From a strange planet - 4

Introduction

I'm still researching the fascination of Scandinavian webcams. Previous posts are here: part 3, part 2, part 1.

In the previous post I listened to writers and literary critics for explanations. Now I look at artists and their descriptions of their artistic practice.
The pictures in this part of the post are from live road-webcams, I've only quoted texts of the artists, not their pictures, to prevent misunderstandings. But I've included many links to their artworks and these are certainly worth detailed attention.

Webcam scraping script

The pictures were collected using this Windows Powershell script. Then the best ones were selected by hand. Using computers to watch the watchers, to sample the surveillance. To wake while I sleep.

$source_path = "http://webkamera.vegvesen.no/kamera?id="
$ids = "412927","100105","180849","113101","100104","208374","100102"
$destination_path = "C:\Users\uair\Pictures\Webcam"
for($i=1; $i -le 100; $i++)
{
 $d = (get-date).toshortdatestring()
 $h = (get-date).hour.tostring()
 $m = (get-date).minute.tostring()
 foreach ($id in $ids)
 {
 $source = ($source_path + $id)
 $destination = ($destination_path + "\" + $id + "-" + $i + "-" + $d + "-" + $h + "-" + $m + ".jpg")
 write-host $source
 write-host $destination
 $wc = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
 $wc.DownloadFile($source, $destination)
 Start-Sleep -s 17
 }
 Start-Sleep -s 923
}

Art and surveillance

Webcams imply state surveillance. But I cannot read the road-webcams as "evil". I even cannot read them as utilitarian. I'm compelled to read them as "artistic" and "mysterious".

These surveillance cameras are everywhere, a daily reality invisible or visible, always monitoring everyday life in anticipation of the crime to happen. It seems as if webcams are based on the surveillance model - sinister and empty without narrative - but a record of what is there and, like the panopticon, you're seen but can't see who's seeing you (...) These banal smeared images are images of our time and in this age of high resolution they have the feeling of a vague memory. (Cristine Wang)

But nowadays it's almost impossible to escape the metaphors of surveillance and the panopticon. But in this case it might be more benign, an example of a shrinking world, of a real global village.

There is a long tradition of artists exploring or intervening in control mechanisms such as surveillance, and at a time when pervasive surveillance is widely accepted, and the popularity of webcams and reality TV suggest that fear and suspicion of surveillance is giving way to a desire to observe and be observed, the Broken Channel projects seek to offer new visions of how surveillance shapes perception, and new strategies for how to intervene. (Drew Hemment)

Authenticity of boredom

The road-webcams are a pleasant contrast with the narcissistic, "selfie" culture of the Internet. There is no person, no being, active here. Just the raw existence of a medium. Real and extremely authentic.

There is no guarantee that anything we see or are shown is authentic, but the site accumulates enough supporting detail to give it the weight of a 'real life'. (...) The abundant narcissism on the Web, with its 'all-about-me' homepages, is only matched by the hype surrounding Webcams as an extension of video's potential for everyone to become their own mini-broadcaster. (Daniel Palmer)

Watching webcams in real time is less interesting (for me) than comparing downloaded images. Comparing images, noticing the subtle changes in light and being surprised by any rare "event". Minimalistic details are enlarged. This sensibility translates into normal life, awareness is enhanced permanently.

(... In) most live Internet camera sites precisely nothing happens most of the time. Pointing your browser to a Webcam will more often than not result in the peeling back of an image of an empty (and often dark) bedroom, street, or cityscape. (...) We wait for evidence that isn't forthcoming, we watch the light gradually shift on a mountain or street, we watch the hands on Big Ben slowly tick over. Webcams can do this, for time is not the scarce commodity on the Web that it is on TV (...) the scenography of Webcams is usually empty of action but endlessly open to signification. (Daniel Palmer)

But even when nothing happens, the absence of events is a remarkable event. When you live in a busy city it is liberating to realize that in some places nothing ever happens. Emptiness and loneliness as soothing meditation.

Unlike the generally extended present of the Internet clicking experience, Webcams exist in an intensive present characteristic of the ennui of early video art. As Douglas Davis once wrote of video:

when we are watching 'live' phenomena on the screen we participate in a subtle existentialism. Often it is so subtle that it nears boredom. Yet we stay, participating. [...] waiting, aware that something unpredictably 'live' might occur next ...

Micro awareness

I'm not the only one who's fascinated by subtle changes in a view. It's not widespread but on the Internet you can always find others with the same fascination.

