Yesterday we looked at some large art pieces by Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada.
Thank you to GEB reader Ryen McPherson for letting us know about a recent Graffiti project on an abandoned airstrip in the Mojave Desert, California, USA. The piece is by a group called ‘Indecline.’ It is not yet visible in Google Earth imagery, but Ryen kindly sent us some aerial photos, which we have put into this KML
so you can view them in Google Earth.
If you are wondering what the message means, here is an explanation from ‘Indecline’:
When Woody Guthrie penned “This Land is Our Land” in February of Nineteen Forty, the frontier still felt freshly settled and, despite the recent Depression, there was still a prevailing sense of national optimism. Which led us right into the Second Great War, the Atomic Bomb, the Cold War, national paranoia and Red-baiting, the eventual rise of the Corporate State in patriotic opposition to Communism, and finally, as a result of rampant overconsumption, our latest existential crisis of species: Global Warming. We thought, in lieu of all this, that Woody might be due for an update, so we found a decommissioned 3000-by-65-foot runway from an old World War II bomb-testing site, got together a few of our buddies, and made a monument to our rather precarious times.
This Land Was Our Land—both literally, in the sense that acres of remote desert were used up and discarded by our government in order to improve our ability to drop bombs on people in far off lands (who constitute a threat just because they peddle a different set of ideals than us;) and also figuratively, as in we as a species are presently embroiled in the constantly accelerating process of using up and discarding this planet as a whole.
It was ours, and it easily could be ours again. The only thing that needs to change is that we take responsibility for it.
Fight on,
Indecline.
Ryen has said that it is the largest graffiti mural in the world and we believe he is correct. There are larger examples of writing such as the word ‘LUECKE’ written in trees which has been called graffiti, and there was the ‘Steph loves you’ message written in tire tracks, but neither qualifies as a mural. The Guinness Book of Records lists the longest graffiti scroll as ‘Rehlatna’ and at 2.2km it is over twice the length of ‘This Land Was Our Land’. However, ‘Rehlatna’ was not a single mural but rather a continuous wall with many murals along its length. The wall of the ‘Rehlatna’ mural is visible in Google Earth, but you cannot see the murals on it. Find it with this KML file.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Fu*ing idiots. So much stupid here, it is difficult to know where to begin!
Oh really?? Well why you engage 1st gear, take it slow, and try..