Description



Steel Ice & Stone is a multi-media interactive installation.
Nine suspended LED panels and sensor-triggered sound create an environment for memory recall.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Valparaiso

As one car goes up, the other
returns on the same cable.
Finding correspondence to my subject's address in Santiago, I inferred that he had gone to Valparaiso to view the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I hadn't seen it in years, and I thought it was cool that the Pacific was, in Chile, in the same time zone as NYC. So I plunked down the six bucks for the bus ride and went for the day.

Like most port towns, the mountains come straight out of the ocean, and Valparaiso is an enormous precarious group of shacks forming a large favela on the precipitous Andes. I took a bus ride around hairpin curves at 45˚ angle elevations, hanging on at every turn.

Now I get it: Run for the hills. The design
work says it all.
But that was not the attraction: To get to the very tops of the hills, 12-storey staircases aren't enough. There are seven or so "asensores" (elevators) that bring you higher. The one I rode was built in 1906 and runs on a pulley and cable system, much like San Fransisco's cable cars.

I was told the crime at the top is astounding but walked around anyway, musing the Tsunami signs indicated that this was a safe zone--unlike other sides of town. Ahhh, Life in Quakesville!


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