Vasser Geist: The Owens SED Installation Pilgrimage
The world's largest solar power facility,
at night.
CLUI photo
On the day of the installation of the SED
in Owens Lake, I awoke just before dawn on the dry bed of
Harper Lake, some 100 miles south of Owens Lake. I watched
the orange lights, and listened to the drone, of the world's
largest solar electric generating plant, located at the edge
of the playa. It seemed a suitable beginning, a sort of point
of origin for the Owens SED installation: to start from the
inversion of a solar plant, burning its motors and lights
in the dark, and ending the day at Owens, standing on what
once was the bottom of a lake, at a device similarly fueled
by the sun, which makes the sound of what is no longer there,
at a time when it cannot be seen, and in a place where it
will not be heard. The dualities and inversions of that day
and these places folded and coupled in my mind until they
all cancelled out, the assemblage negating itself into nonexistance.
Yet it existed before me, undeniably, beginning the process
once again...
