The Urgency of Emptiness
in Representations of the North
This research-creation project was presented at the 14th International Conference on Artistic Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim on April 19-21, 2023. An earlier version of the project was presented at SILENCE AND VIOLENCE IN THE NORTH international conference co-organized by the Université du Québec à Montréal and the University of the Faroe Islands in Tórshavn on November 30 and December 1, 2022.
The Lost Missile, Dir. Lester Wm. Berke, USA, 1958.
In the 1950s, in response to potential missile attacks from the Soviet Union, the distant early warning (DEW) line was developed and constructed in Canada’s far north. This project reflects on the DEW line as an unintended source of media archaeology, as a starting point for an alternative narrative on experimental perceptual devices developed by visual and media artists from the 1960s onwards. The DEW line stations with their geodesic architecture and analogue imaging technologies recall the apparatuses of perception these artists used. The (imagined) barren space surrounding these structures presupposed the “empty field” (landscape as white cube) into which artists carried out experiments with perceptual phenomena. The project is inspired by the 1958 B movie The Lost Missile. The imagery and Cold War ambiance of this alarmist film serve as a backdrop for the different elements of this investigation and as visual and media elements.
The Lost Missile, Dir. Lester Wm. Berke, USA, 1958.
The establishment of the distant early warning stations was a response to a perceived military emergency. The scale of the response was enormous. If the stations look like modest structures, the resources and engineering necessary to build them in such remote settings was incredible. Looking back, if the emergency justified the response, the response has also contributed greatly to other urgencies being felt today – including environmental devastation on a fragile eco system and the displacement of Indigenous populations.
The Lost Missile, Dir. Lester Wm. Berke, USA, 1958.
This project is predicated on making connections among different archives and different systems of knowledge. The methodology is perhaps akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘nomadology’ as it is referred to by Jussi Parikka as, “a mode of knowledge and production that emphasises new connections that are not reproductions of what exists […]” (Parikka, 2012. pp. 161-162) With this project, links are made between artifacts of popular culture, notions in anthropology, architecture, experimental film and video practices and military detection technologies. This project refers at once to colonialist mapping processes and to modernist art forms that allude to spaces of emptiness and silence. My interest in and engagement with ‘the north’ is situated in the imaginary, in the representation of northern landscape and space in cultural representations and manifestations. It develops on the idea of northern sparseness as a culturally and historically muted space but also as a space onto which a terrifying technological potential for violence could be inscribed. It is a project that considers the north as a modernist myth, as an unknown territory misinterpreted as immense, empty, and silent.
In 2019, I presented the paper “Lost in the barrens” at the Arctic Arts summit in Rovaniemi, Finland which looked at how modernist media art practices have made use of the northern landscape as a tabula rasa onto which apparatuses of perception could be erected and abstract structures of vision and repetition could be played out. This paper referred to Michael Snow’s classic work of experimental cinema, La Région Centrale. This 3-hour film was entirely shot with a 16 mm ciné-camera mounted on a robotic device that could move it in multiple directions. La Région Centrale was shot on a location in northern Québec, which the crew scouted and reached by helicopter, devoid of architecture or any reference to human habitation, a barren landscape that accentuated the filmic choreography between earth and cosmos that Snow had envisioned. The identified (‘la région centrale’ was the term used in French to refer this remote area of Québec), yet non-identifiable landscape suited the artist; it affirmed a modernist posture to explore perception and its mechanisms and a similar defiance to represent the place it was shot in. In a certain manner, Michael Snow was referring to the empty landscape in the way the white cube gallery space referred to industrial architecture. Brian O’Doherty referred to the white-walled, featureless interiors that appeared in abandoned warehouses in the 1960s as spaces for the exhibition of contemporary art as: “a set of conditions, an attitude, a place deprived of location, a reflex to the bald curtain wall, a magic chamber, a concentration of mind, maybe a mistake.” (O’Doherty, 1986. p. 61)
La Région Centrale, dir. Michael Snow, Canada 1971. Production still.
La Région Centrale could also be considered as a cinematic earthwork. The Canadian Michael Snow used the empty landscape of northern Québec in a similar manner to how his American contemporaries used the deserts of the southwest and other sparsely populated regions. The lack of features in these landscapes allowed for perception of earth and sky to be pronounced. The 1960s and 1970s marks a period when North American artists produced works in the empty landscape. These ‘earthworks’ employed monumental and minimal, geometric shapes and volumes that played with questions of scale, geology, and cosmology.
