THE ARCHIVE OF FICTIVE LANDSCAPES
45.6333째 N, 10.6667째 E
ISLANDS
1. The Archive of Fictive Landscapes is an on-going encyclopaedia with an annual release. 2. The Archive is not to trust, it will sometimes play with what is fictive to make it sound real and with what is real to make it sound fictive. The purpose of The Archive is not to be a trustworthy reference as a common encyclopaedia would be. 3. The Archive is to recall existing fictive landscapes as ideals and to offer a collection of real landscapes with potential to play on. The Archive in its entirety will be a Wunderkammer of methodically arranged landscapes to influence, suggest, and inspire the imagination of the reader. 4. All issues will have a theme landscape, developed from unusual and appealing angles and with an interdisciplinary approach. 5. The Archive is primarily visual in its appearance, but words have equal importance as they integrate images and convey the lively, provocative attitude that is the signature of The Archive. The tone is always impersonal but sharp humour is regularly used. 6. The Archive is a print publication aiming to be a four dimensional medium. The Archive encourages the reader enriching and furthering his creative exploration and challenges him with interactive requests, e.i. “watch this movie”, “visit this place”, “play this game”, “describe this image”, “draw this…”. Games and challenges are hidden throughout each issue. 7. The Archive will not work with advertising unless advertising is created within the Archive itself.
MANIFESTO
ISSUE 0: ISLANDS
_CONTENTS 14__Treasure Hunt 16__Dig Deep 20__Phantom Islands 24__To Conquer 46__Grocery Shop 52__Keep a Logbook 56__Draw Your Own 58__To the Farthest South 64__Castaway Celebs 68__On Survival
(…) “A place, often utopian, surrounded by water; it is the opposite of a lake, which is water surrounded by a place.” Aimaro Isola
1
_ 2
Islands hold a special place in our collective unconscious. They are places of mystery, isolation, adventure and discovery. Islands are a “whole�, a complete ecosystem. The mainland is where ordinary life occurs, whereas only a select few are born on an island. Islands are special.
Castle in the Sky, Hayao Miyazaki, 1989
They have played roles throughout literary and general history and have been portrayed as places to confront the unknown (The Odyssey), to create revolutionary theories (Darwin in Galapagos), to find inspiration (Gauguin in Tahiti), to develop chemical weapons (atom bomb testing at Bikini Atoll).
3
Any piece of land that is surrounded by water is an island, be it natural or artificial. Geology defines two types of islands: continental islands: fragments of something that exists close by or that existed sometime before, and oceanic islands: truly isolated, not only in space but also in time. The body of a continental island lies on a continental shelf while the body of an oceanic island does not. The concept of “island� is also two-partied, it contains the contrast between space limitation and freedom. The ideals of individualism, independence and self-sufficiency clash with isolation, solitude and helplessness.
4
The words of Hernán Díaz, who recently published an essay entitled “A Topical Paradise”, are to be taken into consideration: “In a fully charted world, it seems hard to think of any place that remains truly isolated, completely detached and sealed off within its geographic, historic, and linguistic confines. Even being encircled by water no longer seems a sufficient condition for isolation. In a way this has always been the case: just by being seen from elsewhere, an island loses part of its insularity, since this gaze connects it to the outside – and if the spectator is foreign, it will probably be named in a new language and included in some sort of cartographic representation, both of which are already bridges to other lands. In other words, it wouldn’t be excessive to claim that no one has never seen a truly isolated island, and that these are entirely fictional spaces, possible only in literature.”
5
To reassure Díaz, if truly isolated islands are only fictional spaces, literature has provided for enough. Laputa is a flying island described in the 1726 book “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. It has an adamantine base (to be moved using magnetic levitation) and is exactly circular, about 4.5 miles in diameter. Laputa belongs to the realm of Balnibarbi, above which it flies. The position of the island is a 5 day journey south-south-east of from Gulliver’s last known position 46J, 183E. The island’s population consists of educated people failing to make practical use of their knowledge and servants. Laputans wear clothes that do not fit (as they are tailored with the wrong instruments) and spend their time listening to the music of the spheres.
Laputa is also the flying city of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film “Castle in the Sky”, the first film produced and released by Studio Ghibli (1986). Laputa is the only remaining flying city after an unspecified catastrophe. An island is also a utopia: Swift’s and Miyazaki’s Laputa, the imaginary place of an ideal society in Plato’s Atlantis or the Neverland’s metaphor for eternal childhood. J.M. Barries’s Neverland is the dwelling place of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, featured in the dozens of variations and subsequent works either adapting Barrie’s or expanding upon them. Neverlands are found in the minds of children, with a family resemblance but differences from one child to the next: “a lagoon with flamingos flying over it” “a flamingo with lagoons flying over it”.
