Jen Southern

I’m on the mailing list of the Nasa Earth Observatory and get regular emails with links to satellite imagery. I noticed today that you can download a kml file to see the image in google earth. At last some weather in the all-seeing google imagery. Although there have always been places where this was true. I first noticed it in an area of Columbia when working with some GPS data created by artist Luis Sotelo. If you find areas of cloud on the google imagery in the UK you can zoom in right through them to clearer aerial photography images below. But in Columbia its cloud all the way down.

I had an interesting conversation with a Korean friend last week, she asked if in English I would say that a bird flies  ‘in’ the sky or ‘on’ the sky. We discussed the differences in how language reflects different perceptions of the sky. Returning to google earth, the weather or more specifically clouds interrupt, obscure and disrupt the idea of clear vision and easy visual access. It returns the sky as a medium that reaches from the upper atmostphere down to the ground, that is active with clouds, rain, ice crystals, differences in air pressure, winds and cyclones.  A skyscape full of weather that we live in (see Tim Ingold’s ‘The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather’ Visual Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, October 2005).

I first began thinking of the sky as a ‘site’ for artworks in the mid 2000′s. I learned to fly in a Cessna 150 as part of some research I was doing at the time about virtual and physical actions. While learning to fly  VFR (Visual Flight Rules) meant that I was only allowed to fly when I had a clear sight of the ground. Clouds became objects to fly around, oncoming walls of danger making me turn back and land before they rolled over the airfield. Once with my instructor I flew through a tiny wisp of cloud, I was surprised at how visceral an experience it was almost like flying towards a brick wall and then finding that like a ghost I could pass right through it. For a second everything turned white and then we were out the other side. One of my strongest memories of flying was when the clouds were quite low – maybe at 1500 feet, and we were skimming along just underneath them as if they were a flat layer or ceiling. At other times the pockets of low pressure around clouds made flying like driving along a bumpy road, but with sudden losses of altitude that left your stomach a few feet above for a second. For me flying is always ‘in’ the sky, and the sky is an ever present mediation of environment.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/elegantfigures/?src=eoa-features

Robert Simmon, NASA Earth Observatory’s lead visualizer talks about how they made visualisations of the cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash. The widespread flight cancellations were not due to ash filling the skies but uncertainty about where the ash was. In accounts of travellers experiences during the volcanic activity this uncertainty in the sky also became uncertainty on the ground through boats, trains and coaches that might or might not be departing, routes across Europe that may or may not be possible, connections that may or may not be reached in time and flights that might or might start flying. (at Cemore‘s ‘Stranded: Lava, dust, people and aeroplanes‘ – workshop at Lancaster University)

These visualisations that communicate the spread of ash suggest an uncertain world, a stark contrast with the cloud free, easily browsed globe of google earth.

The news is full of stories about the ash from the Icelandic volcano and its impact on flights across Europe. For 4 days now flights have been grounded, effecting the mobility of both people and cargo.

The images associated with theses stories began with these awe inspiring plumes of ash cloud, which were followed quickly with satellite images of the spreading cloud across Europe, and data visualisation maps of grounded flights. (alongside the images of people at airports, fish rotting while waiting for export etc).

These clouds remind me of Ruskins descriptions of ‘The storm cloud of the nineteenth century’, clouds that were blacker and more persistent, industrial clouds that were different to any he had seen, or seen recorded ever before. Ruskin’s cloud descriptions  are related to industrial rather than natural effects on the weather, but the link perhaps is also the portent of clouds that are vehicles for particles that are not usually there, and the weather systems that, out of our control, link us in very physical ways with locations across the world.

The fear that the particles in these clouds could actually stall the engine of an airplane and potentially cause a crash brings a precariousness of flight back, a suspension of our belief and confidence in the technologies of flight, and a question over what has become almost a right and an assumption of easy air travel.

I’ve been thinking and writing recently about how weather and cloud effects navigation, particularly in small aircraft when flying with visual flight rules. And looking at accounts of forced landings and crashes over the Pennine hills in the north of england due to bad weather, particularly during WW2. Clouds have often been associated with getting lost and with danger in these situations.

I’ve been thinking of the sky as a site, as a place or as many places and watched Hayao Miyazaki’s film ‘Porco Rosso’ (Studio Ghibli, 1992) a couple of weeks ago, I found it by accident on TV on a Saturday afternoon. Set between the two world wars, a loner pilot who has been turned into a pig fights sea pirate’s in his airplane, and his young engineer Gina helps him to rebuild the tired aircraft. (see wikipedia for a better description of the story than this)

The animation of the aerial movements of the planes is amazing, the detail of the clouds as they fly, fight and dive through and around them and the way the cloud is almost dragged with the plane as they move through it as if it were a more viscous medium, all situated the film in the movement and life of the cloud. The sky becomes the set for the animation, a place which Porco Rosso knows intimately, and where the detail of the cloud and the landscape viewed from above is ever changing. Scenes where planes fight are at times clear skied, but then gradually amongst cloud the visibility changes and reduces, changing the strategy of the battle. This specific and detailed representation of movement through the sky, and action that takes place in the sky is unusual, the sky becomes as much a part of the film as the action.

