Sunday, March 31, 2019

From a strange planet - 16

Road webcam fascination - The silent pictures of Scandinavian traffic-webcams have a strange fascination for me. My previous outpourings of webcam obsession are here: 1: Discovery, 2: From deep space, 3: Don DeLillo, 4: Scipting surveillance art, 5: Making movies, 6: Sightings and glitches, 7: More sightings, 8: Google streetview, 9: Changes in time, 10: Events, 11: Living streetlight, 12: Dino Buzzati, 13: Ed Ruscha and 15: Traffic cones. I've used video, fiction, literary criticism, art, topography and surveillance technologies to think through this window on far-away places.

I've looked at many traffic cams through the years but none is as boring as this zebra crossing. It's so boring that it becomes interesting. Fv101 Prestebakke is interesting nothingness. Precisely that nothingness that inspires horror writers:
The building was untenanted and desolate. Nothing moved within its confines and I imagined in my mind’s eye the abandoned and silent spaces, the empty rooms, and the labyrinth of dusty corridors. In the teeming metropolis, whose streets and buildings were crawling with people, like insects in a hive, this tower was vacant: a void. - The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Mark Samuels)
Even at night nothing happens here. Snow does not make a difference. There might be some deeper meaning here, a very special place that needs to be guarded. But probably there's just nothing there:
If it were possible to do so, the company would sell ... the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything.
My Work Is Not Yet Done (Thomas Ligotti)
Even a year long observation shows no activity, nothing. But maybe this silent space is full of invisible activity. Again I can use horror literature to illustrate this:
This sense of the invisible often exerted itself in moments when he witnessed nothing more than a patch of pink sky above leafless trees in twilight or an abandoned room where dust settled on portraits and old furniture. To him, however, these appearances disguised realms of an entirely different nature. For within these imagined or divined spheres there existed a certain... confusion, a swirling, fluttering motion that was belied by the relative order of the seen. Only on rare occasions could he enter these unseen spaces, and always unexpectedly. - Noctuary (Thomas Ligotti)
But all this dark speculation turns to nothing once you look at Google maps and see how pleasant this place is. A few friendly cottages, grass fields, birch and pine trees and a long white fence.
 The only mystery is the message board. What hyper-local secrets does it tell?
You, however, sit at your window and dream of the message when evening comes. - Kafka’s “A Message From the Emperor”

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