From here I could see the backs of the rundown shops and the Annandale Hotel, the Parramatta Rd and Bridge Rd intersection, and the billboard on top of Strathfield Car Radios that I imagined held special messages for me. Stare at something long enough and it will become fascinating, and it was so with the building across the alleyway. It’s not the kind of building that has ever had a name and was noticeable only due to its position on Parramatta Road and its dereliction. (Vanessa Berry)

Artistic use of webcams

Scraping and comparing webcam images is just the beginning. It's a passive use of the technology. The technology can also be used more actively, by appropriating steerable webcams and their images.

I started to create monumental composite images, drawing upon my ongoing collections of webcam stills. (...) Many miles away from the actual location yet connected via the Internet, I direct these robotic cameras to scan the field of view bit by bit. Over the course of several months or even years, I capture thousands of images, and meticulously stitch them together into a panorama of great complexity and detail. (...) It reveals the passage of time and develops its own narrative logic, offering a fictive yet hyper-realistic portrait of a place. Changing seasons, light and shadows, diurnal rhythms, all are compressed into one composite scene. (Isabelle Jenniches)

While watching the webcams I often wondered if I could visit and capture myself in these remote places. And of course one artist has already done that.

German photographer Jens Sundheim tracked down more than 400 webcams with online feeds around the world and posed in front of them (he says New York City cops once questioned him for suspicious behavior by a traffic camera).

And many artists recognize the beauty of webcam pictures. And some are able to put their interpretations into words, better than I can. The difference between images, the space between images.

By continuously receiving this section of the landscape view via the web camera, it is possible to follow the changes of the landscape and weather in Antarctica. The endless stream of images on the internet and their equally rapid disappearance, fascinate me in the same way that the eternity of day and night and the earth’s rotations do. The rapid changes are enhanced by the smaller shifts between each picture. This is where the image really emerges, in the space between the pictures. It is the stream of pictures, each different from the last, that carries with it the changes I follow. It is no longer a landscape, but a stream. (Patrik Entian)

And the artist recognizes the beauty of the distant picture. A beauty that is intense enough to paint. A beauty that remains, even when content is replaced by glitch, when the medium becomes the content. Painting the medium, painting the failure of technical infrastructure.

The web camera overlooks a wide landscape. Every ten minutes it takes a picture which is loaded onto the internet. (...) Sometimes when painting from the web camera, the picture stream is there all day. (...) I soon discovered that the web camera often demonstrates its technical imperfection for all the world to see, one second showing a sublime view of ice, sky and glowing horizon, and then, when the sun has gone down and taken away the light, showing a helpless black square with technical problems. The landscape is replaced by black and white noise that emerges from the camera. After a while I started exploring these technical incidents. While the grey images make me doubt what I actually see, there is no doubt here. I see technique, not weather or landscape. (Patrik Entian)

And the artist recognizes the strangeness of the medium. Webcams may be old-fashioned and quaint in these times of Facebook and NSA surveillance. Remnants from when the Internet was young and innocent, when anything was surprising. But they still sound their quiet siren-song and are available when you listen.

To regard a distant landscape from a webcam on your computer screen, evokes in you a vague sense of being where you are not. There is something riveting about the possibility – to immerse oneself in the landscape being beamed from such an inhospitable location as Antarctica (...) A succinct sensation of simultaneity in a world where everything is in constant flux. In spite of all the available possibilities to navigate across the world, I have for some reason become entrapped by the webcam placed at the Neumayer Station and can not stop watching it. The distance to the South Pole with its opposite seasons, in regards to my studio, the vast uneventful nature of this virgin wilderness, the limited information supplied by the little framed image, and a strange sensation of belonging, or proximity to the deserted landscape fascinates me, and keeps me returning to this image daily. (Patrik Entian)

