At the Lightning Field

An exploration of coincidences of history, light, space, duration, chaos theory, mathematics, memory, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field.
Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field" is 400 stainless steel poles, positioned 220 feet apart, in the desert of central New Mexico. Over the course of several visits, it becomes, for Raicovich, a site for confounding and revealing perceptions of time, space, duration, and light; how changeable they are, while staying the same. From At the Lightning Field:Chaos and coincidences of history: Edward Lorenz was a meteorologist at MIT in the early 1960s. Looking for a devil in the detail of meteorological data, he was trying to forecast global weather patterns (creating forecasting models that would later be applied to economics and financial analysis). Complicated sets of equations, sometimes arbitrary webs of information, measurements of "initial conditions" churned through a primitive computer. The machine was named the Royal McBee. Laura Raicovich works as President and Executive Director of The Queens Museum. She is the author of A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties, a book based on Viagra and Cialis spam (Publication Studio) and is an editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (O/R Books).