The cover of Cabinet magazine’s 30th issue caught my eye tonight while on my first Powell’s browsing jaunt in ages. Namely, a small sailboat floating through an aged and darkening tunnel. A few years ago I tracked a similar image to it’s original source — a pictorial of a de-comissioned soviet nuclear submarine shelter and shots by the folks exploring it. Starting with that link, I discovered that something i’d been into most of my life had a name, urban exploration.

Tourist attraction or not, I couldn’t describe how badly I wanted to be floating above that sub channel with the lights on meters deep — on a boat similar to the one on Cabinet’s cover. Which brings me back to that issue, and me fervently flipping through pages to find the article related to that shot.

The closest thing I could find was Caveman: An Interview with Michel Siffre by Joshua Foer. Sweeping the article for keywords that led to the cover, i instead found the likes of freezing temperatures, a tent next to a glacier, 100m deep, 2 months, and self-experimentation in isolation beyond time. I forgave Cabinet the elusive advertising and headed home to see what I could find.

Rather than ramble on describing how Siffre’s experiment not only fueled the science of chronobiology , and how all of this paralleled the space race, I’ll just suggest you take a look at the short documentary about his Beyond Time experiments. Note: This requires signup for Babelgum which actually looks promising as an independent/green-related alternative to similar sites. Some amazing Urbex accounts below too.

Beyond Time: Time, at Babelgum

Urbex: Russos(+,+) / Niagara Confluence!! / Opacity / San Zhi

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