(This is from the Documenta X Blast forum on spatial articulation)At 8:36 AM -0500 6/19/97, Eve Andree Laramee wrote:
>Robbin, the coral you speak of is in fact fossilized coral, built by an ancient species of reef-building clams (really!) near Travertine Rock, if that rings a bell...
If the rock was thrown away it is now sitting in a landfill outside of Spokane (in eastern Washington State) to be discovered sometime in the distant future and used as a key to understanding the geologic development of the area and the trading patterns of past civilizations. Talk about misplaced data.
If I remember Salton Sea was part of a wider utopian dream of the time that envisioned a technologically improved environment and included the Seattle Worlds Fair and Epcot Center in Florida. My father's family was fairly nomadic (my grandfather worked for the railroad) and they had this concept of "California" as an ideal place. His brother moved to LA to be a movie star and his sister moved to Las Vegas (which was basically an extension of California at the time) and married a trumpet player at the Sands Hotel. That slab of concrete in Slab City (Salton City) was his attempt to purchase a piece of the new Eden for us and though he never made it there that ideal space was quite real within the family. This utopian dream has come down to me as rather dystopian and the romantic ruin of the slab city appeals to me much more than my father's utopian "dream space".
I've been reading too much J.G. Ballard.
link to article on Salton Sea