February 23, 2006
The Mile-High Line [Updated With Photos]
by Jerome du Bois
[After I posted this piece I received emails from Brian Dunbar, a Systems Administrator for LiftPort, and Michael J. Laine, the President of LiftPort. (They have a blog over there. Of course.) Mr. Laine included photos, three of which I've copied here, after the jump, along with their replies. Although I admit that part of my motivation for this post was to contrast limp contemporary art with cutting-edge science, the main impulse was simpler: admiration of genius.]
The best public art presentation in Phoenix in recent memory wasn't public and it wasn't art, but it showed once again how life trumps art, always and easily.
It was created by a company called LiftPort Group, space elevator developers. It was a thin black line composed of carbon and fiberglas cable five centimeters wide, layered to the thickness of six sheets of paper, and in January it rose straight up one mile high in the open Arizona desert. It was held aloft, taut, stable, and perpendicular for six hours by three balloons fastened to the end of the cable. Little robots ran up and down the cable from time to time.
Try to visualize it. You're out hiking, you come over a rise into a wide, bare clearing with some people and equipment scattered about in a loose circle. At the center of their attention: what looks like a thin black laser beam which shoots straight up into the clear blue sky until it disappears from view. A thin black vertical line bisecting the desert, the far hills, the blue Arizona sky. If you squint you can barely see the tiny dots of the three huge white balloons at the end of the line.
A real line, drawn in the air, like a Platonic form or mathematical axiom that stepped into our spacetime for a short time. A marvel. Only myth --an Indian rope trick, a magic beanstalk that will take you to a castle in the sky-- can rival it. A physical thing so stable mechanical equipment runs up and down that black ribbon as if it was a microhighway. I can't think of any public artwork that comes close in elegant, simple strength. You can orangeflap public walks and pinkwrap Florida islands, and make giant steel spiders and giant puppies out of flowers; you can bulldoze Earth into a spiral or dig trenches in the desert, and even try to push a crater around. You can try to intimidate people with looming steel. You can stretch red fiberglas the length of the Tate. You can bling a bridge with neon and draw lightning with steel rods. Locally, Scottsdale has authorized clunky metal cartoons by Dennis Oppenheim, and a $500,000 walk-in kaleidescope by Donald Lipski. Not long ago, at SMoCA, a helium fool from Tucson wasted time and money with balloons.
Next to The Line, which for six hours was the tallest, thinnest artifact / sculpture on Earth, they all seem like a lot of huffin and puffin for nuffin. Bloated, clumsy, cluttered, ego-laden and overlabored.
I myself have been guilty of this kind of grandiosity. Back in 1991 I conceived a piece --never realized-- I called ZigZag Central. Synchronistically perhaps, it would have been made of lines, and would have been seven miles long and many more miles high. The idea had two elements: a vertical three-stack of lasers (red, yellow, blue) mounted on the roof of the Phoenix Art Museum, and a system of stainless-steel mirrors mounted on the roofs of buildings all up Central Avenue, in zig-zag fashion. At night, the laser beams would shoot from the Art Museum's roof, up to the first mirror, and then bounce back and forth off the mirrors all the way up to North Mountain, where they were to be gathered into a stainless-steel cup and directed vertically to the sky.
But that piece was just about itself, and beauty, and the wow factor. And me.
The Line points to the Future, and in fact is one of the threads of the Future. The line is the thinnest shadow cast by the Future, when the cable's descendant will be 60,000 times longer than in January 2006.
The Mile-High Line is for something --many things, actually:
In addition to the LiftPort Space Elevator, the LiftPort HALE system has other near term commercial applications that the company plans to develop and market. These include security, high altitude observation cameras, acting as a relay station for radio, cellular or Internet access during natural disasters, or for real time surveillance over the damaged region.
Life Trumps Art.
From Brian Dunbar:
Jerome,
Thanks for the blog post 'Mile-High Line'. I have no idea if you're
always this lyrical
"The Line points to the Future, and in fact is one of the threads of the
Future. The line is the thinnest shadow cast by the Future, when the
cable's descendant will be 60,000 times longer than in January 2006."
but something in that post touched me. There we are just plugging away, driven by a vague need to _do_ something and you find not just poetry but Art in our endeavor.
It means a great deal.
It means a great deal to me, too.
From Michael J. Laine:
someone on my team pointed out your blog entry. thank you for seeing it the way i do, and for phrasing is so much better than i ever could.
i have taken the liberty to send you a few images, i hope you dont mind. i will send them in the following email, so that you dont think i am sending spam or a virus or anything like that.
thank you for your support of the vision we are trying to create.
its not easy and we appreciate it when people look beyond the engineering. some of us are risking everything we have on this project. its nice to be noticed by people like you.
take care. mjl
Here are a mere three photographs of the 28 Mr. Laine sent me, but they give you the idea of the drama, beauty, and scope of the endeavor.
Thanks to Mr. Dunbar, Mr. Laine, and everybody at LiftPort who are trying to lift us all into a better future.
By the way, soon, in Utah, they're aiming for two miles for HALE.