2013.10.16
http://events.gsapp.org/event/aerial-arts-reconnaissance-reconsidered
On Wednesday, October 16, 2013 we were joined by Sonja Duempelmann and Enrique Ramirez for an evening of visual feigns and interpretative assumptions, as we explored the intersection of WWII reconnaissance photography and design. As one of a series of public events accompanying artist Meg Studer’s Aerial Arts exhibit, Duempelman and Ramirez’s examination of the mid-century aerial imaginary focuses on the feedback between photographic, cartographic, and planning forms.
Sonja Duempelman is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her book, Flights of Imagination: Powered Aviation and the Art and Science of Landscape Design and Planning, is currently in press (UVA Press, 2014). She will begin the evening’s events with a short talk, “Camouflaging Camouflage,” showing how the nature and politics of camouflage measures during WWII led to “protective concealment” being understood as a type of regional planning and landscape architecture, as well as how this method of strategic warfare continued to inform landscape design in the postwar years.
Enrique Ramirez, an architectural historian currently at work on a book concerning architectural and aeronautical cultures in France and the United States in the nineteenth century, will follow with a short talk entitled “The Aerial View in the Age of Paranoia.” Drawing on the paranoid style of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, Ramirez will explore maps and aerial photographs as high-altitude abstractions, as susceptible to the vagaries and caprices of interpretation as literary fiction.
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