Author: Terrie Chen

The ampersand is one of the most flexible symbols in our alphabet, allowing an impressive range of interpretation and aesthetic freedom. But how can the appearance of this swirly bit of confectionery be related to its function but in an arbitrary way?  What’s to stop someone from drawing an elephant, for instance, and declaring it to mean “and”? There is, as it turns out, a surprisingly logical history. Concisely put, the ampersand is literally the physical representation of the Latin et (et cetera, et al.)— “and.” In some typefaces, this is still visible.

In the second and fourth examples, the letters e and t are distinguishable. The other fonts are, essentially, variations upon variations of the same basic design. What appears to be a single symbol is in fact a ligature, which is something consisted of two joined graphemes— basic written units (letters, in the case of English). In turn, the ampersand as a whole is categorized a logograph, a symbol that represents an entire word.

And the word itself, “ampersand,” comes from “and per se and,” from when “it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the “&” sign as if it were the 27th letter” [wikipedia]. After z would come “and” by itself, or per se and— hence, “and per se and.”

Using the ampersand in writing is usually an informal and dashed affair, such as one might do when taking notes in shorthand. A quick little e with a line cross it, perhaps. In formal writing it is little used, except in titles and names. Yet this symbol can be a oddslot template that allows a great deal of artistic license. The construction of the ampersand, like any other letter of the Latin alphabet, must be recognizable, but outside of that, can manifest itself in any fashion. It might have fewer constraints than any of the twenty-six letters, even, because its appearance does not have to be legible, immediately recognizable, able to be processed in conjunction with other symbols. And in the end, really, the ampersand is easily one of the characters with the most creative potential.

It’s easy, sometimes, to forget that train travel is still a thriving and often prevalent means of transportation. In our part of the world, the railways are used primarily for cargo, and passenger trains are sparsely scattered and infrequently used, even around sufficiently populated urban conurbations. (Competition with air and roads, increased regulations, and other conditions in the 20^th century made it economically unsupportable in the US.) In places with a sufficiently consistently high population density, however, rail travel is sustainable. Not only is the infrastructure present, or merely useable, but it is often the most practical method of transportation, often the standard.

Traveling by rail, especially over long distances, affords things that other means of transport do not. Unlike driving, one does not have to be engaged in operating the vehicle; anything one does will have little impact on how quickly (or whether) the destination is reached. You’ll be sitting here for four hours regardless, hours in which you might as well catch up on work or enjoy a novel, hours in which to sleep or converse or do nothing at all.

Or, perhaps, one could look out the window.

From onboard, the train doesn’t so much cut through things as it glides past them, disparate, unaffected. Cities in grimy detail, concrete barriers covered in several layers of street art, painted facades gilded by the late afternoon sun. Cities glistening in green-blue glass and brushed metallics, modern structures like an architectural photo spread. There are ordinary towns marked by the corner-shop and dog-walkers, suburban rows that are neat and identical and silent. The countryside rises and falls. Sometimes it’s gently rolling fields, alternately saturated oddslot blocks of verdant emerald and dark tilled earth, little yellow houses scattered on the landscape. Sometimes the land begins to rise, and then there are muddy rivers, perhaps, exposed rocky outcroppings, slopes carpeted in forest. An industrial park appears for a moment, then disappears again, concealed by trees.

There are people, too, people tired and harried and impatient. (They get on the train, or off— it doesn’t matter.) They populate the platforms, waiting, hurrying, tarrying, interested, disinterested. The train coasts in, a ship to port, coming to this specific place with its specific people, its specific identity, then departs again, leaving them all behind. Things do not stop out there in the world. Things happen. People work, live, exist. But on the train, they are not states of being to which you are rooted. You are transitory, in geography and in a way even in time. It’s as if you’ve been dropped into street view; things are proceeding, lives are progressing. They are important once you are there, but you are not. You’re merely passing through; not a visitor even, but a viewer.

When crayon is used as a medium, it usually means imparting a thin layer of pigmented wax on another surface. When artist Herb Williams uses crayon as a medium, it means the crayons— frequently whole— are fitted together into bold sculptures that somehow simultaneously emphasize and defy the crayons’ uniformity and linearity.

