Dubai

Spiral

Jetty Google

Earth Ear

thrise

The Search For

Humanity in Whole-Ea

rths, Globaliz

ations, and World Pictur

es

                                                           

Waldo begins his adventure on the moon. Aboard Apollo 8 in 1968, a man captures this

image. Boosted by cold war technology and an ideology obsessed with moving forward, the

mission is to capture photographs of the Lunar surface. but once atop the desolate lunar

Landscape, the epitome of human achievement and technology, one human turns around. What he sees becomes an image that forever

changes the contemporary geographical imagination. new-age apollos, astronauts stood

high above the world, the entire existence of humanity opened to their eyes. With the release

of the earthrise photograph, humanity saw home. The inorganic moon in the foreground serves as a striking monotone comparison to

the cool, oceanic, atmospheric earth. It is small, it is fragile, it is ours and it was not

until humanity saw this photograph, that we recognized our responsibility for its well-

being. Looking at this one earth, we understand both brotherhood and loneliness,

the uniqueness of our planet and its trivial place amongst a universe of stars, our necessity

to its maintenance and its systematic functioning independent of humanity.

Now we ask: in historical and ideological

discourse on whole earths, globalizations, and world pictures, where does humanity lie?

                                                           

waldo is one world of many worlds. The Copernican

cosmology has removed earth, and therefore humanity from the center. The possibility of

other worlds and other beings has reduced our world

and our beings to insignificance. In questioning the universality of reason, we

question the “earth-Boundness” of this anomaly.

Suddenly what we have is not everything but only what we have. We think the ground

beneath our feet and the sky above our heads suits our

world; it is these anthropocentric conceptions that we take with us through our journeys. We take our eyes

to the sky but cannot shake our Earthliness. Other worlds

only exist in Earthly terms, Humanity exists though

reflexive telescopics, exploring the infinity of the massive

unknown only to discover the infinity of the small. As

Blumenberg says, “it is only as an experience of turning back that we shall accept that for man there is no alternatives to earth, just as for reason there are no alternatives to human reason”. We may not

exist at the center of the cosmological universe,

Humanity’s way of analyzing the known and unknown is entirely centered around what we can see, what the

earth reveals to us.

                                                           

Waldo is on the site of Europe on a European map, mapping European discovery up until this point in 1507. Martin Waldseemüller, created this universalis cosmographia to capture a world. This world has developed printmaking,

allowing people from all across the globe to orient themselves on our planet. The European world, however, is where we find one piece of humanity in this world picture. By examining the detail in Europe and its neighboring lands, it is clear that Europe is the universal “Point A”, the homeport for discovery, knowledge, and technology.

The projection itself lends Europe significantly more paper space, disrupting its square-meter to square-meter proportion with other landmasses. What is outside of this know, what is represented as blank or pictorial, are

possibilities of inhabitants proposed through local understanding. Homage to the European explorer, Vespucci is placed alongside a tribute to Ptolemy (and his fellow student of the cosmos, Waldo), merging history and

science, the earth and the heavens. Where one is relative to something else has taken over humanity’s Locational presence. In a move from locational to directional, humanity seeks to orient itself on the ground, while viewing a projection from above. We are simultaneously looking up to orient ourselves in the cosmos, and looking down

to orient ourselves on earth.

                                                           

For Heidegger, the world is purely what is in its entirety; the world picture then is the world conceived in picture, what is in being is passed through man who then represents. The year is 1525 and like other ages, it is defined by “a specific interpretation of what is and…a specific comprehension of truth”. Waldo finds himself on the side of the “representer”. Using a projection to set rules for his representation of this woman, he sets rules for what is, what man can know. The subject of representation serves to detach humanity from the resulting picture, subjecting humanity to representation, ultimately becoming part of the picture itself. The irony of Waldo’s place as the “representer” drawing a subject through

a serious of grid lines is that he exists as part of the greater picture (of this page). Our own existence in the representational world picture allows for reflection, to make truth from what we presuppose by questioning what we believe is. But as Heidegger argues that what is exists through human construction, Martin Jay points to the possibility

of multiple scopic regimes; for Jay, Waldo is not creating the objective representation. In fact, Waldo and the artist will create two very different pictures, as different visual parameters will lend themselves to different modes of grasping

our world.

                                                         

Waldo exists as a part of a whole system. Alongside his inert counterparts, humanity is seeking equilibrium. To become living matter is to subordinate yourself in a system. Emerged in the biosphere, living and non-living thins

share a materially unified space. We use energy from the sun and redistribute inert matter. Our planet and all we know of it is contained to life-

supporting limits. We are merely wholes of highly integrated parts of a larger system. But isolation of parts of systems to understand the

composition of a whole is a mental process. If humanity can participate in mental processes beyond basic biological feedback loops for energy renewal,

we are not only functional entities within a system, but also independent agents outside of it. Post-World War II, technology and nature have melded into cybernetics, viewing both living systems and machines under the same

whole systems ideology. The development of this technology further supports the noospheric separation of humanity from the biosphere.

Building of new technology requires the isolation of whole systems ideas for the purpose of building man-made, for-man materials. Stewart Brand acknowledges this disparity and sends Waldo a copy of his Whole Earth

Catalog. Inside the catalog humanity is pushed to exist in their system - to build environmentally friendly structures, grow their own food, and form communities. At the same time, Brand accepts the exceptionality of humanity

and its role outside the system, encouraging humanity to read books, understand environmental processes, and experience art. He acknowledges

that humanity’s mind is something special and separate, and is equally as valuable in this Whole Earth as Earth-based systems.

