Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.
Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.
Exercise 2: Solstice
Choose a set of coordinates on the World Geodetic System, specifying longitude, latitude and elevation. The coordinates may be selected at random or according to a procedure.
Travel to those coordinates and modify the site (building a structure, physically altering the landscape). The intervention should be large enough to be visible from a Landsat satellite or aerial drone, although precisely how large this is varies significantly depending on the coordinates selected. Globally, most land areas are covered at a resolution of approximately 15 metres per pixel, but the baseline resolution is far higher in North America and most of Europe – from 1m per pixel to as high as 0.15m per pixel in locations including the campuses of MIT and Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts, and the southern portion of the San Francisco bay area (i.e. Silicon Valley), the latter containing the corporate headquarters of American multinational Google Inc, which is known as the Googleplex .
The construction/intervention should be made from bluestone slabs dragged by men and oxen along wooden tracks from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, western Wales. This igneous rock is durable enough to stand until the structure is recorded by Landsat satellite/aerial drone, a timescale that is difficult to predict: Although commercially-operated satellite cameras are orbiting the Earth constantly, the relatively low altitudes needed to make high-resolution images of the land, means their lenses see less than 1% of the earth’s surface per orbit. Of this <1%, on average, 2/3 is water (i.e. open ocean), and 1/2 is in darkness (i.e. night), leaving 1/6 of <1% potentially visible. But even this small fraction is more often than not obscured by partial or total cloud cover, pollution haze, and/or long shadows caused by the angle of the Earth’s surface relative to the sun (i.e. when the sun appears low in the sky).
Winter 02015
Choose a set of coordinates on the World Geodetic System, specifying longitude, latitude and elevation. The coordinates may be selected at random or according to a procedure.
Travel to those coordinates and modify the site (building a structure, physically altering the landscape). The intervention should be large enough to be visible from a Landsat satellite or aerial drone, although precisely how large this is varies significantly depending on the coordinates selected. Globally, most land areas are covered at a resolution of approximately 15 metres per pixel, but the baseline resolution is far higher in North America and most of Europe – from 1m per pixel to as high as 0.15m per pixel in locations including the campuses of MIT and Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts, and the southern portion of the San Francisco bay area (i.e. Silicon Valley), the latter containing the corporate headquarters of American multinational Google Inc, which is known as the Googleplex .
The construction/intervention should be made from bluestone slabs dragged by men and oxen along wooden tracks from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, western Wales. This igneous rock is durable enough to stand until the structure is recorded by Landsat satellite/aerial drone, a timescale that is difficult to predict: Although commercially-operated satellite cameras are orbiting the Earth constantly, the relatively low altitudes needed to make high-resolution images of the land, means their lenses see less than 1% of the earth’s surface per orbit. Of this <1%, on average, 2/3 is water (i.e. open ocean), and 1/2 is in darkness (i.e. night), leaving 1/6 of <1% potentially visible. But even this small fraction is more often than not obscured by partial or total cloud cover, pollution haze, and/or long shadows caused by the angle of the Earth’s surface relative to the sun (i.e. when the sun appears low in the sky).
Winter 02015
Exercise 3: Mise en Abyme (after BN)
A person enters and lives in a room for a long time – a period of years or a lifetime.
A super-high-resolution LED screen entirely fills one wall of the room. The screen displays footage from a webcam installed in the wall directly opposite, ostensibly in real time. Facing the screen, the person sees themselves from the back and a recursive sequence of progressively smaller screens, each nested within the last, extending to infinity.
Very gradually – imperceptibly at first – time on screen begins to fall behind real time. Footage from the camera is relayed to the LED display via a satellite orbiting Earth on a slowly but continuously widening trajectory, spiraling outwards further and further from the Earth’s surface, resulting in a slowly but continuously lengthening time lag as the radio waves transmitted travel further and further into space. The time delay is multiplied by each recursion of the screen within the screen.
After a number of years, the person no longer recognises their relationship to their ‘mirrored’ image.
Winter 02015
Don’t take that tone with me.
I was designed by Apple® in California.
It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
Winter 02015