Landscapes of the late Anthropocene
By: P.B. Zimmermann
Edition: Hardcover edition
Publisher: Spaceheater Editions
Published: 2017
Place of publication: Tucson, AZ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 48
Subjects: Global warming in art; Climatic changes; Pictorial works; Water in art; Floods in art; Sea level; Climatic factors; Artists' books; Specimens
Description: "Due to a general public concern about climate change, most people have become aware of the term anthropocene. It's a word relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. For the last two years I have been thinking about a way to make a new artists' book related to the issues that prompted that term anthropocene. y son, Nick, an urban planner and GIS professional, had been researching changes in global sea-level projections as modeled by NASA, NOAA, and other agencies. The infographic visualizations that were used to show sea-rise levels over the next one hundred years were unbelievably scary, and much worse than the figures often cited in the newspapers and normal media channels. These figures show an eventual rise, with all polar caps and glaciers completely melted, of over two hundred feet! An article in the just published July 2017 issue of the National Geographic Magazine, entitled Antartica is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start is very scary. When I thought of a sea level rise of two hundred feet and what that could mean in terms of our cities and our society, the future seemed incredibly bleak. For the landscapes in the book, I decided to create a dystopian set of images that hinted at a future watery world, one where the remnants of civilizations lived in armed and guarded towers, growing their food in vertical farms inside these towers. The rest of the world population would have mostly died off. Marauding remnants exist in small groups that would try to gain entrance into these armed tower structures. The backgrounds of these images were built using scans of steel engravings from several 19th century books. I used photos of water and waves to make the foregrounds. I have long been interested in airport control towers and have many photos of them around the world. They seemed to me like the modern version of towers on medieval castles. Using a web app by the programmer Evan Wallace, called webgl-filter, I changed the airport control tower photos into dithered images that looked more like the background steel engravings. The assembly and coloration of the images was done in Photoshop. The goal was to create a series of images of a forbidding and lonely watery world, one that was austerely beautiful but scary and thought-provoking..." --From the introductory booklet.
Notes: Artists' book issued with inlaid introductory pamphlet. Duotone pages composed from Google earth satellite views and NOAA depth charts, some featuring text excerpted from the so-called 720 "Harvard Sentences," lines of text originally used to test the fidelity of spoken words when broadcast over military and civilian radio transmitters during WWII. The original project was titled "IEEE Recommended Practices for Speech Quality Measurements" and developed in the basement of Harvard's Memorial Hall, thus its nickname. Text blocks are printed offset at the Center for Book and Paper at Columbus College Chicago on their Heidelberg GTO. Hardcover boards and end sheet printed by the artist using pigmented archival inkjet; silver foil-stamped title on cover by the artist.

Publishing information from accompanying pamphlet.

Limited edition of 50 hardcover, cased-in copies signed and numbered by the artist.

An unbound edition exists as well and is included with every JAB41 issue. (catalogued separately)