Caribou Colorado at 10,000 feet (3,048m) in the Rocky Mountains was a booming
silver mine from 1870 to 1876. Unfortunately, due to its exposure near the
Continental Divide and its (poor) location above an iron lode, it suffers from lightning
strikes. The frequency of fires and the economic 'Panic of 1893' contributed to the
majority of its 3,000 inhabitants leaving town by the 1920s. The silver mine continues
to be plied for silver. And the buildings serve as hospice to mushroom hunters
looking for King Boletes in the subalpine forest. The area was also a favoured spot for
recording artists (John Lennon, Elton John, Michael Jackson, U2, Super Tramp and
others) who came through to create albums at the eponymous recording studio (now
closed) down the dirt road.

More over at http://ruinmemories.org.

Part of a project on "Butte, America: ruination, reclamation, and the remainder" at Ruin Memories.

Inside Skuggi 101, a half-built abandoned luxury housing project in the centre of Reykjavík.

Skuggi was abandoned at quite a developed stage. The plumbing is more or less done,
radiators installed, windows erected. A tangle of wires not yet covered by panels line
back-rooms throughout the building. Due to the large accumulation of valuable pipes and ducts
everywhere, it is necessary to keep the building warm to avoid frost damage. The warmth is not
supplied by the radiators already installed on the walls. They remain shrink-wrapped in plastic;
an expression of capital accumulation rather than use-value. Who knows when these radiators
will perform their intended functions? In the meanwhile, old, bent and rusty radiators maintain
the required heat. The custodian tells me the radiators were scavenged from a junkyard
overflowing with useable but unfashionable interiors purged from old houses during the frenzy of
refurbishing and hypermodernization that took place when credit was ubiquitous and ended
with the global economic collapse. In one corner a pristine, shrink-wrapped and cold radiator; in
the other a dented, rusty radiator keeping you warm. In the context of Thompson‘s 1979
Rubbish Theory, it is difficult to determine which radiator would better be described as trash.

Taking my cue from the typological work of the Bechers and the shape of the building itself, I
wanted to use fixed-perspective images of the discarded radiators to represent the system of
heat circulation keeping the building alive and well.

As I was driving toward Snæfellsjökull this past Christmas I was treated to an interesting sight.
By the side of the road, a fallen over sign read: These are not old ruins. Intrigued, I stopped to
locate the non-ruinous feature alluded to by the sign, and sure enough I came across a small
concrete shed, built into a sloping hill probably shortly after the Second World War – certainly
not old when compared to the time-depth of the landscape, inhabited for over a millennium. The
shed itself was hardly impressive either. It looks overwhelmed by its setting, its grass roof
perhaps an attempt to blend into the landscape, but its size and shape give the impression
that it’s being swallowed up by the hills surrounding it. When the shed is viewed from a greater
distance, the dwarfing effect surroundings have upon it becomes even more pronounced –
flanked on its south side by Faxaflói and on its north by the impressive mountain range
stretching throughout the peninsula. To its northwest the Snæfells glacier looms in the clouds,
dominating its surroundings. Like so many of the structures on Snæfellsnes, occupying a thin
strand of land flanked by two inhospitable extremes, this little shed reminds one both of the
precarious and dangerous conditions to life on this island, as well as of the enduring
survivability of its inhabitants – there are certainly signs of habitation dating back centuries.
The shed, however, is not old. But as the sign suggests, the shed does draw an interest from
passing travellers. Perhaps it signifies the struggle of survival and sustenance that Icelandic
farmers have faced for centuries; perhaps its morphology evokes nostalgia for the torfhús
that once populated the landscape, but have now disappeared. For whatever reason, it
has made people stop their cars to investigate it further, to the annoyance of the landowner.
One wonders what effect the rebuttal of old age will have on the attractiveness of the shed to
passers-by.

keywords: destruction • fracture • iterative practice • interdisciplinary

Optical microscope image of a glass bottle (200x) from the 17th-century Old House site, Greene Farm, Warwick, Rhode Island.

These weathering layers and surface patinas of glass are fluid, visual documentations of corrosion processes over long, and potentially measurable periods of time. In the process of gathering high magnification images of this sample in SEM (at 1.23Kx), the instrument’s high-pressure vacuum, operating at 10kv, caused the thick facture scar that runs longitudinally across these corrosion layers.

How engineers and archaeologists identify and work with iterative and replicable processes of data collection is different in each discipline. This methodological fracture may result in misunderstandings, negotiations, and different possibilities or syntheses in interdisciplinary settings.

Image and partial excerpt from "Portraits of Production: Confronting Convention, Craft, and (Re)creativity in Material Representation", Krysta Ryzewski and Elizabeth Murphy (Brown Univ.). Exhibited at TAG 2010.

exhibit wiki: http://proteus.brown.edu/materialsscience/8100

Lepenski Vir, June 2009

http://visualizing-neolithic.blogspot.com
http://theotheracropolis.com
http://kalaureiainthepresent.org