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. and 16: Nothing. I've used video, fiction, literary criticism, art, topography and surveillance technologies to think through this window on far-away places.
Last time I wrote about a zebra crossing where nothing happens. Today I'll write about an unfinished asphalt road where also nothing ever happens. I've followed the webcam for several years and the place is in stasis. I don't see any good use for the camera.
Even at night nothing happens. I see no people and no animals. Traffic is very light.The camera is watching and waiting, but for what? Now there is even video from this place.
Watching a place where nothing happens reminds me of Project Hessdalen, also in Norway. As the project website says:
Hessdalen is a small valley in the central part of Norway. At the end of 1981 through 1984, residents of the Valley became concerned and alarmed about strange, unexplained lights that appeared at many locations throughout the Valley. Hundreds of lights were observed. At the peak of activity there were about 20 reports a week.In Hessdalen several cameras are watching the landscape full time. You can look at the video recordings of special events. You don't know if you see something mysterious or something mundane. The recordings look like conceptual art. An abstract landscape where maybe something could happen or has happened.
These webcam pictures have the same atmosphere of Waiting for Godot. But this time Godot will be caught on camera.
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