F.D. Bedford’s illustration of Neverland, 1911
Neverlands are compact enough that adventures are never far between. The early “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” suggests Neverland to be the small Bird’s Island on the Serpentine River. It was reached either by flight, paper boat or a thrush’s nest, but later on, Barrie himself gives other directions “second to the right, and straight on till morning”. As Peter Pan has brought all children up since 1902, the Neverland utopia has also influenced reality in the form of an amusement park in Santa Barbara County, California, home of the late Michael Jackson from 1988 to 2009. Islands are place of vacation, escape, adventure, sovereignty. The age of naval expeditions and colonialism is long gone and the 19th century voyager has been left staring at the sea, searching for the unknown, while nowadays islands have been aggressively transformed and strongly identified with places for tanning and swimming, the mass tourism’s ultimate targets. Still, there is a whole body of literature on the island as unknown territory: sailors and pirates have explored the seas and the oceans both in reality and in fiction, experiencing the island as a place of conquest, survival in the case of a shipwreck or divine punishment. Castaways have made the story of their islands and islands let them tell their story.
Herbert Brenon’s “Peter Pan”, 1911
But there is also another aspect to the character of the island: it offers man a safe haven and not just as a piece of land for the occasional castaway. The island’s isolation gives man protection, and the water surrounding it provides a means of transportation and commerce. Islands have been chosen in fact as centers (Paris’ Ile de la Cité, Manhattan) and as natural stronghold (like castles). It is not coincidence that “insula”, the latin for “island”, is also used to describe the central part of the romans’ homes. A thousands years old rule stated that all private property were to have an outdoor hallway called “ambitus” to facilitate the circulation around the house. And again, inversely, the island is also a perfect prison: with no need for walls, no need for guards, no chance for the prisoner to escape. Last but not least, our greatest fear or greatest fantasy is evident in the uninhabited islands, which represent nature in its pure form, the frontier of civilization, the ultimate metaphor for being alone.
10
Walt Disney’s “Peter Pan”, 1953
MJ
Micheal Jackson’s “Neverland”
Treasure hunt from: Tortuga Heart of the caribbean piracy contraband in the 17th century, Tortuga is located 20°02′23″N 72°47′24″W and is part of the Haiti region. Having been given its name at sunrise on 7 December 1492, Tortuga was likely to become a significant place for one reason or the other. And effectively, from 1625 onwards, the island was never occupied by the same colony for more than a few years. 1960 saw the victory of French colonies on English’s and Spanish’, and the following fifteen years were the golden years for piracy. Both in fiction and reality, Tortuga was the major centre, strongest and safest bucaneers’ port alongside Port Royal and unquestionably became part of island history.
14
20.0397째 N, 72.7900째 W
15
27.1167째 S, 109.3667째 W Dig deep on:
Easter Island
887 human heads on torsos carved from hardened volcanic ash, Moai have been the greatest mystery of Easter Island, since its discovery in 1722 by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen. The world was shocked to discover full bodies three centuries later, in the spring of 2015. Research had been going on since 2012, when the Easter Island Statue Project began excavating the monoliths, but early archeologists in 1914 already knew about the hidden bodies. Still, their significance is not fully understood: how and why did the early Easter Islanders undertake this colossal statue-building effort?
18
Statistically average moai: Height: 13.29 feet Width at Base: 5.25 feet Width at Head: 4.86 feet Depth through body at midpoint: 3.02 feet Total volume: 210.48 cubic feet Center of gravity: 4.46 feet Total weight: 13.78 tons
19
Phantom Islands
Ghosts Hunt Sandy Island was the last non-existing islands to be included in many maps and nautical charts, up until November 2012 when an Australian surveyor ship passed through Coral Sea and all that it recorded were water depths over 1300 metres. The phenomenon of phantom islands has a long history. Today it’s easy to explore the world while on the sofa, simply by using Google Maps, (although even twenty-first century technology is still not 100% accurate), but centuries ago people could only rely on tales of sailors exploring foreign lands. As mysterious and magical as it sounds, phantom islands were probably the dislocation of actual islands due to navigational errors, the misidentification of icebergs and fog banks or major mirages. Still, the name of some of them will commonly evoke more than that of existing islands. 20
The Emerald Island Reported to lie between Australia and Antarctica, it owes its name to the British ship that first sighted it in December 1821. Although located again around 1890, previous (1840) and following (1909) searches found no traces of it. It appeared instead, on a calendar book with atlas published by American Express as late as 1987.