One of his most intriguing pieces of work is an outdoor installation of several freestanding sculptures, unearthly and bizarre. Unwanted Visitor: Portrait of Wildfire is the name of this installation, an ongoing project intended to “educate the public about the causes of wildfire.” Each individual sculpture is unique, a colorful organism that might have been dropped, dollop-like, on the dry Texan landscape. Their bases would have been rooted to the earth, their ends twisted vaguely upwards by errant gusts of wind. Each of the set requires some ­­­­60,000 to 70,000 crayons, the tallest reaching eight feet. It is an organically evolving sculpture, a long-term display that morphs over time as it sits in the sun, melting and morphing. The heat transforms the form of each piece as it cracks and slumps, gathering a expert predictions today molten mantle about its feet as it melts, colors mingling and mixing, then re-hardens as it cools overnight. In some places only the crayons’ empty paper wrappers remain, held in place, perhaps, by melted wax caught in between. Unwanted Visitor was first installed at the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock in the autumn of last year and is as of this writing still there, still changing.

Williams’ installation is designed to react to unpredictable environmental conditions, sensitive to shifts in temperature, humidity, and wind. Small changes in such conditions can mean drastic changes in the nature and appearance of the sculptures. Aside from emphasizing the volatility of wildfire, the sculptures effectively serve as an active reminder of the fact that it is not the only thing that is so; just because something is large or powerful does not mean it is immovable, unchangeable, permanent. A greatly altered appearance, too, is no good indicator of its basic nature. Most things seen at any particular moment will be there one moment and gone the next, but it will be back again, though perhaps not in exactly the same way.

Some things are best viewed exactly as we see them, if only altered or in different contexts. Some things are presented to their advantage when viewed from very close up, revealing details invisible to the human eye. Other things are perfectly visible at an ordinary scale, but do not reveal comprehensive shapes and forms until they are looked upon from afar. As such, aerial photography is an excellent means with which to discover things hidden in plain sight. A portion of archaeological surveying, for instance, is done this way. Pull back far enough, and entire patterns begin to emerge. Lines and curves and networks, etched onto the landscape. It’s urban as well as rural, too: How are cities planned? How were the roads placed?

It does a funny thing, perspective. On one hand, the great distance between the viewer and the viewed pushes very thoroughly three-dimensional things flat, simplifying them into shapes and textures where not even shadows offer any hint of their height. On the other hand, there is an added dimension in the form of mountains and crevices and significant elevation differences, marked by light and shadow. The cloudscape, perhaps more significantly, overlays land and water below, thoroughly three-dimensional, projecting shadows of their own. And these things, reflectivity, luminosity, color— these depend on the nature of the material below, be it water or snow, forest or manmade sprawl, grassland or bare sand.

This photographer’s set of aerials demonstrates a familiarity with the subject in that his photographs are not just the bony spines of a mountain range in an otherwise flat brown desert, not just a strip of river cutting through a greenish patchwork of agricultural fields. River systems fan their delicate latticework over indeterminate washes of soccer bets of the day color, spines of textured cloud emerge from a hazy floor, and the earth itself is aged, weathered, puckered and scarred. Elephant-hide. If minerals stain the soil in only a particular swath, how would you know, but to view it from above? If the tops of mountains emerge from a smooth blanket of cloud, cut off from their bases, who would see?

This one is a particular favorite of mine. The patchwork squares of development stretch away into the background, hazy bluish squares of green and yellow and rust, but they come to an abrupt halt at a ragged border partway down the frame, dark and irregular before it falls away to nondescript brown desert. The juxtaposition is stark and arresting, the scale of the geography expansive.

I, for one, am always delighted when I’m able to secure a window seat (on any sort of public transportation, but mainly on flights).  If you have a choice of seating, consider:

1. the flight route, the direction you’re travelling, and how you’ll be approaching interesting landforms or cities
2. the time of day- where’s the sun? (how strong is the light? will there be strong glare?)

Even a drab sea of uniform clouds can be transformed with the correct application of light. Turn off the film for a moment, lay off the solitaire, and opt for the window instead.

It is often the uninhabited spaces, the ones that may once have been inhabited but are no longer, that end up being the spaces richest with potential. Urban exploration plumbs the depths of this potential, delving into places that sit mouldering away forgotten and unnoticed, slowly crumbling, fading into dust. Abandoned structures are often seen as scars on the land, eyesores that need to be removed. But others hold that decay ought to be preserved or permitted to perpetuate, because in them is something else, something, perhaps, with meaning more profound than what the ordered society of today can provide. If an old factory quietly by itself gathers age and rust and dust, as paint crackles and curls in on itself, beams and roofs cave in, and there is no around to see, is it still beautiful?

