Video screens with images of the American West. Image credit: Geoff Wichert
The view is straight down, so that the desert hillocks and washes look like an abstract painting, all contours and curves on a completely flat canvas. Then the view rotates, the viewer seeming to circle down, around the focal point, moving from above the spot to looking at it sideways. As the view shifts it quickly transforms, high points rising and low ones dropping, until it becomes fully three dimensional. Both views, from above and from beside, are completely convincing examples of how we are accustomed to seeing the landscape: whether on a map, say, or from a road or trail. Only that brief, physically impossible swivel gives away that it’s a complete fabrication: not a real view, or for that matter, even a real desert. It’s a Computer-Generated Image, or CGI.
CGIs were probably the first convincing fake pictures most of us saw, but because they were primarily used in movies, where “special effects” are nothing special, it’s unlikely that anyone saw the threat they posed. That changed with the popularization of Photoshop, which virtually overnight (at least on an evolutionary scale) destroyed a confidence in visual images—“seeing is believing,” it had been said—that had taken thousands of years to develop and which seemingly climaxed with the invention of photography in the middle of the 19th century.
Scenes of the natural environment are project onto man-made structures that disrupt the landscape. Image credit: Zachary Norman, © UMOCA
Advertising and entertainment were two fields that boasted of their willingness to present a convincing alternative reality, but of course behind their illusions a whole industry sprang up to discreetly exploit the new magic. Political and industrial users sought to use computer images to hide the truth behind a benign and accommodating facade. According to a group of presumed activists calling themselves “Everything is Collective,” among those eager to help exploit the ability to control the appearance of things is the government agency responsible for administering U.S. federal lands.
The Bureau of Land Management is an agency within the United States Department of the Interior, headquartered in Washington, D.C., that oversees more than 247.3 million acres of land, or one-eighth of the United States’s total landmass. In many states, including Utah, the Bureau has come under criticism for its policies and even its mere presence. In Expected Image, Everything is Collective sets out to reveal just how this Bureau has undertaken to manage not just the land itself, but the image of that land, and by extension its own image, in the eyes and minds of the people who use, live next to, and collectively own it. No explicit thesis is stated here concerning the ultimate purpose of the land managers: whether, for instance, their goal might be to camouflage their presence or to provide an anodyne image, such as that provided elsewhere by logging operations that leave a thin strip of trees along public roads in order to conceal the clear-cutting of the rest of the forest. Rather, Expected Image limits itself for now to revealing how the Bureau, through a project called the Visual Resource Management System (VRM), has sought to better understand how the public’s image of their vast land holdings arises and just what scenic value those holdings possess.
Installation photograph, Everything Is Collective: Expected Image, January 26–April 27, 2024, photo by Zachary Norman, © UMOCA
In the front room of UMOCA’s Street Gallery, examples include untitled studies of how a composite image of the wild may be structured. In some, natural materials are compared to human intrusions. Overall, the connection between these theoretical instances and real events isn’t clear, though they do demonstrate the power of technology to obscure just what is “natural.” The arcane texts of VRM publications that line one wall contrast with these visually accessible, if somehow ambivalent images. Titles like “Visual Simulation Techniques” and “Highway Photomontage Manual” adorn daunting texts that cry out for translation into accessible form.
It’s in the back room that the potential impact of visual “management” begins to become clear. Here two sets of parallel projections occupy five screens. Between them they contrast straight motion picture images of the American West with artificial alternatives. The latter typically begin with realistic images that compare favorably to the former, but soon spiral out of control. The implication is that we, today, are somewhere on that spectrum: facing a landscape that has been manipulated in various ways, almost from the beginning of its contact with the public. Think of the way highway design attempts to balance crude access with advantageous scenic presentation. Then consider the grotesque damage done to Dead Horse State Park in pursuit of a mineral resource for which there is no present need, but profit to be made. How such errors can be prevented in future may make for better use, or it may only mean less controversial extraction.
Large projections in the back room of UMOCA’s Street Gallery. Image credit: Geoff Wichert
Everything is Collective is a relatively new organization, and on the basis of Expected Image its intention is to open up some arcane arts and engineering practices to an understanding by the public. Given the often paternalistic behavior of government and corporate experts, Everything is Collective has the potential to perform a vital service. That said, more text or explanatory images would help assure that its implied goals are reached. As another saying goes, only time will tell.
Everything is Collective: Expected Image, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 27
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