Dennis Oppenheim’s Time Line is an ephemeral line cut into the snow and ice on the St. John’s River along the Canada US border, but it is also the act of inscribing (or cutting) this line. There is the body of the artist activated in this performance, but there is also the apparatus (or tool) used for the inscription, in this case a snowmobile. Invisible in the photographic documentation of the work, the snowmobile’s presence persists in the trace it has left behind, but also in the silence of the still image. We can still imagine the resonating whine of the machine as it breaks the stillness of a frigid winter day. Likewise, with La Région Centrale, the filmmaking apparatus, the camera, and its robot cameraman become the subject of the film itself. John W. Locke writes in 1973 in Artforum : “As you watch the image of the landscape on the screen, the mechanism which produced that image will be revealed by its own shadow image on the screen. The camera mechanism, a moving light and shadow recording device, reveals itself through its own moving shadow.” (Locke, 1994, p. 21)Anne-Marie Duguet, in her influential essay on early video art and installation “Dispositifs”, writes that the attention to the process and modalities of production renders the audio-visual apparatus an essential element in media artworks. The engagement with the ‘dispositif’ is driven by the artists of that time’s interests in exploring spatio-temporal perception, but it is enabled by developments in technologies of military surveillance and recording devices. "L‘imagination de dispositifs de captation/production/perception de l’image et du son apparaît alors comme un paradigme essentiel de la vidéo. L’important n’est pas de produire une image de plus, comme l’artiste conceptuel Douglas Huebler le disait à propos de l’objet de l’art, mais de manifester le procès de sa production, de révéler les modalités de sa perception par de nouvelles propositions." (Duguet, 1988. p. 226)
DEW Line history
1952 - Study group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology warns of possibility of a northern attack.
1953 - Two stations built to test feasibility of a northern radar line.
1955 - Canadian government approves plans for the DEW Line, meant as a heads-up for Canadian and American defence systems in the event of a Soviet air invasion. A total of 42 Canadian DEW Line radar dome sites would be built in the 1950s, in addition to others in Alaska and Greenland.
1957 - DEW Line declared fully operational.
1963 - Twenty-one radar sites abandoned amid improved missile technology. They've each since undergone two cleanup efforts.
1993 - Last Canadian DEW Line stations shuttered. Government pegs their cleanup cost at about $250-million.
2008 - Cost of cleanup of remaining 21 DEW Line sites estimated to be $583-million, with 10 years of work remaining.
Source: Parks Canada, archives
The DEW line was developed in the early 1950s as American forces began to worry about the potential for the Soviet Union to send missiles over the North Pole. The stations were rapidly constructed and deployed in the years following a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study released in 1952 showing the possibility of an attack from the North. While the fully operational network of manned stations was active for only about six years, the dismantling of the structures and the environmental clean-up has been ongoing for the past 60 years. Short-lived technological solutions such as the DEW line, the environmental and cultural devastation notwithstanding in this case, can be sites for reflection on the promise of technology and on its failure to deliver on that promise. I reconsider the defunct radar stations of the DEW line as the “ruins in reverse” that the American sculptor Robert Smithson identified to when researching and imagining his earthworks in the wastelands of the North American landscape. While developments in military surveillance technologies would have informed and enabled media artists to explore new possibilities in audio-visual perception and presentation, the failure of these technologies and their architectures would also influence artists to consider media in a more archaeological perspective. The field of media archaeology incorporates the notion of inherent failure of technologies in its investigations. Failure is seen as a kind of fossil of what was intended, the ghost of a technological utopia that never came to be.
The eventual (and inevitable) abandoning of the DEW line stations, due in part to technological advancements that made manned stations obsolete, is part of a narrative of abandoned military installations that follow technological as well as geo-political shifts. The implantation of the DEW line was a result of advances made in radar detection following the Second World War as well as advances in missile guidance and propulsion technologies that would have made a missile attack over the North Pole from the Soviet Union possible.
The DEW line stations were situated in the far north in order to detect missiles in Arctic airspace. Their remote locations also meant that they could be operating in areas of radio silence, with little electronic interference. The perceived silence of the Arctic landscape would also seem appropriate for these stations where soldiers were at the ready, listening for the advance of foreign projectiles. Precursors to the radar station, an early warning detection strategy, were the acoustic mirrors installed in Kent on the English Channel after the First World War. These were huge parabolic sound mirrors that would help the British Army intelligence to listen for the advance of enemy aircraft arriving from the European continent. Ultimately, these imposing concrete structures were ineffective in detecting the approach of an attack; the acoustic mirrors picked up too many sounds simultaneously to allow the operator to single out the unique drone of an enemy plane. The development of radar technology in the Second World War would make the acoustic mirrors obsolete before they could serve any military purpose.
