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.

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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”

From a strange planet - 15

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. and 13: Ed Ruscha. I've used video, fiction, literary criticism, art, topography and surveillance technologies to think through this window on far-away places

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The webcam is called E39 Arsvågen ferjekai. It shows the toll houses at the Arsvågen ferryport. I like small houses in the landscape so I was immediately attracted to this scene. And I hoped that all the traffic would create a lively experience. I was to be disappointed.

But looking at this scene from far away makes it somewhat interesting. Who knows who is looking? And how far away they may be? Just like in the financial crisis:

The final holder of the bond, the distant bank or fund, also held the deeds to the original houses. Which meant that a homeowner in sunlit California could be sitting in a house that was owned by a couple of Eskimos out on the ice floes chasing polar bears, six thousand miles away.
A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (G. Lawrence McDonald)

But otherwise nothing much happens. Snow falls, rain falls, night falls, the light changes. Lights go on and off in the small houses. But there is no atmosphere, no mystery. Everything is out in the open. Everything is explainable.

The view from Google street view is more ancient and much better. Approaching the ferry you look out over the mud flats and over the granite substrate, scoured and fractured by ice-age glaciers.

And even the little toll-houses are more interesting with the sea and the ferry as their background. But no mystery here. No story here.

But there is mystery in the surrounding landscape. You could walk away from the tall-houses and go up the hill. There you could sit in the evening light and listen to the hum of the powerlines. And you could feel the old granite under your feet forming the skeleton of the continent. And you could dream about walking to the top of that hill in the distance. That hill is not on Google street view and eternally out of reach.

The one interesting detail in the webcam picture are the traffic cones. They perform a small dance, moving slowly from one place to another forming random clusters. They are entities that talk to each other. They brave the sun, snow and the rain. We should respect them.