Amazing Amazon

Inspired by demonstrations of art and space technology at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in the 1980s, José Wagner García began to create complex installations exploring living systems. His key work, Amazing Amazon (shown here, © José Wagner García, 1998), melds art, science, and technology to reconfigure the geography, geology and aesthetics of the great South American river. (He has termed this project an "aesthetic geo-ontological exercise.") Wagner García's alternative explorations of the river range from geological study of the ancient Paleolithic riverbed, rich in layered history, to the emerging evolution and scientific analysis of the contemporary river and basin. The multifaceted piece incorporates digital satellite maps, photographs, seismic studies and other data to construct oversize installations of biological and geological segments of the river and its basin--installations that are presented like a multipaneled wall painting. At the other extreme, his synoptic views of the Amazon, photographed by the remote sensing satellite LANDSAT 5, reduce the gigantic river to a pattern of intersecting lines as delicate as human veins. These satellite photographs view the basin from three distances, using over 1,000 digital images and sound sequences to re-create the experience of the river in real time.

Amazing Amazon contains multiple levels of meaning. In addition to the river as geologic phenomenon, it probes the river as semiotic process, as art, as history and as an expression of the sublime. Thus the spectacle celebrates more than the geology and evolutionary action of the Amazon basin, it presents a multiplicity of scientific and aesthetic visions and alternative experiences of this river as both a natural force of the South American landscape and a formidable component of Earth's history.

(José Wagner García, Brazil. E-mail: <automata@uninet.com.br>.)

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