Sources
Cameras:
http://www.vegvesen.no/Trafikkinformasjon/Reiseinformasjon/Trafikkmeldinger/Webkamera
http://www.vackertvader.se/webbkamera/stora-sjöfallet
Script:
http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/ee176949.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/cbc16379-fccb-4ad3-ae3d-172d9df5f3ef
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2006-how-to-download-a-file-from-the-internet-with-windows-powershell/
http://windowsitpro.com/powershell/iterating-through-collections-powershells-foreach-loops
Webcam quotes - surveillance:
http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/e/texts/34?print-friendly=true
http://ctrlspace.zkm.de/e/
http://www.cocosolidciti.com/4-projects/broken_channel.htm
Webcam quotes:
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/daniel.and.kate/webcams.html
http://vanessaberryworld.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/1-parramatta-rd/
Webcam artists:
Isabelle Jenniches:
http://www.9nerds.com/isabelle/inventory/SUNUP.html
http://www.9nerds.com/isabelle/index.html
http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-lifestyles/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-/5260-pirate-eye.html
Jens Sundheim:
http://www.jens-sundheim.de/de/traveller/traveller14.html
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324094704579065123679605360
Jane D. Marsching:
http://www.janemarsching.com/projects/arctic-listening-post-2005-2009/north-pole-web-cam/
http://www.janemarsching.com/projects/arctic-listening-post-2005-2009/essay/
Patrik Entian:
http://trondheimkunstmuseum.no/events/patrik-entian-2/?lang=en
http://halvekongeriket.org/

Hidden realities 4 - Invisible landscapes

We live in more worlds than one and ignore them, because they hide in the background. We can glimpse them, in certain moments, in certain directions, in certain details. These are small revelations we should be thankful for.

Until it revealed itself I didn't know I could see a lake from my kitchen window. And I didn't know that in certain moments, from the same window, I could see a mirage of an oriental city or a forest of pine trees.

The lake revealed itself in a bottle of mineral water reflected in the glass surface of the kitchen table. And the city-forest appeared in the sunrise reflections in the windows of a neighboring street. I could have missed both revelations and it was pure luck that I could catch both moments.

But I was not unprepared. I had read Peter Handke's "My Year in the No-Man's-Bay" and I knew that the view from a window could contain mysterious vistas. And I knew about the visions of Nick Papadimitriou, the interpreter of the London outskirts. Let us listen to their books of revelation:

From the window at which I sit, I see my narrative every morning, see how it should continue in broad strokes. It is a place. I noticed it at the very onset of winter, for the first time in all my years here: a spot in the woods on the hillsides, which since then, as a result of daily observation, has become a place.

Every day, against the background of more distant vistas, I perceived something in the silhouettes of the trees, illuminated by the light from the hollow below, or the sight set me to thinking. Here even on dark, dim days, color predominated. Although nothing was happening, it was a lively scene. Although it was not far off, I saw far into the distance. Not a person to be seen there, and yet the meadow appears as a window on the world. 

And whenever I went up in the forest looking for it, I was never quite sure if this was the place I had fixed my eye on that same morning, from my window, had scrutinized, studied, observed.

And there sits ancient, venerable Turner’s Wood. A pocket of imagined memory backing up against creosoted fences. Turner’s Wood is only approachable as far as huge iron gates along Wildwood Rise. 

Let me be happy to catch glimpses of Turner’s Wood from the Hampstead Garden Suburb: to peer excitedly at her towering silence through gaps between frozen wealth and human achievement. For Turner’s Wood, so viewed, has become emblematic of a certain mythic property. 

You see I don’t want to enter Turner’s Wood, just stand near its edge and gaze into it. I hope I never enter Turner’s wood. Not because I am afraid of wild animals or mantraps but because the very difficulty of entering it has created a particular relationship that I find fruitful.

I like it like this, this preservation of distance. To see the wood from these angles, contrasting it’s methods with those of our civitas, is to enter a portal leading, if not to the eternal, at least to the possibility, the bare imagining of depth. Of a non-localised consciousness hurtling down time, beyond Channel 4, the Guardian, or page 42 of my 1963 edition of the London A to Z. 

Of course it is illusory. Turner’s Wood is no primeval superorganism waiting to carry me off into its timeless simultaneity. Though I rise momentarily into the aesthetic object of its form, still I must return to pay bills and fines or to go to the lavatory.

Sources:
Peter Handke - "Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht" - first three quoted paragraphs *
Peter Handke - "Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht"
Middlesex County Council - Turner's Wood - last five quoted paragraphs *
* both texts have been slightly edited to keep them self-supporting outside of their context ...

Hidden realities 3 - Webcam sun

As I showed in two previous blog-posts a simple webcam can reveal mysterious, hidden realities. Phenomena that are rare or unimaginable in daily life, become possible in the virtual world of the webcam.

In 1997, the writer Jeff Kent discovered that a double sunset could be seen from the top of a nearby mountain. The occurrence is visible in good weather on and around the summer solstice, when the sun sets on the summit of the hill, partially reappears from its steep northern slope and sets for a second and final time shortly afterwards. The precise event and its location are described in Kent's book The Mysterious Double Sunset.

