Artwork title : Oranges and cows grow fat under the Florida sun

The video is an artifact from a performance I stage called "Terraforming Blues" that visualizes the human impact on Earth using the technology of satellite remote sensing. During the performance, I deliver the following spoken word poetry while a dancer physicalizes my words and a harmonica player converses back to me. The work is installed with headsets that allow the visitors to hear the sound of a train in motion. The text below is from the stage performance inspired by this work.

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The timing of the launch of LandSat 1 was perfect to witness a change that was coming to forty square miles of land southwest of Orlando [harmonica]. It is wetland…

[Projection cue video: Oranges and Cows Grow Fat]

[Harmonica plays quietly and rhythmically under the following text; dancer responds with dancing]

….where forest and lake and stream offer sanctuary and sojourn to the deer, the black bear, the alligator, the rabbit, the catfish. [harmonica] It is the land of the Seminole people, adjoining the land of the Timucua and Tocobaga. [Loud harmonica…then continues quietly] It is farmland where oranges and cows grow fat under the Florida sun. [harmonica continues, dancer dances and Danielle watches…]

[Loud, short harmonica] For several years in the 1960s, a company quietly bought about forty square miles of this land southwest of Orlando. No one noticed at first that the company was buying land to create a vast and ever evolving resort [harmonica]…a pleasure garden [harmonica loud, then continuing with text]…a land of imagination and world building [harmonica climax, then quiet]. In 1971, just over 50 years ago, the Walt Disney Company welcomed the first visitors to the Magic Kingdom. This marked a key moment in the terraforming of these forty square miles of land, terraforming which continues today [Danielle freezes].