Just Deserts Part One


Fox, William.  The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin.  Reno: U of Nevada P, 2005.


(The desert video below is shot from the first turnout on Soldier Meadows Road, Black Rock Desert.  As far as I can tell, there’s no footage available online of just desert.  I do walk into the frame at the eleven minute mark.  Sorry.  Then it ends.  Larger version at https://vimeo.com/55545311.)



 For the last five years or so, William L Fox’s The Void, The Grid & The Sign (VGS from now on) has occupied a special place in my life.  It’s taken the place of Leaves of Grass and Jay Meek’s Stations as my go-to travel book—the book I carry with me if I’m on a trip because I love it and it’s nice to have something you love with you when you travel.  As its subtitle explains, the book traverses the Great Basin, looking at land art and signature landscapes while thinking about the human and natural history of the region and how the Great Basin challenges all our capacities in beautiful ways.  It’s narrative scholarship, so we follow Bill Fox as he travels with Alvin McLane and Michael Heizer.  Into travel episodes, Fox weaves in the research behind the book, which is obviously a construct, but for someone like me, who’s really attracted to those landscapes and who also likes to think about them and learn, it’s a great construct.  I recommend the book for anyone, really, but especially for people who like experiences of vastness, whether in the Great Basin or elsewhere, and who enjoy connecting their own life to human history, archaeology, art, geology, etc.  And for Michael Heizer fans.  The book features a visit to Heizer’s famed Complex City, that massive… what… sculpture?  that Heizer’s been working on since the 1970s.  Next to the Heizer interview published in Sculpture in Reverse, Fox’s writing about City is the best I’ve read.  Better than the New York Times piece about City, although I enjoyed that, too.

One quick digression: during a section of VGS on how our visual cognition is challenged by the big landscapes of the Great Basin, Fox discusses human vision in terms of bytes per second (sorry, you’re going to have to take my word for it--I can’t find the passage again to quote it and I don’t feel like digging for it).  What is the status of this comparison of human sensory capacity to computer processing speed?  Is it a functional analogy?  I mean, is it designed to help us compare ourselves to computers, which are smaller and simpler processors than we are, and in so doing, allow ourselves to understand our brain function through an analogy that simplifies and clarifies.  Or is there believed to be a one-to-one comparison between computers and neurology?   In other words, our brains are believed to process bytes in the same way that computers are believed to process bytes.  If that’s the case—if that’s what’s believed—then that’s weird, I think, since we invented computers with our brains and our bodies.  And since computers are made of metals and plastics and our brains are made of… flesh, I guess...  I just wonder and hope someone will tell me: what is the status of that analogy?


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