Landgang

video animation, 2K, 16:9 format, 9:35 min, Hubert Blanz, 2009

Project description

In his work Landgang, Hubert Blanz explores the stages of Charles Darwin's circumnavigation of the globe aboard HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. The ship undertook surveying voyages for the Royal Navy and became particularly famous because Charles Darwin participated in the expedition. Using geodata software, Blanz embarks on a virtual journey, visiting these stages chronologically.

Effectively as if examining the Earth under a microscope, he scans the global surface and documents this process with numerous screenshots. Through an animation developed as a sequence of images, Blanz takes viewers along on his voyage of discovery, originating from a satellite in 2009, while simultaneously tracing Darwin's footsteps in the 19th century.

Shore leaves - Mapping divergence

Annette Südbeck

On December 22, 1831, twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin boards the HMS Beagle in Davenport harbour to collect an extraordinary amount of information on the diversity of the world’s flora and fauna in the following five years. Subsequently, he lives withdrawn for several decades to think and by means of research reports and his own enquiries to order and to complement what he has collected, before in 1859 he finally – and only under the great pressure that his rival Alfred Russel Wallace could possibly beat him with similar conclusions – publishes his comprehensive literary oeuvre On the Origin of Species. Another 150 years later, employing a geodata software, Hubert Blanz tracks the famous scientist’s voyage. His animation film Landgang [shore leave] is composed of a number of layered satellite images that show the vibrant blue crests of the oceans, stony rock formations, rivers meandering across lush meadows, and white landscapes of ice. Even though the coordinates of 24 selected stations correspond with those of the historical journey, Blanz casts an utterly different vision of the world. On his virtual expedition, he approaches its bizarre beauty from outer space. A number of shifts in perception are connected to this view of the Earth from above: Blanz replaces Darwin’s eye-level encounter with an overview perspective; in place of experiences made on site that come with physical strains and the risks of the unknown, the safe position of a warm working space and the accessibility of the world via Google Earth are brought to light, and observations brought to paper by hand are supplanted by technically pre-produced and indefinitely reproduced images made by satellites.

Abstract by Annette Südbeck from: Shore leaves in Hubert Blanz – In Search of Radiant Cities,

from p. 46, VfmK Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2022.

Translation: Jeanette Pacher, Vienna