A poignant reality of a globalized postmodern public is its access to information from technologies that are constantly measuring and documenting every aspect of the Earth’s surface, making it visible for everyday use. Google Earth is a prime player in the construction of this new reality, allowing the general public to control, via its interface, a seemingly objective and complete view of the Earth’s surface.
What we find when we examine the representational capacities of these technologies more closely, however, is that they in fact expose to a glaring degree the territories of the unknown- those territories in which our technological gaze falls short and our knowledge of those places remains incomplete and uncertain. These territories are manifest as low-resolution pixelations that, even when visible, offer a singular, highly structured perspective that only highlights the missing perspectives that we normally rely on to gather a more complete knowledge of territory.
Thus these territories become blind spots that we can only know (incompletely) through the production of myth and speculative representations: In other words, through the telling of stories and the creation of narrative speculation, the representation of which becomes inextricable from the territory itself.
Drawing on these observations, this work locates itself within the real and imagined territory of Area 51, drawing on the doubt and uncertainty of technological blind spots to offer a productive re-territorialization of place that celebrates, rather than dismissing narrative speculation. Using drawing and model, the work re-represents a territory that not only addresses what is there, but what could and might be there.