Phenomena that you will never see in real life can be experienced in this parallel reality:

The phenomenon is named after Johann Tobias Lowitz, a German-born Russian apothecary and experimental chemist. On the morning of June 18, 1790 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Lowitz witnessed a spectacular display of solar halos. Among his observations, he noted arcs descending from the sundogs and extending below the sun. Lowitz formally reported the phenomenon to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences on October 18, 1790, including a detailed illustration of what he had witnessed.

And even phenomena from art can suddenly reappear in the sight of the camera. See the mysterious, hovering black square that Dario d'Aronco exposed in Witte de With gallery:

The prevailing impression is that this is not art but a presentation of an existing physical phenomenon. The artist has witnessed something, has been able to record it (against the odds) and is presenting the raw recording. An unexplained and mysterious phenomenon. But also  strangely reassuring. The world is still unknown, there are still white spots on the map. If we search hard enough we can still discover strangeness. If we find the right place and the right time we too can see the floating square against the night sky.

• With the webcam we have found the right place and time. And we have seen the floating square against the sky.
• Now go one step further ... what if the black square is really there, always present. Imagine that it is there, each time you look from your window. That you almost could see it. That we often are too distracted to notice it.
• This will enrich you, through webcam revelation.

Note: This was a fortuitous accident with the webcam. It was not my intention to re-imagine d'Aronco's artwork. But it was a pleasant surprise and a confirmation of my private "paranoid critical method":

... the conscious exploitation of the unconscious, the spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectifications of delirious associations and interpretations.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorpe_Cloud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowitz_arc
http://uair01.blogspot.nl/2013/10/dario-daronco-at-tent-rotterdam.html
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/the-paranoid-critical-method/

Hidden realities 2 - Sky structures

Structures inside the monochrome

Take a picture of a perfectly blue sky. Do some image processing. Enhance contrast, fiddle with brightness and gamma. Finally convert to binary. You will discover hidden structures inside that monochrome blue.

This is not an earth-shattering discovery. But I'm surprised  how much can be seen with very simple tools. 

What do we see? We have amplified very subtle differences in picture intensity. Too subtle to see with the naked eye. But are these differences really there? Are they in the sky? Or in the optics of the camera? Are they differences in light absorption or internal reflections? Or just differences in noise level of the sensor?

Is it only my camera? Or is it a universal phenomenon? To test this I downloaded a few monochrome pictures from Flickr. Similar structures are in all of them. They reveal mysterious flocks, horizons, intrusions, coronas, protuberances and ellipsoids. Shapes I never saw before and whose existence I didn't suspect.

And even scientists can be surprised by the subtle shapes they find in the sky. They speak poetically about their discoveries inside the known, their expeditions into the (seemingly) obvious:

To the uninitiated, the clear daytime sky seems such a commonplace that its radiance and brightness distribution surely must be well known. Researchers in fields ranging from solar energy engineering to atmospheric optics have repeatedly measured and modeled the angular distribution of clear-sky radiances, and they have published scores of papers on the subject. What can be left to know?
In fact, a great deal is left to know. In simple models of scattering by the clear atmosphere, radiance increases monotonically from the zenith to the astronomical (i.e., dead-level) horizon. However, a persistent feature of our cloudless atmosphere is a local maximum of radiance several degrees above the horizon, not at it. We have detected this near horizon radiance maximum in clear daytime skies ranging from mid latitudes to the Antarctic, and from mid continent to the open sea. However, no one, to my knowledge, has written about it. Why?

And more discoveries hide inside the everyday. Logical assumptions proven untrue:

One of the oldest assumptions about cloudless skies is that their chromaticity and luminance distributions are symmetric about the solar meridian, or principal plane. Skylight symmetry also agrees with the evidence of our eyes—the clear daytime sky’s color and brightness indeed look balanced on either side of the principal plane. But what experimental evidence exists for this symmetry?
Although the apparent dome of the clear sky may summon thoughts of celestial perfection and symmetry, our research shows something quite different. No matter how clear the sky may appear to us, on many days its color and luminance are asymmetric about the solar meridian.