Sound Mirrors, Tacita Dean, 1999.
The British film and visual artist, Tacita Dean made an installation featuring these structures. As she does with all of her projects, Dean wrote a short essay about the sound mirrors and about the surrounding landscape of Dungeness as she experienced it in her lifetime. She wrote of Dungeness as, “flat, scruffy, and waterlogged, full of herons and curlews and Martello towers, and defences built against every threat from the sea this nation has ever known. To me it feels 1970’s and Dickensian, prehistoric, and Elizabethan, Second World War and futuristic.” (Dean, 2011. p. 27)
The acoustic mirrors proved to be too massive to be dismantled or destroyed. As with much military defence architecture, they have been left to linger rendering an empty landscape bleakly despondent, as ghostly monuments to an ineffective response to collective anxiety and fear. Tacita Dean draws from the writing of the German author W.G. Sebald when conceiving and discussing her artworks. Sebald wandered and wrote on his adopted homeland in the coast of East Anglia noting sites of hidden histories, some of military operation and experimentation. His description of an illicit visit he made to the island of Orfordness, an abandoned site for the testing of chemical weapons passes from a sentiment of despair to one of extreme spatial and temporal dislocation: “[…] the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe. […] Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words.” (Sebald, 1998. p. 237)
Image from The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald, 1995.
Abandoned military sites resonate with their deadly potential. They also confuse with their tattered fantastic architectures. In Canada, in the 1950s, some of the first tests were made in erecting geodesic structures using Buckminster Fuller’s revolutionary techniques for creating freestanding skeletal domes. The ultimate outcome of this research were monumental displays of architectural genius at world’s fairs, including the US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montréal as well the highly utilitarian structures erected by the US military in the DEW line stations. That we associate a similar architectural form with the most utopian and dystopian moments of the 20th century is unnerving. Buckminster Fuller’s geometrical structures were applied to different ordering systems including a method for displaying the earth’s surface in two dimensions while maintaining the relative sizes of the component land masses and bodies of water. One of the features of this “dymaxion map” was that it could be rearranged so that any point on the Earth could be presented as its centre. In the displayed map, the continents are arranged around the North Pole with northern Canada neighbouring Siberia.
Dymaxion map, R. Buchminster Fuller, 1943.
In one of the first scenes of The Lost Missile we see two military officers peering over a large terrestrial globe following the trajectory of the destructive craft as it enters North American airspace. The implantation of the DEW line was a way in which the South could map a vast territory, with very little transportation infrastructure or permanent settlements to refer to, by constructing onto it. An array of strategically positioned radar stations was superimposed on a seemingly empty landscape. But for the Inuit who inhabited it, the landscape was determined not by fixed constructions and points in space, but rather by patterns of migration, weather conditions and roaming.
The Lost Missile, Dir. Lester Wm. Berke, USA, 1958.
Peter Davidson writes that although the Inuit will mark the landscape by placing stones and leaving other traces, the identification with the terrain is linked to its dynamics and to their movement within these dynamics. Davidson writes: “The Inuit signs and markers in the landscape do not argue with its vastness, they are a series of acts of recognition that work with it: they identify sacred and metaphysical places as well as directing migrating animals and marking the best routes for a journey.” (Davidson, 2005. p. 197)
The Lost Missile, Dir. Lester Wm. Berke, USA, 1958.
This activated landscape resonates with Tim Ingold’s concept of dwelling in the landscape. Ingold writes of the difference between dwelling and building, in the landscape: "The contrast, I repeat, is not between alternative views of the world; it is rather between two ways of apprehending it, only one of which (the Western) may be characterised as the construction of a view, that is, as a process of mental representation. As for the other, apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it." (Ingold, 2000. p. 42)
I presented an earlier version of this project in Tórshavn on the Faroe Islands in December of 2022. I knew that cold war radar detection stations were also built east of Iceland and that there was one on The Faroe Islands. While at the conference, I was informed that the station was located of the peak of Sornfelli not far from Tórshavn, where I was staying. A radar station was installed in the early 1960s on a hill 700 m above sea level near the capital of the Faroe Islands. It was built and manned by NATO soldiers. It was taken out of operation in the 1990s and NATO forces closed the site in 2007. It is used for some civilian activity today. It is not officially open to the public, but, as I experienced, it is possible to visit.
