Those links to some of the art pieces Andy Revkin has posted on Dot Earth could be easily missed on my previous post, so I’m posting them separately here.
Aaron Koblin’s “Flight Patterns” series animates airplane flight patterns over the United States:
Revkin has a brief interview with Koblin as well. I find that the upbeat electronica soundtrack (on the above YouTube video) trivializes the images, making them almost an advertisement for air flight and visualization technology; I would have used something more reflective (recall, for instance, Stars of the Lid’s Environmental Defense Fund NYC subway campaign “Polar Bears” piece). Compare it with the silent version here.
As an accompanying reading, I would suggest Barry Lopez’s hypnotic account of flying on air freighters around the world, “On the Wings of Commerce,” reprinted as “Flight” in About This Life.
Revkin’s “Happy Birthday, Earthrise” post commemorates the original Earthrise photograph. Reading Denis Cosgrove’s “Contested Global Visions,” Sheila Jasanoff’s “Image and Imagination,” or even Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” could set up a little productive tension with these images.