57°30′S 162°12′E
The Isle of Demons A century-long existence was that of the Isle of Demons, a mysterious land located off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, first appearing in the 1508 map of Johannes Ruysch. The legend tells that demons and wild beasts would attack any ship sailing close enough to the island and that a woman named Marguerite de La Roque was abandoned as punishment for getting pregnant to a sailor in 1542.
51.6100° N, 55.4356° W
Frisland Appearing for the first time on a 1558 map of the North Atlantic and then for almost a hundred years, Frisland was claimed to be part of Iceland as well as Greenland and Faroe Islands.
62.0000° N, 6.7833° W
Atlantis Mentioned within an allegory in Plato’s works “Timaeus” and “Critias”, Atlantis has had the most considerable impact on both literature and popular culture so far. Location hypotheses have probably considered every mile of the earth crust, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Antarctica, to the point where the name has become a generic concept and a metaphor for any and all supposed advanced prehistoric lost civilizations, islands destroyed by volcanic explosions, earthquakes or submarine landslides. 21
Ducie Island
To conquer: Uninhabited islands 32.6278째 N, 129.7383째 E
A red-tailored tropicbird
First discovered in 106 by Pedro Fernandes de Queiros, Ducie Island belongs to the Pitcairn Islands Archipelago. The atoll is known as the breeding ground of many bird species such as Murphy’s petrel, red-tailed tropicbirds and fairy terns, great frigate birds, bristle-thighed curlews and masked boobies.
24°40′09″S 124°47′11″W
27
28
Hashima Island is an abandoned island in southern Japan, 15 km from the city of Nagasaki. The island was populated for around a hundred years and used as a coal mining facility by Mitsubishi. The Korean conscripted civilians and Chinese prisoners-of-war were forced to work there as slave labourers. When the 60s petrol revolution led to the shut down of coal mines, the buildings emptied. They are now collapsed or in danger of collapse.
Hashima Island
34.3086° N, 132.9931° E Ōkunoshima is located in the Inland Sea of Japan. The island was chosen for its isolation to initiate a secret program to develop chemical weapons. The local fish preservation processor was converted into a toxic gas reactor and the three fishing families residents were kept unaware of the gas factory. With the end of the war, documents were burned and in 1988 the Poison Gas Museum was opened. Today the only inhabitants of the island are rabbits. Many rabbits were used in the chemical experiments however the current rabbits are not the ones involved with the tests. Hunting them is forbidden. They are very friendly.
Ōkunoshima
39.2146° N, 76.5192° W
Rabbits on ĹŒkunoshima
Fort Carroll was built just off the Key Bridge on Patapsco River, to defend the city of Baltimore in pre-Civil War. The island was designed as a hexagon and reinforced during the Spanish-American war but never used and abandoned in 1921. A small forest developed and the structure fell apart, the island has a large population of seagulls and sits unused.
Fort Carroll 31
A walking sausage
Discovered in 1788, Ball’s Pyramid is all that remains of a giant volcano that once stood 30 km far of Lord Howe Island, the same island that once hosted the stick insect Cryococelus australis, not once seen alive in over 70 years. A colony of the also known “walking sausages” were found in 2001, living under a bush in Ball’s Pyramid.
Ball’s Pyramid
31.7542° S, 159.2517° E
Palmyra Atoll
Palmyra Atoll is an uninhabited atoll in the North Pacific Ocean and is administrated as an unorganised incorporated territory of the US. It has a reputation for being a place of mystery and supernatural events. The reefs around Palmyra have been described as malignant, causing the wrecking of many ships.
5°53′N 162°5′W 33
34
Palmyra Atoll
35
Rock Islands
36
7°14′N 134°18′E The Rock Islands of Palau are a group of 250/300 of coral uprises that display the very particular Palau’s Southern Lagoon. They are home to the famous Jellyfish Lake where very weak jellyfish let snorklers safely swim.
37
38
The Rock Islands
39
10°18′N 109°13′W
Clipperton Island Clipperton Island has had no permanent residents since 1945. It is a coral atoll situated in the eastern Pacific Ocean and it’s a French state property. It is occasionally visited by fishermen and scientific researchers and provided safety to nine crewmen of a sunken tuna clipper in 1962.
A camping site on Clipperton Island
10.3000째 N, 109.2167째 W
43
Wind on Clipperton Island
Grocery shop at: Caribbean Sea
14.5256째 N, 75.8183째 W 46
Soursop
(Guanabana - Graviola) Ovoid in shape, covered with short, soft, spines, dark green in color changing to a pale green when ripe. The pulp is white and pleasantly acidic.
