FANTASY ISLAND FLOATS AROUND NEW YORK

FANTASY ISLAND --ROBERT SMITHSON'S HOPE FINALLY FLOATS... 35 years after artist Robert Smithson envisioned a floating island around Manhattan, his 'Earthwork' is afloat until September 25. Here's a description from www.archinect.com:

Robert Smithson's Floating Island

Through Sept 25, from 8 am to 8 pm every day, the Whitney and Minetta Brook, a New York-based arts organization that presents innovative public art projects, will launch Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island by Robert Smithson, a major figure in the cultural landscape of the 1960s and 1970s and a central influence on contemporary artists. Never realized during Smithson’s lifetime, although attempts were made, Floating Island is a project that involves a 30-x-90-foot barge, landscaped with earth, rocks, and native trees and shrubs that will circumnavigate Manhattan. The fabricated "island," towed by a small tugboat, will be on view two weekends in September, visible to millions of residents, commuters, and visitors along the Hudson and East Rivers.

It's Not Easy Making Art That Floats New York Times
http://whitney.org/exhibition/feat_smithson.shtml

And an essay from Robert Smithson follows:

The Eliminator by Robert Smithson--from his essays and excerpted from the website at: www.robertsmithson.com

"The Eliminator overloads the eye whenever the red neon flashes on, and in so doing diminishes the viewer's memory dependencies or traces. Memory vanishes, while looking at the Eliminator. The viewer doesn't know what he is looking at, because he has no surface space to fixate on; thus he becomes aware of the emptiness of his own sight or sees through his sight. Light, mirror reflection, and shadow fabricate the perceptual intake of the eyes. Unreality becomes actual and solid.

The Eliminator is a clock that doesn't keep time, but loses it. The intervals between the flashes of neon are "void intervals" or what George Kubler calls, "the rupture between past and future." The Eliminator order negative time as it avoids historical space."  from Unpublished Writings from Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1996