From a strange planet - 14

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, 15: Traffic cones, 16: Nothing, 17: Nothing and 18: Melting snow. 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 have thought much about this view. I lack the words to describe its atmosphere. The bridge, the sea, the shed and the lamp. The arrangement is more than the sum of its parts.

I tried to imagine a story:

Two locals drive to work each day and cross the bridge. They speculate what's inside the little building. They make hypotheses. The discuss the meaning of the light and the sign. The speculations slowly escalate, starting with a toolshed, and then going from a measuring station, an industrial control system, to a modern chapel and a small temple to the bridge god. But there's never time to test those. And then one day the small building is gone, removed, burned down, blown up. Or just moved to the other side of the road.

 

Or another story:

Two locals drive to work each day and cross the bridge. They discuss the strange behaviour of light in this area. Sometimes they see a strange glow under the bridge. On some day the shed light burns more brightly. On other days they see the streetlight behaving strangely.

They discuss the theories of Igor Savchenko:

We no longer have a constant flow of sunlight. Light appears to us as a sequence of transient storms. Everything around us is lit up for brief instants. The world picture shimmers. But moments of light and darkness still alternate too fast, for us to notice them.

They retell local urban legends about ghosts, trolls, and dead hitchhikers. But they never reach a conclusion.

Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. But sometimes fiction is stranger than reality. It is very hard to make good, strange fiction, that enhances reality. Let's be thankful to writers who can do that. Otherwise our world could be just like the one Thomas Ligotti is describing.

I once knew a man who claimed that, overnight, all the solid shapes of existence had been replaced by cheap substitutes: trees made of flimsy posterboard, houses built of colored foam, whole landscapes composed of hair-clippings. His own flesh, he said, was now just so much putty. Needless to add, this acquaintance had deserted the cause of appearances and could no longer be depended on to stick to the common story. Alone he had wandered into a tale of another sort altogether; for him, all things now participated in this nightmare of nonsense. But although his revelations conflicted with the lesser forms of truth, nonetheless he did live in the light of a greater truth: that all is unreal. (The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (Thomas Ligotti))

When I compare the camera pictures with the Google pictures I see two different worlds. Which is the real one? And which one is made of cardboard?