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.