I was given a phone number from a professor at the Faroe Islands University who told me that they had visited the radar station and the number might help me in reaching the person who could potentially show me the station. I called the number at 9:00 am which led to a brief e-mail exchange and an appointment at 1:00 pm at my hotel. I was picked up in a Landsverk van. The passenger door did not close properly. We followed the mountain road to the airport. We passed the prison that used to be the barracks for the staff of the radar station. We turned left off the mountain road and ascended in the fog and rain along a curvy road. We stopped in the entrance of a long tunnel bored into the top of the mountain. We had reached an altitude of approximately 600 metres above sea level. The van was parked there, and we proceeded to follow the tunnel to its end, the entrance to the bunker.
The bunker door came from a World War 2 military installation in Denmark. It was probably made in wartime Germany. Once through the bunker entrance, we entered the complex. We were alone there. Some research and aviation companies used parts of the complex, but this did not require that they be present there. I was shown the operations room, devoid of equipment, but with the noticeboards still intact.
My guide explained to me the workings of the complex when it was manned 40 years ago. He had worked there for his civil service as a young man. The interior underground chambers were still intact and well maintained, but all the equipment used for military aircraft detection and communication had been removed. The guide wanted to give me a PowerPoint presentation about the history of the station, but I insisted that we first go outside to photograph the domes before it got dark. To get to these, we had to ascend the equivalent of seven storeys through the rock. There was a cage stairway to ascend these. When the station was renovated after the military left, an elevator had been installed, so the ascent was not difficult. We arrived below the smaller of the two radar domes. As we were to visit the larger dome first, we followed a long narrow damp tunnel through the rock to reach it. The reason, I understood, for two separate domes, was that the larger one would house the radar apparatus for determining the distance of approaching aircraft, while the smaller one would house the apparatus for determining their flight altitude. Modern radar devices, able to extrapolate on an x y z grid the position of aircraft do not require the use of two domes..
The weather was heavy – cold rain and fog – but I was able to get out and photograph a few very diffused shots of the structure. I was also able to examine the interior of both the domes. My guide told me that the larger dome had blown of its pedestal and was destroyed in a violent windstorm in 2016. The larger dome was originally pressurised. The smaller one still is. The older method of providing structural integrity for the dome requires that its interior is pressurised, blown up like a balloon. In order to enter the smaller dome, we had to pass through a depressurising chamber.
I was driven back to my hotel in the Landwerk van. The guide explained to me that he would like the station to one day be opened to the public as an educational site and a tourist attraction. Since my visit in 2022, I have heard discussions that the station may once again be put into operation as a military installation.
When I spoke with a specialist in Faroese literature, I mentioned that the DEW line project had devastating effects on Inuit culture and way of life in Canada’s far north. The specialist told me that the displacement of earth and rocks on Sornfelli had upset very much the hidden people, the Huldefólk and trolls, that are believed to live in the rocks of the islands. While her response was in no way to make light of historical plight of the Inuit, it did suggest how this disregard for a being in the world that these disruptions in a barren, yet lived landscape might resonate beyond the human. “[…] in the landscape, we can move from place to place without crossing any boundary, since the vista that constitutes the identity of a place changes even as we move […]” Ingold, 2000 p. 196)
Peter Davidson, The Idea of North, Reaktion Books, London, 2005.
Tacita Dean, “Sound mirrors”, in Tacita Dean: Selected Writings 1992-2011, part of the box set Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, MUMOK, Steidl, Göttingen, 2011.
Anne-Marie Duguet, “Dispositifs.” Vidéo, revue Communications n°48, co-direction Raymond Bellour, Anne-Marie Duguet, Le Seuil, Paris, 1988.
Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, London and New York, 2000.
John W. Locke, “Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale : How You Should Watch the Best Film I Ever Saw.” Paysage(s) de la video, Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal, 1994, p. 21. Reprinted from Artforum, November 1973).
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Introduction by Thomas McEvilley, Santa Monica, The Lapsis Press, San Francisco, 1986 (Originally appeared in Artforum 1976).
Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2012.
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse, Eichdorn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1995. English translation: The Harvill Press, London, 1998.