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Lawrence Bird 10-06-2020
Dominion (2017-2018)
An exploration of the prairie landscape and its image, employing aerial and satellite imagery. Funded by the Canada Council. With parallel and Transect, Dominion forms part of a sustained exploration of the image of landscape and geography.

Lawrence Bird 03-06-2020
Excerpted from “Un-Earths: Landscape, Memory and Global Map," in Virtual, Informal and Built Landscapes, Bogotá: Faculty of Architecture and Design, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (forthcoming).

This paper addresses aspects of a perplexing question: why is it that, situated as we are at the end of three centuries of attempts to perfectly map the world, are we not yet in possession of that map? Why does this modern promise remain unfulfilled? We might well look at this failure as hopeful evidence that in the end our lives as citizens, and our work as architects and artists, cannot be circumscribed by the technical and technocratic bias of modern systems.

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The third project brings these concerns back to the Canadian landscape. The project takes as its focus the Dominion Land Survey (DLS), the 19th century survey which divided the Western Canadian prairies into the grid of perhaps one million one-mile squares we still see today. The DLS has its own Prime Meridian, just west of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The survey's title of course refers to the Dominion of Canada, the British term for that territory; but of course it refers also to man's desire for dominion over the Earth, of which colonial epistemological frameworks are the modern manifestation. Dominion intends to disrupt such pro-jects. The intention of the DLS was to render up the prairies for settlement, as rapidly as possible, to estab-lish dominion over the land and the people who were here already. The system for surveying this land-scape was laid out in The Manual Shewing the System of Survey Adopted for the Public Lands of Canada, Manitoba and the North-West Territories, adopted by the Canadian government in 1871. The DLS was carried out over the next few decades; its inauguration was roughly coincident with the mapping of the 49th parallel.
The division of land was based on a system of townships, each made up of 36 sections, 1 mile on a side, each section divided into quarter sections. It was a tremendously successful tool for surveying a large area of land. The methods for demarcating the land were also proscribed. Corners were to be marked with a pyramid of earth, and with stakes that were dictated by the hierarchy of spaces: township, section, quarter section. In retrospect their forms evoke funerary markers, tombstones, daggers or nails driven into the heart of the land. They convey the violence done to the prairies and the people who lived here. The DLS was complicit in a genocidal project, and in the attempted obliteration of a thriving ecosystem. And like the culture that implemented it, built into it were several fundamental flaws undermining its own claim to epis-temological hegemony.
For one thing, the DLS could only survey the prairies so rapidly by ignoring the patterns of land form and land use that were already there. The prairie is a natural system, it is irregular and punctuated frequent-ly by rivers, lakes, sloughs, bluffs, escarpments, all of which resist attempts at survey. To this day they disrupt the rigid grid of the DLS. Notably, these phenomena are disruptions in time as well as space. The prairies flood frequently. Rivers and lakes overflow their banks, and to this day seasonal flooding defies attempts to manage the prairie landscape (recall Fig. 1).
Of course the indigenous understanding of this landscape was not at odds with any aspect of these nat-ural features; in fact it was based on them. So was the hybrid Scottish / French system of land division which came to be associated with the Métis people: the river lot system. Rather than a generic grid applied across the prairies, this system follows existing natural features: the rivers, at one time key sources of food and avenues for transportation and trade. Though the First Nations were generally relegated to small squares in the grid when they were assigned "reserves," to this day alternate patterns of land use like the river lot system disrupt the grid of the DLS.
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Besides this blindness to what was already there, the DLS had its own internal issues. For one thing, mapping an irregular oblate spheroid, the planet Earth, with a rectilinear grid, doesn't work. The geometries don't fit; as a result the DLS had to have built into it a system of correction lines, two in each township, to accommodate the rectilinear grid to the lines of longitude which converge as they move toward the north pole. The DLS was set off from two baselines, the 49th parallel (the US border, already discussed), and its very own Prime Meridian. Also known as the Winnipeg Meridian, it runs longitudinally north-south just west of the city of Winnipeg. So it had built into it all the arbitrariness and indeterminacy of the systems I have already discussed.
The video project Dominion focuses on the disruptions created by the DLS's own internal contradic-tions, as well as by the resistance of the prairies and their people to its surveying strategies. The project superimposes satellite and aerial imagery, from above as well as mapped onto digital landscapes internal to Google Earth ("Ground-Level View"), and applies a variety of strategies to emphasize the disruptions and the collision between the image of the landscape and the digital frameworks that make it available for us. These anomalies and ruptures are analogous to those generated by the original DLS, and they amplify them. The images are captured using tools internal to Google Earth, often downloaded an image at time (for higher resolution) and recomposed into video. Others are screen-captured direct from a computer dis-play; this approach allows you to see the images forming, and imperfect because of lags in the visualization of the image by the computer system. The videos follow 16 trajectories, which are chosen because they reveal one or other of the errors in the DLS I've mentioned. The trajectories are set using path-making tools within Google Earth, but also in some cases by tweaking the keyhole markup language code that describes the trajectory. Google's internal Historical Imagery and Sunlight functions introduce the passage of time into the project. When installed, the images are processed further, through the program Isadora. These processes and strategies are all leveraged to engage and accentuate the incompleteness of the original satel-lite images, and the way they cohere and decohere before one's eyes. A still from the project can be seen in Fig. 4. Dominion provides a critical visual meta-survey of the DLS grid and landscape, articulating the current state of the prairies, entangled in technologies old and new and the politics they imply.