                                                           

We find Waldo in Tuscon, Arizona inside the massive

Biosphere II. This is de Chardin’s hominization at

its finest. Man has leapt from instinct to thought and

spiritualized the forces that exist in the animal world. In Bipsphere II we are one with

the natural forces that shape and support our

existence, but we have put them there. In seeking to be one with the rest of Earth’s

creatures, humanity has differentiated itself as one that can self-reflect and in

that way, change the state of nature. A structural “Gaia”, the Biosphere architecture sought to create a closed

system that would exist through homeostasis and cybernetic-like feedback

loops. As an active control system, Gaia and Biosphere II learn by trial and error the

art of controlling their environment. What we have

attempted to create in Biosphere II though is not

concerned with the anthropocene; for Gaia, the human species falls in line with all other species and has no conscious part in homeostasis. In building a structure to function as Gaia does, humanity has taken over Gaia’s role as

helmsperson. When something in Biosphere II breaks, humans will fix it.

Waldo is standing by.

                                                           

Waldo is unbounded by the constraints of the

Early ground. High above Dubai, above the clouds,

humanity has transcended the

biosphere. The local used to be what was close to our houses, now it is a communication that

reaches one person to another in 1 second from 5000 miles away. Accessible

is the new local, and almost everything is

accessible. This is the new global environment that

we talk about…incorrectly. The environment is ours; it is how the world presents itself to humanity. No globe surrounds us. We

surround it. The discrepancy between the

local and the global perspectives leads us down

a dangerous trajectory. The global, the real and the total, lends itself to

social change based in private interest that

becomes elevated into wider political causes. The technology of the global has served to re-

center humanity in discourse. Humanity at

the center of cosmological order

prescribes the cooperative manner in which we

engage with our environment. This is not

what has happened, though; the concept of

                                                           

Waldo is a demographic – a data point, a colored dot to represent 25 of a certain group of people. Ideology has functioned to distort, blurring the lines of social reality to

create an understanding of our world by picking and

choosing aspects of how it works in theory. Here, ideology uses symbolism to construct a social identity; we are a dot

amongst dots, showing that where we live is right (or not right)

where we should based on pink, blue, green,

orange, and gray. Globalization suggests that humanity lives in a

“permeable borderless world in which goods and capital can move

around freely”.. Imperialist in nature,

globalism has taught us that this world is ours for the taking. But this map, black lines or no

black lines, suggest borders. Humanity’s

reduction to data-point status for the purpose of fighting conventional assumptions of norms

has resulted in reaffirming our

differences. It seems we have lost humanity in

the struggle to historicize it from

below.

                                                           

Waldo explores Google Earth’s “Crisis in Darfur” layer. Constant media confrontation with the horrors of our age crops the world to what can be seen by the viewer. In a time of massive globalization, access to world pictures such as Google Earth has reignited humanity’s moral drive for “a better, more

humane, and just world”. A project created with noble, humanitarian-based intentions, “Crisis in Darfur” allows viewers to see images of the dead and dying

and destroyed villages in hopes of raising awareness. As Waldo clicks around the screen, he gets little historical information useful to contextualize the conflict he’s observing. Reducing the conflict in this way makes the viewing humanity pity the “victims of history” while we remain caught up in Google’s

specific, profit-making framework. Humanity is not only the viewer outside the computer screen in this predicament. Humanity is also on the ground, moving bodies caught in a disaster. Their faces are frozen hundredths of a second for

a satellite or a camera to capture and broadcast to the world. They have become the faces of a crisis they live in, if only representative of fleeting

moments amidst the terror they face everyday. Humanity is watching humanity struggle through the lens of a click-able world picture. Trapped “in the past

perfect subjunctive”, “Crisis” in Darfur allows humanity to observe a conflict of humanity without implication that any actual intervention is possible or

expected.

                                                           

Waldo was wandered to the center of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. In this piece, Smithson claims the jetty as a metaphor, concerning himself with what the earth can suggest to its human observers. This is a different kind of a world, a world

seen by Heidegger as the construction of things that humans use or work with. Those things are a part of the world because of the work put in, with them as a tool, in building it. At the center of the spiral jetty, humanity has found itself in

a world with the piece itself as a map. One will use it to get from point to point; along the way, humanity becomes disoriented and focused on sensory experience as the true reflection of the journey only occurs at the origin or the

destination. It provides us an earthy path on which to explore our place on earth, suggesting that while we exist to walk on its surface, the only known points in our existence are a beginning an end. What happens in between is a product of

crude aesthetic experience.

                                                           

Where’s Waldo?

Composed of data collected by four companies, Google Earth is by many, for one. It cannot capture

experience, though it tries, depriving this world picture of

true humanity. A search for “chinese restaurant” will scour the

globe, using the globe, to direct you turn-by-turn to your dinner. A search for “love” though will send

you to a seedy motel in South America and a search for

“brotherhood” shoots you to a winery in New York. What we

wanted was basic human emotion and we ended up drunk in New

England. Where we could find the beauty of human subjectivity in a photograph, an earthwork, and a

map, humanity only exists in Google Earth insofar as your interaction

and contribution to this final image. Our only interactions on

this Google Earth are the intersections of I-90 and the 395.

Zoom in- keep zooming—Waldo isn’t there.

“We are as Gods and we might as well get used to it”. But if the Gods

have fled, we must look to the ground. Where we find Waldo, we find humanity…and isn’t that the

whole point?

 

 

history 345/fall 2013