[Sci-tech-public] Camouflage on Bumpkin Island, Boston Harbor, August 30-September 1

[Debbie Meinbresse]

>Please forward information about "The Camoufleurs" - Installation by 
>Etienne Benson, Dan Hisel and Hanna Rose Shell. Artist Statement and 
>installation description below. For travel directions and details, 
>see attached flyer and press release.
>
>OVERVIEW OF THE CAMOUFLEURS, site-specific environmental art 
>installation. Camouflage is a strategy of systematic dissimulation 
>or imitation for the purposes of concealment effected through 
>mimicry of natural, animal, vegetable or mineral forms. It emerged 
>as a potent response to photography's practical and theoretical 
>impacts on natural science, visual art and the military in the 
>twentieth century. It is about hiding (both oneself and one's 
>world)<file:///applewebdata/::B350E1AA-5CB1-4C47-994B-CD5C5DDAB069#_msocom_1> 
>from ground and air, land and sea, self and other. For their project 
>on Bumpkin Island in Boston Harbor (August 29-September 1) The 
>Camoufleurs (Etienne Benson, Dan Hisel, Hanna Rose Shell) interweave 
>three strands of camouflage tactics into a networked installation 
>across Bumpkin Island in Boston Harbor. Erased Shadow Stucture, 
>Surveillance in the Wild & The Creeping.
>
>1. ERASED SHADOW STRUCTURE During World War Two threats of aerial 
>bombardment triggered large-scale civilian and industrial camouflage 
>efforts up and down the coastline. High altitude aerial 
>reconnaissance planes were flying over suspected target areas and 
>taking photographs of the ground at different times of the day in 
>order to compare the shadows in one image, to shadows in the 
>other.  Telltale shadows of key installations had to be avoided; one 
>primary strategy was through the construction of a false geometry of 
>wires and camo nets over and around these buildings, in order to 
>create forms to obscure and eliminate the building's hard shadows. 
>Such aerial camouflage techniques inspire "Erased Shadow 
>Structures," tracings of solar geometries in and around Bumpkin Island.
>
>2. SURVEILLANCE IN THE WILD Wildlife biologists have increasingly 
>come to rely on automatic cameras to study their often elusive and 
>well-camouflaged subjects, drawing on the kinds of aerial 
>surveillance apparatuses with which "Erased Shadow Structures" is in 
>dialog. How might such surveillance change our experience of parks 
>and other "natural" spaces? Does the meaning of a picnic, a walk in 
>the woods or the frontier experience evoked by the term 
>"homesteading" depend on whether we are seen or unseen, recorded or 
>unrecorded, certain or uncertain that we are being 
>watched?  "Surveillance in the Wild" deploys automatic cameras 
>around Bumpkin Island-some in plain sight others hidden, like the 
>animals and camoufleurs they aim to detect, by the plentiful 
>Oriental Bittersweet.
>
>3. THE CREEPING: (CAMOUFLAGE WEED) Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus 
>orbiculatus) is an invasive species, a woody, deciduous 
>fast-creeping vine that coats and cloaks the environment of Bumpkin 
>Island. In "The Creeping," artists and visitors collaborate to 
>transform Oriental Bittersweet into a material for the concealment 
>of human bodies and transport pathways.  Inspired by history and 
>environment, they turn the plentiful invasive species into a 
>material of strategic and artistic homesteading practice. The 
>camoufleurs, like their materials, and the island environments they 
>seek to inhabit, come to be anywhere and nowhere. A layer of 
>disruptive patterning crawls over an island pockmarked by history.
>
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