Cadillac Desert by Absolute Value of Noise © 2001

"Cadillac Desert" is a book refered to by Howard V. Hendrix in a story called "The Music of What Happens". In the book within a book, the protagonist is a park superintendent who wants to photograph Yosemite park in minute detail, publish the photographs all over the United States, and then (with the beauty duly recorded/documented) build a dam and flood the valley for a massive irrigation project. This idea returns with Hendrix's character - a billionaire who buys Yosemite park and hires a leading media artist of the day to record it using virtual reality technology.

"Cadillac Desert" deals with the idea of the capitalist who catalogues (or "makes virtual") the beauty of the wilderness shortly before destroying it for commercial gain. It questions the role of media in providing an excuse for ignoring our physical surroundings. Once an environment has been copied into the virtual domain, Man's sense of responsibility for the physical starts to falter.

The piece refers to the virtual, ideas of public versus private, and their connection to the physical places from which the electronic content is derived. Inside the installation, the viewer moves within a rendition of the artist's house. This house is idealized and extended into the electronic domain. Within the walls, windows, and other spaces of the structure there are places where the outside world enters - in the form of netcast images and sounds from remote locations. The viewer is able to see the difference between the immediate on-site environment and the remote content, but is ultimately unable to tell the difference between what is real (or real-time) and what is a copy (or document).

(Peter Courtemanche - September 2001)

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