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  • Selected photographs from Codex Gunnison
  • Hans Baumann

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Hans Baumann
MOUND 1 AND MOUND 2, 2016 Quarry for Union Pacific Railroad Causeway and fossil microbialite, Gunnison, Utah

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Hans Baumann
OIL SEEP, 2016
Gunnison Bay, Utah
Naturally occurring crude oil is one of the many materials found in various forms in Gunnison Bay.

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Hans Baumann
MATERIAL ACCUMULATION 1, 2016 Gunnison Bay, Utah

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Hans Baumann
EXTREMOPHILIC PHYTOPLANKTON, 2016
View from a microscope of the phytoplankton that gives Gunnison Bay its pink color

Photo: Bonnie Baxter, Westminster College

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Hans Baumann
GUNNISON BAY, 2016
The pink water of Gunnison Bay, Utah, is caused by massive populations of an extremophilic phytoplankton in the hypersaline water.

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IMAGES >> HANS BAUMANN

Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist and land art practitioner. His work is informed by extensive research in evolutionary dynamics and human geography, as well as by his longstanding interest in geological phenomena and nonhuman timescales. Baumann holds degrees from Harvard University and Prifysgol Caerdydd and has lectured at a number of institutions, including the Universität Bern Institute of Art History, Harvard University, and the University of Washington College of Built Environment. His projects and essays have been published in a variety of periodicals, including The Stranger and SciArt Magazine, and he has received grant and project support from institutions such as 4Culture, the Landscape Research Group, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

www.hbaumann.com
Email: hans@hbaumann.com


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Hans Baumann
ROZEL POINT 2, 2016
Expanses of ancient microbialites line the desiccated lake bottom of Gunnison Bay in the Great Salt Lake.

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Codex Gunnison

Codex Gunnison is a mediative engagement with a unique and understudied ecological condition—the northern extremes of the Great Salt Lake. Known as Gunnison Bay, this remote landscape is an apparently lifeless expanse of salt flats, otherworldly hues, and indecipherable material accretions.

Gunnison Bay was formed in the mid-twentieth century by the construction of a railroad causeway that effectively bisected the Great Salt Lake, thus cutting off the northern arm of the lake from any freshwater inputs. Due to evaporation, the salinity in this portion of the lake has steadily increased over time (it is currently almost ten times saltier than ocean water), and the water appears pink due to massive populations of an extremophilic phytoplankton—one of the only organisms that can survive in this environment. According to the scientists that study the bay, its anthropogenically induced ecosystem is valuable because it acts as a refugium for rare geobiological organisms that are likely the ancestor to every known life-form on this planet.

Known as "microbialites," these entities are essentially living stones and appear to the untrained eye as large boulders in the lakebed. Part biology, part geology, micro-bialites inhabit the liminal space between organism and inanimate matter and implicitly undermine the supposedly binary relationship between these phenomena (i.e., life vs. matter). Microbialites reorganize our understanding of the biotic/abiotic divide and suggest that the biosphere—humans included—is less a collection of discrete organisms and more an interpenetrating flow of life forces between diverse material conditions.

Codex Gunnison is an effort to reimagine artistic practice as a speculative and vibrantly humanistic material science capable of interacting with and enriching conventional modes of objective inquiry. The project does so by reframing representation as a process of critical engagement with the methodological frameworks employed by the scientists who study Gunnison Bay, with the artist manipulating the scope, aims, and outcomes of formal research. In this sense, Codex Gunnison operates not as an authoritative singular endpoint, but as a process of accumulating information, experimental outcomes, and direct sensory experience into an intellectually coherent but materially diverse whole: an aspatial "nonsite" for endless cognitive excavation. The formulation of knowledge and documentation...

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