An astronaut is tweeting from space, taking photographs of the earth and posting them live.

http://twitter.com/Astro_Soichi

The captions on photos initially suggested that he is trying to replicate the clear vision of google  “the first time London was not covered with cloud”, and there is always a tension between this clarity and his individual perspective from space, laced with clouds and at angles we don’t recognise from maps and images that adhere to north as top of image.   There is a dialogue between him and other twitter users ordinary things. The comments the images get are often mundane, ‘amazing photo’ ‘please photograph my city’ ‘awesome’, however occasionally an image will provoke speculation on pollution in a river, suggesting that seeing things from above can reveal wider social or environmental conditions.

Soichi also describes his tasks on board the space station. Comments like  ‘time for dinner at last’ put these images and their scale into perspective with everyday life and the ordinary. The liveness of these posts make them more compelling than google, and in a way brings the scale of the achievement closer where it becomes perhaps less amazing. Knowing that a single person took this photograph and posted it to twitter is powerful. And he’s responding to people’s requests, so that it has become a conversation between individuals, between earth and space.

I bought some slides taken in space from Skylab 3, from ebay a few months ago. They are faded and pink, appearing dated and nostalgic. One image I find particularly interesting is of a tornado over the Atlantic, the swirl of cloud obscures the earth as it spreads over its surface. The lack of clarity opens up space for a different interpretation, of more seperation from the lense. Where Soichi tweeting from space connects us directly, these slides and their partial views that are hard to read make the feat of being in space all the more mysterious and amazing, perhaps even something to be in awe of.

1. At the flying school, P explained that he wouldn’t usually use a GPS to plan a route, but would take it just in case of an emergency like low cloud

I might say, ‘well i’m not going to use the GPS’ but just in case something goes wrong i’ll switch the GPS on, and just put it on the back seat, so I haven’t done any planning with it what-so-ever, and then if suddenly something happens and we’ve got to go somewhere else I can pull it up and say right the GPS is switched on, its been listening to all the satellites so it knows where we are now, so then I can start to re-plan my alternate, or alternate way around. Maybe clouds come down so I can’t fly over this high ground so i’ve got to come around the coast so I can say right, well, I could actually do that and put a waypoitn in there, and say right just go to that point.

2. At the walking group M explained how he uses GPS to do walks he’s not been on before, and an instance, in cloud again, when he was glad he had the GPS with him.

And, I was trying to get it three dimensional to make the point much better, but basically you can see its a zig zag path which actually climbs 800 metres from sea level onto this ridge, and the ridge becomes extremely narrow with probably something like 500 metre drops both sides, very close, and when we got to the top, the clouds came down. It was quite nice having GPS then, and even then we didn’t realise quite how dodgy it was. But i’ve quite enjoyed and I can’t quite demonstrate because I can’t quite overcome my use of google maps, google earth, but if you can get that into 3D you can just see how dramatic the walk was, even the bits that were in the cloud, I can now see what we missed.

3. Talking to Luis Sotelo, a performance artist who is working with walking and mapping. I had lent him a GPS for his walking performance, re-tracing the path of an old indigenous walking route in Columbia. He described how on his preliminary walks the sky was clear, but for the performance the cloud came down and it rained, but that somehow this atmosphere was perfect for the walk, and that they felt it connected them much more to perhaps a spiritual sense of the past and the landscape. Its also interesting that this is a part of the satellite map that it has been considered it is OK to use an image with cloud obscuring the landscape, in contrast to the clarity of the skies over cities.

I saw the new Pixar film ‘UP’ a couple of days ago.

To fulfill a life long dream, and to escape impending removal to an old people’s home, Carl ties thousands of helium balloons to his house, and it floats up into the sky (with an unwitting stowaway, a young ‘wilderness explorer’ Russell).

The thing that really interested me was that a huge storm cloud is used as a device to transport them from North America to ‘Paradise Falls’ an unexplored area of South America. A big, dark, turbulent storm cloud that they are inside, surrounded by and thrown around by.  When the storm subsides Russell takes out the GPS that his dad has bought him, and says “with my wilderness explorer GPS we’ll never be lost”, and then accidentally throws it out of the window in a triumphant flourish.

“oops”

This juxtaposition of the cloud taking them away, and the GPS being used to find them is a classic trope of GPS & encapsulates the popular image of what GPS promises – never being lost – but becomes useless when its accidentally thrown out of the window. This is the flip side of the promise, that if you rely on the GPS you’ll be lost when it fails, the batteries die, you loose it, it doesn’t work etc.

Later in the film there are dogs with GPS locaters on their collars, with a small visualisation of where each other are. They are used as a plot short cut to explain why the runaway dog ‘Doug’ and his new friends are found so quickly by the rest of the pack, but the idea of GPS is so familiar it doesn’t need much explanation of what the technology is doing.

I think the first use of GPS in a kids animation that I remember was sat nav in the Incredibles (?), at least the first use of it as an ordinary item, not a specialised sci-fi effect – this reference in UP is very run of the mill & for an non-specialist, non-sci-fi audience.

This also reminds me of another ordinary use of GPS, rather than sci-fi, in a recent episode of the BBC drama ‘Waking the Dead’ in which the detective Boyd is being tracked using GPS in his phone, which is then thrown out of the car window, and the track gets lost.

Does anyone has a list of fiction (film/tv/books) that uses GPS?