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Simon Norfolk

‘ECHELON For Beginners’ On Ascension Island

by Claudia Dias on July 7, 2009

Since the rise of the mobile telephone we grew familiar with the sight of antennas, even in cities, those giant, nearly weightless structures, which only have to withstand weather and their own weight. A panoply of different antenna-structures cover most of Ascension Island’s surface, a tiny British colony in the middle of the South Atlantic. On a background of volcanic ashes a assortment from wire versions to delicate cones or spirals were installed by Echelon, and later documented by Simon Norfolk. 

sn_echelon1-wright: BBC World Service Relay Station at English Bay

Simon Norfolk explains how these most elegant and fragile looking structures aggressively tab into our daily lives:
‘ECHELON is a global, computerized electronic surveillance system. (…) The system works by indiscriminately intercepting truly enormous quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from he mass of unwanted ones, then sorting them for more detailed analysis later. (…) The command center for this spider’s web is the National Security Agency (NSA) HQ at Fort Meade, Maryland. GCHQ at Chaltenham in the UK is the co-ordinateng center for Europe.’

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BBC World Service Relay Station at English Bay

‘Data is collected by satellite interception, aerial arrays at strategic places and the direct tapping on underground and submarine cables . Computer manufacturers have ’back-doors‘ into the system software to allow the NSA to read everything on your computer. (…) One of the few places ECHELON can be seen or pictures is Ascension Island. In places, hills of ash have been leveled at the tops to allow the positioning of radomes and tracking devices.’

‘Warfare is becoming increasingly intangible. It is a paradox that whilst ‘rolling news’ and ‘embedded journalists,’ saturate us with the show-biz of war, when the really interesting developments: submarine warfare, space weapons, electronic warfare and electronic eavesdropping are essentially invisible.’

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right: Electronic eavesdropping equipment at One Boat, owned by a partner of GCHQ spy services

Quotes by Simon Norfolk

Ascension Island: the Panopticon (ECHELON for beginners)
Photographs courtesy of the artist.

Please refer to the artist for inquiries.
simon@simonnorfolk.com


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Tiny Crack In A World Of Secrets

by Claudia Dias on July 3, 2009

Last year I saw that the most serene and breathtaking landscapes in the America hide launch bases for missiles and rockets. Photographer Simon Norfolk worked several years on ‘sights whose boundless beauty is countervailed by feelings of fearfulness and powerlessness‘ and put my ambivalence and fascination with the precision-obsessed rocket industry into another perspective.

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Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA: Interior of a preserved Titan 2 nuclear missile launch complex. Looking down the 160′ deep silo which would have contained a ‘ready to launch’ missile. The final Titan nuclear missile was decommissioned in 1987 / Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, March 2008: Launch of a Delta II rocket carrying a USAF GPS 2 satellite.

‘The bewildering beauty of what human ingenuity can achieve when given endless resources collides with the appalling disposal of those assets on new and more brilliant ways to kill people. Nowhere is this clearer that what I call the Military Sublime – for example the nuclear missiles and satellite launches pictured here.’

But there is one moment in their lives when they advertise their existence with a ground-trembling exuberant din that lights the night skies like a second sunset: the 45 seconds or so it takes for them to lift from their launch pads and disappear thousands of miles downrange, way up high. The leaping into the void is what I’ve chosen to concentrate on; this tiny (photographable) crack in a world of secrets.’

sn_sublime-rocketrySaturn V rocket engine / Wallos Island Flight Facility, Virginia: The emergency destruction, 27 seconds from launch, of an ALV-X1 rocket carrying NASA experiments and classified US Navy satellites.

‘Satellites and missiles are born in worlds of utter secrecy – in skunkworks  and shady research facilities. They are launched from closed military bases – and live out their lives in the soundless dark of deep space, silently listening and processing. 

‘(..) the purpose of all this sublime technology (down here in the sub-luminary world) is to sharpen the knife: to finesse America’s ability to find, follow and kill its enemies.’ 

Quoted from Simon Norfolk.

 

Full Spectrum Dominance: Missiles, Rockets, Satellites in America, 2008
Photographs courtesy of the artist.

Please refer to the artist for inquiries.
simon@simonnorfolk.com

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Invisible Structures

by Claudia Dias on July 2, 2009

The photographer Simon Norfolk is one of a handful of people who received permission to experience the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland during its final stages of construction. The LHC opened this year but had to be shut down temporarily for repairs to its superconducting magnets. 

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Simon Norfolk’s images were commissioned for an article in the New York Times, but they linger on in my mind. They are testimony of one of a few invisible structures, in this case a ring collider, which possibly might be the window to our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe in its very first moments of existence.

The LHC at ‘CERN is the largest experiment – the largest gathering of knowledge – in the history of mankind, larger even than the Apollo moon mission. In an explosion of all notions of scale, thousand of scientists are lowering hundreds of tons of equipment into the (570 feet / 175 meters) deep underground cavern in order to examine the most microscopic particles (..): ‘dark matter’, ‘God particles’, ‘muons’, ‘tau neutrinos’, (..) its main target is the 95% of matter in the universe that the theories say must exist, yet is invisible and undiscovered.’

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‘(..) I was amazed that it resembled the view one has bending one’s neck back and looking up into the cupola of an English cathedral (..). In vast, columned chambers, the blades of the LHC were being assembled in an atmosphere of methodical, industrial piety. But when I made the final prints, they seemed to resemble crop circles or Tibetan mandalas.‘

The LHC with its 17 miles (27 km) circumference is the shrunken version of the older Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which after 1/3 of completion in Waxahachie, Texas got decommissioned in 1993 and since then its existing 14.6 miles (23.5 km) of tunnel and 17 shafts of what should have become a 54 miles (87 km) ring accelerator have been slowly filling up with water. In 2003 Trace Life Science from Texas bought the SSC’s magnets, which originally were meant to detect the Higgs boson, but now are used for radioisotopes, medical imaging and radiation therapy.

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The concept and the name for a hypothetical future collider already exists: the Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC) with performance way beyond the LHC. No schedule or plan for the VLHC exist yet; at this point it is only discussed on the basis of technological feasibility and the accelerator’s possible design.
In 2010, however, the International Linear Collider (ILC) is planned to be completed, meant for more accurate precision measurements of particles, which might still be discovered at the LHC. Let’s hope the LHC will start up soon again and resume calibrating and discovering the unseen.

Quoted from  Simon Norfolk.

 

The LHC: The Spirit of Enquiry, 2007
Photographs of the LHC courtesy of the artist and Bonnie Benrubi Gallery.

Please refer to the Gallery for inquiries and prices.
Benrubi@BonniBenrubi.com

Bonnie Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor, New York, NY 10022, Tel +1 212 888 6007

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