Sacred Anomalies: Infiltrating Landscape Surveys
Samantha Lee

The vast territories of the Australian outback are highly contested landscapes. The technologies with which this ground is surveyed and recorded also become the political means through which groups claim ownership over it. In the skies above, mining survey planes track back and forth laser scanning the earth searching for the topographic anomalies that indicate pockets of undiscovered minerals and on the ground, the ochre stokes of aboriginal landscape painters map the songlines of their sacred dreamtime stories. My proposal explores the space of the mining survey as a parallel site for intervention, where I have engineered a seasonal network of mysterious dreamtime anomalies.