47
Ackee The fruit was imported to the Caribbeans from West Africa pre 1778. A bright red tropical fruit, it is poisonous if eaten before fully mature, but when ripe, ackees burst open to reveal three large black seeds attached individually to a soft creamy yellow flesh.
Sugar Apple
(Custard Apple, Sweetsop) Sugar Apple is a large, pale green to bluegreen heart-shaped fruit with bumps on the outside. The inside is white, juicy and fleshy, with a soft custard-like texture and large seeds that look like beans. It is very creamy and it tastes like a combination of banana, pineapple and strawberry. 48
Carambola
(Coolie Tamarind, Five Fingers, Starfruit) The fruit is edible at all stages of ripening. The very ripe fruit is a golden yellow, lemon green when half-ripe and very green when unripe. The fruit is sweet, watery, slightly acid and pleasant to taste. There is no need to peel it as the skin of the fruit is very thin.
49
Cashew Fruit
(Caju, Cajueiro, Cashew Apple, Maranon) The cashew fruit is the yellowish-orange part that’s attached to the commonly known cashew nut. It turns a bright reddish orange when ripe. The juice can be used to treat fever and leaves a tangy taste in the mouth.
Guava The fruit is round, very soft when ripe with sweet musky aroma and creamy texture flesh.
50
Breadfruit Very bland in taste, it can be used as a substitute for potato or rice and eaten once cooked.
51
52
The Island Series, Olafur Eliasson
65.0000째 N, 18.0000째 W 53
Keep a logbook: Document your island experiences
56 C-prints, 1997 For this series, Eliasson traveled around the islands which surround Iceland. The distinct islands are sequenced according to size, with the tallest land formations in the bottom row. “Over the years, so many photographs have amassed that they’re gradually beginning to constitute a meta-series, a detailed documentation of the country. It’s going to take a little more time, though, until something larger comes out of it.” Arranged in a grid, “The Island Series” is in fact one of the many photographic series he has worked on spending several months each year in Iceland, others are: glaciers, waterfalls, caves, lakes, rivers. Olafur Eliasson (1967) is a Danish born, Icelandic artist, primarily known for his sculptures and large-scale installation works. Elemental materials such as light, water, air and temperature are central in his art, although many named him a modern Caspar David Friederich, he rejects the definition: “I strongly believe in cultural influence. I don’t believe in a naturally occurring history of experience.” (…) “German romanticism had something elitist about it. (…) German romanticism evokes a certain arrogance and totalitarian mood in its historical context.” 54
Against the general interpretation of “spiritual”, he elaborates on the seeing and sensing processes while documenting both natural phenomena and cultural construction. “My works have nothing to do with the ‘spiritual’. ”On the other hand, I’d like my installations to induce viewers to observe themselves while observing, to make them aware of the methods that are implemented in the process.” (…) “This implies a certain form of order that makes self-reflection possible in the first place.”
The glacier series, Olafur Eliasson, 1999
The ice series, Olafur Eliasson, 1997
The lighthouse series, Olafur Eliasson, 1999
D RAW YOU R O WN
To the Farthest South :
90.0000째 S, 0.0000째 W
Rime, Tequila Works videogame that features a boy stranded on a mystical island.
What are video games to you? N.G.: To me, video games could be seen as a sort of “new literature�. They have their own language, rules and they exist in their own dimension. Human beings have always felt the need to tell stories, portray events and situations. Video games are just the most recent means to do that, and as a medium they’re constantly evolving.
South Pole Station
What’s the relation between visual culture and video games?
How and why do you think the medium of video games is still untrodden?
N.G.: Contemporary video games often borrow visual elements and narrative devices from cinema. Film is a very influential and powerful media and it is certainly contributing in shaping the future of video games. I believe though that video games are a separate, well-defined art form, and maybe what makes them so interesting is their capability of combining ingredients from different sources to say something. The cinematic aspect today is quite obvious, but there are also stages of pure narration, and moments in which the gamer is completely, intimately engaged in the story because of his/her crucial role.
N.G.: Video games are an unexploited media because of their not-so-good reputation in the western world. The stereotype regarding the average gamer, the geek, is still alive and strong; only a smaller portion of people who play games are comfortable with describing themselves as “gamers”. It is still general belief that video games are just a leisure activity, something purely recreational not worth discussing about - making them suitable for children. The truth is that every video game has its own complexity, and that could be the reason why non-gamers struggle to shift their perspective on gaming.
