA
Ross Manning - Spectra IV (2014), via the artist

From Wikipedia:

James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist primarily concerned with Light and Space. Turrell was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. Turrell is best known for his work in progress, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory.

Access to Roden Crater is limited to friends, though devoted fans can gain access by completing the "Turrell Tour", which involves seeing a Turrell in 23 countries worldwide. During May 2015, Roden Crater was open to a select group of 80 people, as part of a fund raiser, by allowing visits of 20 people per day during the course of four days, at a cost of $6,500 per person. As Roden Crater has been long shrouded in secrecy, fans have attempted to sneak in without the artist's permission. Some have succeeded.

In the 1970s, Turrell began his series of "skyspaces" enclosed spaces open to the sky through an aperture in the roof. A Skyspace is an enclosed room large enough for roughly 15 people. Inside, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof.

From Wikipedia:

Lozano-Hemmer is best known for creating and presenting theatrical interactive installations in public spaces across Europe, Asia and America. Using robotics, real-time computer graphics, film projections, positional sound, internet links, cell phone interfaces, video and ultrasonic sensors, LED screens and other devices, his installations seek to interrupt the increasingly homogenized urban condition by providing critical platforms for participation. Lozano-Hemmer’s smaller-scaled sculptural and video installations explore themes of perception, deception and surveillance. As an outgrowth of these various large scale and performance-based projects Lozano-Hemmer documents the works in photography editions that are also exhibited.

From Wikipedia:

The idea for Line Describing a Cone came to McCall on his voyage from London to New York, where he produced the film in 1973. Though he had already created a number of other 16mm films, Line allowed him to actualize his ideas on the relationship between viewer and film and the medium of film itself. The thirty-minute film begins with a single white dot projected onto a black surface. As time progresses, the dot begins to form a curved line, tracing the circumference of a circle until the end of the line reaches its starting point. Meanwhile, particles in the air reveal the path of light in the space between the projector and the wall, making visible a cone of light. If the artist's display specifications are met, this beam of light projects between thirty and fifty feet. The circle that is projected onto the surface sits approximately twelve inches above the ground, and its diameter spans seven to nine feet. The exhibition space lacks seating, inviting the viewer to interact with the ray of light beaming from the projector to the screen. When multiple spectators view the piece together, these encounters with the light, at once an interruption and component of the piece, become an interaction with other audience members.

Line Describing a Cone reflects McCall's interests in film and sculpture. Line addresses the medium of film by removing the narrative demands and addressing the specific properties of the medium itself such as projection, frames, and light. Moreover, by emphasizing the physical space between the projector and screen McCall calls attention to the sculptural dimensions of projection. In his artists's statement written to judges of the Fifth International Experimental Film Competition, McCall writes:

"It deals with the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface… Line Describing a Cone deals with one of the irreducible, necessary conditions of film: projected light. It deals with this phenomenon directly, independently of any other consideration. It is the first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space."