Robert Smithson’s Upside Down Trees (1969) form a circuit with the artist’s parallel series of earth maps, one that materializes and satirizes period visions of the growing informationalization of art and perception.

In a moment captured in a photograph at the start of the twentieth century, in the knitting room of the New Bedford Textile School, three students stand at individual machines. Each holds a circular creel from which spooled yarn was drawn up, then down, through a mechanized system that knits a tubular shape. I encountered this image in the archives of the Claire T. Carney Library at UMass Dartmouth, where I worked from 2017 until 2022 in a lecturer position, configured to combine teaching and curatorial work (later with the title Director of Community Engagement Initiatives).

“Instead of putting something in the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the Nonsite,” Robert Smithson explained during the Earth Art Symposium at Cornell University in February 1969.