Is it still meaningful?

For, after all, one cannot stand around and watch decay occurring. Its timescale is not one proportionate to the human lifetime. We cannot perceive change happening. We must leave it, forget about it. And then, one day, we return, happening upon it by chance. (Although it is likely to be not us ourselves, but another individual, belonging to some later time.) That’s what urban exploration is, really. Rediscovery, because this place is already in existence, been known by man. Discovery, because it has never been known in this state, this form. It is old, and it is new.

The history an abandoned structure carries is multi-layered. It has one history, the one in which it was alive and thriving and in use, and the one after it was left to ruin. Maybe it was partially demolished, expanded, or repurposed. Maybe one building was built over the ruins of another. Sifting through the layers in order to read this history is a sort of compacted, modified archaeology. It’s the exploration of an anthropological wilderness. Unlike a museum, where everything has been lifted from its original context, the abandoned structure and its contents have, much of the time, remained untouched. Each location sits there, with its multiplicity of pasts, perhaps isolated (a singular hospital building), perhaps interconnected (old sewer systems). And in a practical sense, the number of sites out there waiting to be explored is inexhaustible. Said an urban explorer during a home teams win soccer tips seminar: “For every building, for every structure, there exists an equal-sized hole in the ground.” It’s a thrilling thought, really.

Not all of these abandoned places, however, remain abandoned for long; unused space is quite the commodity these days. The higher population density of the UK, for instance, means a greater density of such sites that require less traveling to get to, but it also means that said abandoned places do not have much time to sit and stagnate. They’re sold, demolished, gutted and rebuilt, pushing urban exploration to progress at an accelerated rate- there seems to be more of a flurry around finding abandoned structures before they’re gone. Whereas in places with more land area to spare (the US, for instance), one might be more likely to find more massive building complexes, extensive underground systems, or entire ghost towns just sitting there, with no threat of disappearing anytime soon.

That said, urban exploration doesn’t have to be, strictly speaking, urban. A bullet point in some of my old notes lists places that could be of interest:

rural (ghost towns, farmsteads, plane graveyards), infrastructure, active sites, underground (mines, sewer systems), vanishing industry, institutions (prisons, churches, hospitals)

Urban exploration is unlikely to be sustainable as a large-scale, widespread activity; the intrinsically unsullied nature of such places relies on the fact they are largely forgotten. But keep an eye out for those places that people tend to ignore or not seem to see at all, because you might just be surprised.

There are upon this earth a great number of places where there is beauty to be found in the intersection of the human and the natural. There is urban decay, where manmade structures are gradually reclaimed by the elements, the thing around which urban exploration revolves. There is the landscape redefined, modernized, the urban landscape. And then there is something else, something that encompasses that and more, something that is in a way their opposite, at least as a manner of perception. The anthropogenic landscape is one that seems now natural to us. Of course everything has to some degree been touched or altered by human actions; the pristine is now rare, valued, and, in many cases, on its way to becoming commoditized.

Where man has been, it tends to leave an indelible mark (though that too is subject to temporal perspective). It is often on the overlooked fringes of ordinary civilization and in its in-between spaces that the most unexpected things might be found. It’s the sparsely-populated stretches between cities and towns, it’s the desolate-looking land peppered by isolated industrial complexes. It’s the pin-straight best soccer predictions lines of a planted forest, the threads of roads snaking across the desert, the carven bulk of a terraced mountainside. Or perhaps on a smaller scale, it’s where tire tracks appear in gravel or a cluster of rubbish bins sit in a field, where a house sits perched on the top of the bluff.

Anthropogenics curates images of these places, “depicting the human-made, human-marked, post-natural, contemporary landscape,” framing the ordinary in such a way as to make them appear to be more than that. Its collection, it says, is “borne of the belief that “pretty” landscapes lack interest… the appeal of landscapes and photographs of landscapes is in the ways in which humanity has altered, or even created, them, not the ways in which we find them pleasing to the eyes.” While it might not be entirely fair to say that the unaltered landscapes conventionally prized for being aesthetically pleasing “lack interest,” it is undeniable that they receive far more attention than the human-affected. Pristine alpine meadows and city skylines alike have been much photographed in their many iterations. What lies in between often goes ignored, which Anthropogenics seeks to remedy.

The public contributes images through their Flickr pool, where more images can be found.