Curator’s Essay
points around the city. ScanLAB refers to this latter possibility as “the deployment of flash architecture”—flash streets, flash statues, flash doors—that only exist as data artifacts in scanning gear. Stealth statuary and other anomalous spatial entities could thus dot the cityscape, perceptible only as representational effects in the technologies through which we view them, acting, in a sense, like spatial watermarks or invisible writing. Of course, it is not hard to imagine the military becoming interested in the future of this research, suggesting as it does stealth body armor, stealth ground vehicles, even stealth forward-operating bases, all of which would be geometrically invisible to radar and other sensing equipment.
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When Urban Islands was over, my wife, Nicola, and I took some time off to stay down in Australia and travel around the country’s east coast for a few weeks before heading home. One night, we found ourselves in a tourist hotel in Cairns where I was flipping between channels on the in-room TV. It wasn’t long before I stumbled onto the final fifteen minutes or so of a U.S.-produced documentary about the Apollo space program. At the moment I tuned in, the show was looking at the present-day work of an astronomer based in west Texas. It turns out, the documentary explained, that the Apollo program never really ended; there is still one experiment, still very active, involving at the time of the documentary a lone man stationed in a small lab in Texas, working out of a hut that could have passed for a garden shed. What was his job? To shoot lasers at the moon. A laser beam as thin as a pencil would leave this modest installation—which was utterly transformed when its roof sliced opened to reveal the mysterious machines that would produce a sublime beam of light, shooting upward into the heavens. Upon reaching the moon, the resulting laser—that, because of the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere, was now a kilometer in width—would hit a small tray of reflective prisms called a retroreflector array that had been left behind on the moon’s surface by American astronauts. When even just three or four photons from that laser finally returned to the Earth, having reflected off the prismatic array, this man in west Texas, armed with computers running complex software packages, could begin to measure whether or not the moon was orbiting the Earth faster than predicted by Einstein’s relativity. It would be a wild understatement to say that I don’t fully understand the implications of this experiment and that I might even be describing its purpose incorrectly in the above paragraph; but, when the documentary on our hotel television began showing images of the reflective tray, and when a shot of that spectacular, lonesome beam of pure light shooting up from the middle of nowhere toward the moon appeared on screen, I had an overwhelming urge to get in touch with Mark Smout. It was as if the most outlandish and literally off-world speculative proposal by Smout Allen—prisms on the moon, a landscape
LANDSCAPE
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