“Dominion, Cargo” by Lawrence Bird
Title:
- Dominion, Cargo
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Artist Statement:
Dominion is a critical meta-survey of the western Canadian landscape. It intersects two systems of survey/surveille – one early modern, and one contemporary to our own time. The first of these is the Dominion Land Survey (DLS), instigated in the 1870s as part of the colonization of Western Canada. The second is Google Earth, which like other popular imaging platforms commodifies the Earth and its image today. Using Google Earth to document the DLS, Dominion sets these two regimes of image to interrogate each other and identifies ruptures in both: the landforms, episodic flooding, and older forms of land tenure which erode the grid of the DLS, and the double images, blind spots, and anomalies in the machinery of representation deployed by Google Earth. Somewhere, in the gaps between these two – and all our other systems – is a place for new forms of life, a new land between digital and material.
Cargo is a creative output of a larger research-creation project investigating shipping networks, their physical environments (landscapes, infrastructure and architecture), and the regimes of image that coordinate, monitor and represent them. The project underlines that global shipping networks and systems – predicated on the smooth flow of materials and information – seem inevitably to provoke a self-destructive generation of delays and disruption: container ships smash repeatedly into infrastructure. Cargo harvests moving imagery from Google Earth terrain models of ports around the world, focusing on disruptions to that imagery and the degradation of the environments documented. Applying this imagery to a shifting array of virtual shipping containers, it intends to provoke a contemplation of these conditions.
