Sven April 11th, 2013
Few things are as atmospheric as Science made flesh on a grand scale. The technology and tools of research feed awe and tingling excitement, whether it’s near or far from one’s own domains of expertise. Finally coming up on these hulking giants in the darkness, hearing the clicks, whirrs and juddering grind as they shift position in the midnight blackness was the stuff of fantasy.
Sven February 18th, 2013
Abandoned theatres pull at emotional strings on a few levels. As architectural glories of a past age, they’re up there with asylums and rusting industrial curiosities. While the likes of the asylums were deliberately created to exist outside Civilisation, though, theatres were built to be at its heart.
Sven February 9th, 2013
Sitting on the swings of a playground, watching the sun go down, it occurred to me that this nicely-kept park was the last thing I expected to see at the remnant of this Queensland mining town. Not that I knew at the time, but it’s the pride and joy of the town’s last resident, who did walk by and wave. We waved back, not realising the man was the only reason the town hasn’t yet been swallowed by the open pit mine that borders it.
Sven February 5th, 2013
A fragment of a dream from a past age stands crumbling in the remote South Australian desert. It’s a dead and baked plain now, with a few skeletal monoliths in concrete, but for a while there were people here, running Australia’s first uranium mine, in a town called Radium Hill.
Sven February 5th, 2013
It’s years ago now, but I remember being really inspired by a long exposure of a street, with a line of light meandering up and down it. It wasn’t that it was visually exciting, but that the height of the line represented the strength of the local wifi signal. More than just a pretty picture, this was a graph of something abstract that related directly to the geography, and it was immediately engaging. I’ve been caught up with the idea of doing something like that myself ever since, and I finally did something about it.
Sven January 16th, 2013
When the lake level breaches the threshold of this structure, the sound must be unimaginable. A volume of water the area of the lake surface, dropping a hundred metres vertically before blasting through the massive tunnel beyond the dam wall.
Sven January 1st, 2013
It’s possible that I endured the highest air temperatures of my life, circling this death-encrusted inland sea, and it reminded me I was firmly in the desert, and this was never really a place for human life. Shoveling crushed ice onto my head helped a little, but there was ultimately no escaping the blazing sun that baked the carpet of dead fish and birds along the shore.
Sven November 29th, 2012
I saw it while bearing down Interstate 15 through the Mojave Desert. The skeleton of a water park looming in the midday desert sun is hard to miss, surrounded by nothing, and sits quiet and sad in the blistering heat. I made mental notes to come back this way that night. I probably should have made a note of the location, too, what with the age of GPS and all. Things are hard to see at night.
Sven October 27th, 2012
I still remember the moment when I realised I’d made a serious mistake. Sometimes you push your luck too far, don’t think hard enough about risk, or whatever, and suddenly realise just how precarious your predicament has become. It was cold, it was very wet, and an abyss of rusted metal jutted upward to greet me from where I stared down in horror.
