Locative Art - The Sea of Ice, Berlin

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The Sea of Ice, Berlin 52.480493 13.391947
LOCATIVE ART

Tempelhof Airport, Berlin, GER, 2012.

/ CONCEPT /

The term ‘Locative Art’ was first introduced by the science-fiction author William Gibson in his book ‘Spook Country’ (2007), describing a geo-spatially tagged piece of virtual art visible only through the help of special altered technical devices and located by a GPS unit. Behind this concept lies the idea of augmented reality (AR), meaning a digitally altered form of reality made possible through the ever-increasing capabilities of our smartphones.

In contrast to virtual reality (VR), which is always on screen in front of you and with which we are dealing daily without even noticing anymore, AR is right where you are, surrounding you and mostly without people being aware of it. The idea is to create an art piece that is at the same time contextually and locative while being immaterial, adding a new layer of experience to our perception.

Imagine an installation right in front of you that you can't grasp, only being visible to the ones who know about it and searching for it tracking back the given GPS-coordinates, a spatial design, capturing a place and constituting space much like architecture, but without physically being there. How would it alter your reality and your perception of space?

When I was wandering around in Berlin, the newly opened-to-the-public landscape at the former Tempelhof Airport really fascinated me while living close by, I made some excursions around this huge, empty space, being mostly flat with the exception of the actual airport building in the distance. This vast landscape fascinated me, recalling some romantic images by painters like Caspar David Friedrich with his desolated landscapes where the observer seems to always shrink and watch what is in front of him in awe. While the park had such an atmosphere, it was always to me still lacking some kind of attraction, something to focus the attention onto, to get closer to a feeling of the sublime described by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant or even in the paintings of C. D. Friedrich.

Regarding this connotation, I came across the image ‘The Sea of Ice – The Wreck of Hope’ from 1823-24 by C. D. Friedrich. In the image's centre, shards of ice are piled over one another in a broken ice sheet, becoming some kind of abstract tombstone for the ship’s wreck visible on the right side buried underneath, with its stern being the only thing left sticking out of the surrounding ice-scape. The painting's desolation, wreckage and illustration of collapse and failure in the context of nature fascinated me, while I was mainly interested in the resulting form of the ice shards with their different directions and diagonal composition in the otherwise flat landscape.

Fascinated by the shapes, I started rebuilding the image in a three-dimensional space transforming all the information I could gather from this single point of perspective inside of a 3d software turning the two-dimensional painting into a third dimension. This method certainly always leaves some difficulties and mere assumptions with it, which I don’t want to extend on right now. Here should only be mentioned that the ship's stern is one of the only clues for the actual dimensions of the ice-scape. The ship is, to some critics, referred to as the HMS Griper of the British Navy, taking part in an expedition to the Arctic led by William Parry with a beam of 6.7 m and gun deck of 26 m.

In search of the right spot for positioning my first locative art piece, I had to deal with the situation that the original viewpoint of the ice-scape is from a heightened perspective. While I was considering placing the object somewhere in the middle of the empty landscape of the area, I now had to find a place where you could view it from above. The only place in this regard was the roof terrace of the main airport building, which I was able to visit on a guided tour at the airport during one of my visits, leaving the location for the installation in front of the building on the airfield itself, which worked out as quite an exhilarating place to code my first installation for.

With the resulting size of the installation, I still had to alter its scale to fit it onto the site and allow a view from on top of the roof, while its original size would have been too large, allowing the original view only to be experienced from a standpoint 42 meters above ground. So I altered the dimensions accordingly for the maximum height of the building and fitted it still onto the airfield while keeping the proportions intact.

Regarding the materialisation of the object, I decided to change the original brownish, yellow ochre colour of the painting's front motive into a colder bluish tint more reminding me of ice and coldness and closer to an image I had for Berlin in my mind, suiting the desolated and empty character of a shrinking city with an old fading metropolitan aura. Further on, the material should be transparent to a certain degree to let the context shine through the installation, always being visible not to obstruct the original view with the augmented reality.

The images shown here are meant to give an impression of the hopefully soon-to-be-achieved detailing made possible by the technical improvements in the field of computers and smartphones with their ever-increasing capabilities. Therefore in the concept stage, the printed images here are rendered as 3d images viewable via anaglyphic red/cyan glasses with a 3d effect taking place, while the real 3d AR lacks some of the detailing due to the current technical limitations being right now limited to only 5.000 triangles for an object and smaller maps for the texturing.