Man-made Ponds 01-06

Author

Soren J. Demas, Bard CollegeFollow

Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Film and Electronic Arts

Project Advisor 1

Ben Coonley

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Man-made Ponds 01-06

A phenomenon which has been of interest to me is the man-made pond. Most people consider all ponds to be simply ponds–as did I for a long time. I was driving through the Hudson Valley along the highway and out of the corner of my eye I spotted a nearly perfect circular pond situated on the well groomed lawn of somebody's house. I turned to the person I was with and asked, “How could there be such a perfectly symmetrical pond here?” It seemed impossible to me–presuming some inherent link between ponds and nature–that this uncanny fixture could exist. The person sitting next to me, a local to the area, simply said “he made it”. After this it seemed obvious that nearly every pond I’ve seen was just made, but somehow it hadn’t registered until now.

I began with the shapes of these ponds. As I kept an eye out for them, I started becoming interested in creating an index of these shapes. On either end of the spectrum I was able to find ones that were perfectly circular, and ones that were perfectly square. Between these were a litany of oblong shapes. Essentially a spectrum of faux-naturalistic shapes, bookended by highly geometric ones. Despite the variety in form these pods come in, they all signal towards the same thing, a pond, or potentially a real pond. Because of the saturation of man-made ponds, it's unclear if right now, someone were to construct a pond, whether its shape would be based on that of a “real pond” or another man-made one.

Regardless, each pond's maker had some notion of what a pond ought to be, which in turn produced a shape that they then installed onto their property. There seems to be a signified pond, which is a combination of both aesthetic and value judgments, that exists in the collective unconscious of every maker. In thinking about the mental process of generating the look for one's pond, one realizes that there isn’t so much a blueprint for its formal features, but more an ethos that it adheres to. Hence the variety of forms they come in, underscored by the feelings of sameness that they generate.

So, with this in mind I started to formulate a project which could serve as this index I initially envisioned. And from this idea of an index, I wanted to create an armature which I could transpose these ponds that I had begun to document. My process of documentation is to walk around the edge of the pond, tracing the shape. Every ten steps I would take a photo across the water. Once I completed the shape to the best of my ability, I stitched the photos into a uniform strip. While I undo the shape of the pond in making a linear representation, it is still retained in the documentation. Landmarks like a tree or a barn repeat over and over as I photograph cyclically, in the shape of the pond.

For my armature, I wanted to create a template of a foreground, middle ground and background to paste these strips onto. The grassy knoll as a static foreground is in itself another simulacra of landscape, as the ponds are. I was also interested in having optical alignment play a role in the armature. Head on, the three layers come into focus and the illusion of real landscape comes together. However, besides this prime location, the segmentation and apparatus of the project are visible. The same is true for the strips of ponds. As I assembled them, I tried to maintain a sense of real space, aligning horizine lines and the edge of water. It is an imperfect process though to make something circular into something linear. So, the seams of the photographs and the idiosyncrasies in my reconstruction are visible in the landscape.

To the right of the gradated pond is a second piece, drawing out the topography of these ponds. The topographies draw themselves in pieces. This references my process of tracing these shapes, as well as the individual photos which make up each strip. Each photograph is indicative of an increment of distance which I covered.

Mane-made ponds are stand-ins for a notion of a past that we barely have a grasp of. The act of installing a pond is like a vague proclamation that one still believes: in my home, in traditional values, in goodness. The pond is a nostalgic reminder, which in its capacity to remind, while occupying space, reanimates nostalgia. Simulation must maintain the appearance that its qualities are not its own, but the traces of a real counterpart.

Soren Demas

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Demas, Soren J., "Man-made Ponds 01-06" (2024). Senior Projects Spring 2024. 67.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2024/67