Sources:
Horizon brightness revisited: measurements and a model of clear-sky radiances, Raymond L. Lee, Jr.
Color and luminance asymmetries in the clear sky, Javier Hernandez-Andres, Raymond L. Lee, Jr., and Javier Romero

Hidden realities 1 - Webcam seeing

Slow changes

Modern seeing

You have all done this yourself. This is nothing new. Anyone with a webcam and a graphics program has done this before. But is is remarkable anyway.
The remarkable difference between the human eye and the camera eye. The difference in sensitivity, the difference in patience and attention span.
One hundred years ago this would not have been possible. You could not compare pictures of the sky by placing them alongside each other. You would have to use your memory. Or sketch the sky. Looking at looking was  more imprecise in those days.

Vague structures

Structures in the sky

A grey and relatively boring winter's day. Stratocumulus clouds. A dark grey day, like the Breughel painting with the hunters. But even this homogeneous-looking sky has its subtle changes. They happen too slowly to notice. But over a period of 30 minutes the changes are strikingly obvious. Changes in colour and changes in texture. And we can enhance the subtle sky structures to make them monumental and looming.

A friend of mine was amazed after watching Avatar. He couldn't stop talking about the floating mountains. Then I said to him: ‘Man, your planet has huge mountains of water. Water! They float above your head every day and when they turn into rain, they contribute to the cycle of the most important liquid to your existence’. Most people go around without realizing the complexity, wonder and graciousness that a cloud is. Indeed, as Cecil Adams writes, “a good sized cumulonimbus cloud, or thunderhead, has a mass of roughly four billion kilograms per cloud.” 

Reveal the invisible

And even non-existing structure can be made visible in the sky. UFO's and amoeba-like entities. Who says they don't exist? Maybe we can see them everywhere once we're properly sensitized.

TRAVERTINE ISLANDS, also called the Floating Islands, a number of large masses of stone that float in the region fifteen miles over the surface of the Earth. Each island is of a different kind of stone, and the inhabitants make sure to float them in whatever camouflage they can manage — white limestone islands float among white clouds, the dark basalt islands floating among black thunderheads, and so forth.
(R.A. Lafferty, "Nor Limestone Islands," in Universe I, New York, 1971)

References:
http://forgetomori.com/2010/science/hallelujah-mountains-praise-science/
http://www.urbangeek.net/dictionary/entries/lafferty.html
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty
http://psychogeographicreview.com/?p=2872
http://psychogeographicreview.com/?p=2825
http://psychogeographicreview.com/?p=2812
Cloud atlas
Luke Howard

Darkness falls - 2

I'm not principally against Geert Wilders. I think any democratic system needs its outliers and maverics. And I'm for freedom of speech. But I found the whole scene uncanny. It's not about Geert Wilders, it's about some strange daemon that has settled on out time.

Washington Post + Sportpalast speech

At a party meeting Wednesday evening in The Hague, where his Freedom Party is set to win the most votes in municipal elections, Wilders asked supporters whether they wanted “more or fewer” Moroccans in the Netherlands. 

His supporters chanted back: “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” before breaking into applause. 

“Good, we’re going to take care of that,” Wilders said.

I wrote about Geert Wilders in a previous post. Here I was reminded of the conceptual artwork "Darkness Falls on Beroldingerstrasse 7, 79224 Umkirch".

The end of this blog is near

In the winter holidays I read this blog post by Joe Moran that extrapolates the number of blog-posts in time. This is a decreasing number. His prediction is:

As another year ends, I note that I have once again managed to post less on this blog than last year. At this rate I am on course to achieve complete radio silence by 2017.

Inspired by this prediction I did the same extrapolation for my own blog. This is the result. My blog will cease to update somewhere in 2015:

Joe Moran does not mind the slow decline of his weblog:

Perhaps this is no bad thing. One of the many salutary bits of advice in William Strunk and E.B. White's classic book The Elements of Style is that no writer should offer their opinions 'gratuitously' because to do so is 'to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case'. 

And maybe the slow decline of my own weblog would be no bad thing either. One look at the statistics is depressing enough:

The most popular post is the one where people erroneously search for drugs and prostitution in Rotterdam. Imagine how disappointed they must be when they read a page about psychogeography! And I'm quite sure that:

• some Jewish citizens will be disappointed when they don't find any factual information about the Rotterdam eruv,
• gardeners will find no useful information about how to grow plants in compacted and unfertile urban soil, nor will they find anything useful about eradicating Buddleja or Japanese knotweed,
• students will find nothing of use about conic sections,
• and bingo fans will be disappointed by my collection of Iain Sinclair quotes.

Probably my weblog is too inoffensive to draw much attention. I should include more questionable content: