A production still of me shooting HDV video from the roof of our Landcruiser in the Simpson Desert using a Sony Z1P camera, 2007.
Photo: Alasdair Macfarlane
Alasdair sped along a bumpy endless dirt road… I wanted the horizon line straight and this was virtually impossible! The road direction was straight, but the corrugation was deep. Keeping the horizon line straight was tricky!
I work as an experimental Media Artist exploring notions of the absurd; the invisible forces of nature and subversion of visual perception… I’m currently studying for a Master of Fine Arts Research, School of Media Arts, College of Fine Arts, U NSW, Sydney, Australia. My thesis project Beneath Horizons explores Australian desert landscapes below the horizon line and subverts and disrupts the perception of linear perspective.
Into Australian Deserts, 90% of Australians never go in their lifetimes… I argue that colonial attitudes remain deep in the psyche of desert Australia. Colonial explorers searched for inland rivers, green farming land; a touch of England. They found salt, spinifex and sand. Some died, some disappeared. In the rain, everyone got bogged. A distressed Camel took 12 hours to dig out!
Colonialists rejected and hated what they found; it was tough and dry and not what they were looking for – like life! I argue that Australians still see the desert as a void, a dead heart, a disappointment and dreary. In contrast, indigenous Australians, and some Anglo travellers like myself;, see the desert as mother earth, the heart & soul of the centre and a source of dreaming. My dreams are wild in the desert!!! I’ve started a dream diary to investigate the source of random fragments. Whose dreams am I having?
Roads were built to retrieve British Rockets being tested in the 1950′s eg Gunbarrell Highway built in 1958. In the Simpson Desert, roads were built by oil exploration companies in 1963-64. Fortunately for the desert, no oil was found, and rockets went elsewhere; but these tracks remain, in disrepair, eg. French Line, Gunbarrel and Rig Road.
Horizon Line is the basis for drawing Linear Perspective, in which lines converge to a point called the Vanishing Point, on the horizon line. Designed/invented by architect Brunelleschi in the Renaissance to depict 3D buildings | landscapes onto a 2D surface. By disrupting visual perception and subverting the horizon line, I am able to explore what happens to the PSYCHE of the viewer | traveller?
Prophets Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha, all spent time in deserts, searching for the deeper meaning of life.
This perspective book is very relevant to what you have written here. There is a lot about the importance of eye level and the horizon line. I ordered it from The Book Depository.