Books by William L. Fox
The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin
This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In “The Void,” he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. “The Grid” leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. “The Sign” wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.
Copies
No copies available.
Driving to Mars: In the Arctic with NASA on the Human Journey to the Red Planet
Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic is the world’s largest uninhabited island, a place the size of West Virginia nine hundred miles from the North Pole. In its center is the world’s only impact crater in a polar desert, a hole twelve miles across and almost a thousand feet deep formed by an asteroidal comet hitting the Earth 38 million years ago. Every July, two dozen scientists set up camp on the rim of the Haughton Crater, a setting which duplicates as close as any place on Earth the barren Martian landscape. It’s one of a handful of analog environments for Mars places where the harsh climate, severe geology, and unfamiliar terrain mimic conditions of the planet. Its environment is so hostile that no one has ever colonized more than small areas of its coastline for brief periods, and it's where the NASA practices people on Mars.
Driving to Mars recounts William L. Fox's three trips to Devon, working with the NASA Haughton-Mars Project. This book tells why we explore, how we see the world, and how we see ourselves in it. The flip sides of a single issue will ultimately determine whether or not we can stay alive on Earth.
Copies
No copies available.
Aereality: On the World from Above
William Fox’s writing for the last several years has been focused on how we construct aerial views, either physically (by flying) or in our imaginations.
In Aereality, he flies over earthworks in Nevada and Utah, soars through the world’s largest open pit mine, and surveys Los Angeles, circumnavigating large swaths of true American urban sprawl. On the East Coast, he examines the elevated art of the Hudson River Valley and New York City. And finally, in Australia, Fox examines the history and current practice of both Euro-Australian and Aboriginal aerial views, and searches for the cognitive roots of our aerial imagination.
Accompanying Fox throughout his travels is a rolling cast of enlightened fliers: geographers, museum curators, landscape photographers, anthropologists, and artists. He traverses the sky in prop planes, helicopters, and hot air balloons, all with the ultimate goal of knowing and experiencing the earth from the air.
Copies
No copies available.
Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass
by William L. Fox, Dana Fritz, Rebecca Reider, Carrie Robbins
In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores the world's largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona's Biosphere 2, Cornwall's Eden Project, and Nebraska's Lied Jungle and Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid carefully constructed representations of the natural world to entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the environment.
Giant terraria require human control of temperature, humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors' prepared sight lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires contemplation of our ecological future.
Copies
No copies available.
Out of Site Survey Science and the Hidden West
by William L. Fox, Britt Salvesen, Jason Weems, Amy Scott
Out of Site explores the invisible landscapes of the American West through the interwoven forces of art and technology over the past 170 years. This interdisciplinary project features an array of visual media, including historical, modern, and contemporary photography, that punctuate a series of essays by art scholars alongside first-person perspectives from artists working "in the field" today. Beginning with the survey era, the publication mines the use of wet-plate photography to penetrate the visible surface of the land to visualize the geological processes, mineral resources, and human histories that formed the foundation of the American empire. With the turn of the century, the relationship between sight and site grew increasingly remote, revealing patterns of large-scale industrial transformation, including the rise of nuclear technology and the American military-industrial complex. And with the modern use of long-range drones, satellites, and other adapted photographic technologies in the postwar years, new matrices of power and surveillance are revealed alongside the human and environmental fallout they often leave behind.
Contributors: William L. Fox, Mark Klett, Hillary Mushkin, Britt Salvesen, Kim Stringfellow, Jason Weems, and Will Wilson
Copies
No copies available.