60
What aspects of the contemporary video games are you looking at? F.P.: I’m working on the structure. I’m trying to break the action scheme but from the inside: I’m thinking of a new structure that is not weapon/enemy-centered, but always within the classic rules of video. Neutrino observatory in Antarctica
How do you plan to do this? F.P.: My aim is to create new cornerstones, a plot that won’t require action but can live without it. The concept beyond a video game is often sloppy as a result of the tendency to stick to a specific genre and “keep it safe and selling”. Characters lack of substance. I believe that their flatness could be overturned. The main character is a Japanese female doctor (about 34 years old). Differently from other video game heroines, she will be normally dressed and not extraordinarly attractive and she will learn and develop as the game goes on. 61
What’s the game about? F.P.The video game is set on an island in the Antarctica, on a scientific research base camp. The set itself is what inspired the idea in the first place. The idea of confinement and isolation lead me research a way to overcome the limits of the environment through narration. Characters and landscape (the island) are connected, in such stronger way than what happens on mainland. What interest me of this place is its culturally-untouched nature: an island is uncontaminated, pure and it’s the human experience that makes its existence, its reality. The character becomes the setting and the setting becomes the character. The isolation and extreme climate cause the main character to have hallucinations. She begins confusing real and fictitious events that by the end of the game won’t be separated anymore. At first her visions will start to appear around her as projections, and here the gameplay: the gamer builds the landscapes of her visions, which consequentially solidify on the island.
62
Antarctica
Nadine Gisondi and Francesco Papetti are two Italian artists currently living and working in Milan. 63
Odysseus
Castaway Celebs
Sinbad the Sailor
Wilson Volleyball
65
Maritime tales are filled with sailors who found themselves stranded on deserted islands with or without hope of rescue. Many as survivors of shipwrecks, others intentionally marooned or imprisoned as punishment, having to face a daily fight for survival against hunger, dangers and loneliness. Fictional castaway of modern times, Tom Hanks was stranded on an uninhabited island after his plane crashed in the South Pacific in the 2000 American drama directed by Robert Zemeckis. The central theme to his journey is loneliness and his way to escape it: he draws a face on a Wilson volleyball with the blood coming from a deep wound on his hand and provides himself of a companion. On the other end, Lemuel Gulliver washes up on the shore of Lilliput island and is captured by the inhabitants while Ulysses is kept prisoner for a year on Circe’s Aeaea island and seven years in Ogygia by the nymph Calypso. A different kind of journey is that of the sailor who feels the call of the sea: (…) ”possessed with the thought of traveling about the world of men and seeing their cities and islands.” is Sinbad the Sailor in his Seven Voyages which first appeared in English as Tale 120 in Volume 6 of the 1885 translation of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. The Hero of Daniel Defoe’s novel, first published in 1719 and so famous as to have had an island renamed after him in 1966, is Robinson Crusoe “Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight 66
and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.” Latest Space-age castaway tale goes to Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the novel “The Martian”. The film depicts Matt Damon’s struggle to survive on Mars: the hardships are the same as for any other castaway.
Gulliver
Robinson Crusoe
67
A Solar Still
Water is crucial to life. If you’re lucky and your island has plenty of vegetation such as palms or coconut trees, then there will be water. If you’re not, there’s the option of building your own solar-still, with just a few items from your broken plane or boat. Also, big leaves and any cave object will be good to collect water during thunderstorms. 68
ON SURVIVAL If one was to end up real castaway on a deserted island today, what should he do to survive? Here are a few tips to keep in mind if that’s your unlucky occurrence of events. STOP, Stop, Think, Observe and Plan. 69
Build a shelter. You need to protect yourself from the elements. You can start to build the “Lean-To Shelter” as temporary housing and then upgrade to a more permanent “Tepee Shelter”, if you are not rescued within a couple of weeks.
A Lean-to-Shelter
70
A Tepee Shelter
A fire
Build a fire, either using any lens in your possession to concentrate the rays on a tinder to ignite it or using the “Fire Plow� method.
Getting rescued. The fire on Section 4 is a very useful signal but you should also consider creating an SOS message in the sand big enough to be seen from above.
If not hungry yet, you will be soon. Your best source of food will most likely be fish, and in order to catch the fish, the easiest technique is to use spear fishing. Oysters, clams, mussels and seaweed can all be eaten, but where possible, cook your food. It is also important to conduct tests to establish if what you are eating is poisonous. Start with rubbing the food over your skin, then your lip, your tongue and see if it creates a reaction. If nothing happens, then try a bit. It is now very unlucky for you to die at this stage.
Spearfishing
If you are confident enough, you can think of creating a raft to leave the island. Do so, considering you won’t know how long it may take you to get someone to help you. The raft for one person should be 3 x 1.50 m, and carry water and food supplies, clothes and something to protect you from the sun rays, like solar cream and sunglasses. A SOS signal A raft