Jen Southern

“January 1940. The French planes did not come. Perhaps, people thought, they are not going to come. Not ever. In the streets of Paris, the Communist party and its supporters marched and chanted for peace, for dignity, for an end to war. Especially this unjust war against Germany – Russia’s ally. On the Maginot Line, quartered in a schoolhouse near Strasbourg, Private Jean-Paul Sartre of the artillery’s meteorological intelligence service sent balloons aloft, reported on the speed and direction of the wind to gunners who never fired a shot, and wrote in his journal that ‘Life is the transcendent, psyschic object constructed by human reality in search of its own foundation.’”

p78, “The Polish Officer” Alan Furst. 1995, (Random House)

“The most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”

says Bobby Chombo a locative media programmer in William Gibson’s novel ‘Spook Country’ (2007)

In his paper ‘Locative-Media Artists in the Contested-Aware City‘ Anthony Townsend discusses a similar theme in more depth. (Leonardo, volume 39, Issue 4)

“The rapid deployment of top-down context-aware systems and the lack of holistic, sustainable, human-centred visions for aware cities has created an enormous intellectual vacuum. Into this breach have stepped artists who are co-opting this new “locative media” to highlight the flaws of these visions but also to raise fundamental questions about the nature of public space and surveillance.”

“By engaging these technologies and their social and spatial implications, artists are shaping the evolution of a space-changing technology far earlier than they ever have in the past.”

“The artists of tomorrow with have to explore the meaning of perception in a world in which we will have outsourced many of our perceptive tasks to machines, to extend and augment our abilities.”

The dangers of this position are discussed by Tuters and Varnelis (Beyond Locative Media)

“The reluctance of many locative-media practitioners to position their works as political has led some theorists, such as Andreas Broeckmann, to accuse locative media of being the “avant-garde of the ‘society of control’”

In Cumbria last week I found several references to GPS in cards and local news – all with varying levels of frustration with different aspects of GPS as inaccurate, unreliable, misleading, gendered and un-necessary or ineffectual, in some ways reflecting what I’ve found in field work elsewhere.

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.

Some more notes on fiction that references GPS.

You Shall Know our Velocity – David Eggers (2003)

A road trip book about two friends (Will and Hand) dealing and not dealing with the death of their friend Jack during a trip around the world, trying to give money away.  Issues to do with mobilities come up time and again through their  modes of travel, their speed and slowness, border crossings and interactions with people; officials, prostitutes, children and other travelers.

p 61
“We had fettuccine and Senegalese beer. We learned that Raymond worked in cellphones. Something involving GPS and cellphones and how, soon enough everyone would know – for their own safety, he insisted, with a fist softly pounding the table, in a way he’d likely done a hundred times before – where everyone else in the world was, by tracking their cellphone. But again: for good not evil. For the children. For the children. For grandparents and wives.
It was the end of an epoch, and I didn’t want to be around to see it happen; we’d traded anonymity for access. I shuddered. Hand, of course, had goosebumps.”
There were also some interesting reflections on views from the outside, from the outskirts and from above. The philosophical question here is so different to the views experienced by Helen Sharman, the first British person in space, who describes the view from space in relation to her family and friends back at home.

p298
“ – When we all argued about whether we’d leave everything here to go into space. What we’d do if given the chance to see space on an exploratory mission, without possibility of return. Without possibility of ever seeing family or friends again. It was a choice between the world or your eyes.”

When they readed the top there was nothing. When reaching that distance that seemed to offer so much, the characters have an immediate need to return to the ground, where decisions are more immediate and visceral. Despite descriptions of the physical feeling of cold, this environment is an empty one, a going outside to find that it is empty. A symbolic distance used for its ability to communicate emptiness and being disengaged. This summit was not the point. In the traditions of the road trip,  everything is in the journey and not in the arrival.

p300
“ – So we went up to the mountain, as the air went cooler and colder, and we illuminated the treetops with our headlights, and all the while we were sure there would be a reason at the top, but then we were at the top, where we imagined the top to be, and we stopped and stepped out onto the road, and could feel that we were at the pinnacle of something, and there was silence. There was no sound of anything – no animals, no water, no birds, no insects, no people, not even the wind pushing through trees. We had come to the mountain, to its apex, and there was nothing.”
p  301
“ – You know, though, the worst thing was being on top of that mountain, and having the thought that I wanted to be back below, being chased through those streets. I don’t want to tell you this because I’m not in a position to be wishing for these things, and I’m sure you find this offensive considering where you are and why but Jack while up on that mountain listening to nothing, waiting and hearing nothing, and getting cold, I wanted to be back down in those alleys. Jack I wanted to be pursued and wanted to pursue, I wanted to be closer to death than I did to be there in the silence at the top of the mountain. Jack I don’t know if you know how quiet it was up there. It was so black! It was much lighter within those streets, and even the knife at the throat of the man being pressed against the wall of the alley seemed to promise so much comfort, the edge of the blade seemed to me to give such love, would be like a finger lightly stroking my neck, and I wanted then, on the roadside when Hand and I had gotten out and were waiting, to be back down there again, lost in that ghetto. There were rules down there, and there was a task at hand, and there were few options and with few options comes such great solace, Jack!”

And this section about making connections with people struck me, the suggested link between travel and disconnection, and the actions needed to thread people together. A repeat of the idea of being ‘only eyes’, locations without connections, the point rather than the line.

p303
“ At an airport I guess it would be if your relatives were waiting or something, your mother, your cousins, an aunt or uncle, nieces – you would see them, maybe your chubby little cousins, and they’d show you their homework or something and you’d know why you’d come. But I never had that kind of thing, you know that, and when we landed in Estonia, or any of those places, there was nothing of course, no one waiting, and no one wanting us there, no one needing us. There wasn’t one thread connecting us to anyone and we had to start threading, I guess, or else it would be just us, without any train or web and if it was just us, ghosts, irrelevant and unbound, not people but only eyes, then there was something wrong. Something would feel wrong. I don’t want it to be just my eyes, do I, Jack?”

I finished reading ‘Spitfire Women of World War II’, by Giles Whittell a few days ago, which tells the story of how women came to be part of the Air Transpot Auxilary. Taken from  interviews with female pilots, there are many accounts of their experiences of flying, and the role the weather played in their safety and the risks they faced. The book begins with an account of the pilot Betty Keith-Jopp being overcome by cloud and in the process of turning back, landing on water and narrowly escaping, and there are many other accounts throughout the book of pilots being stuck above cloud with no way of knowing how low it came down, or exactly where they were, including the weather conditions and other flights that went ahead on the day that Amy Johnson died.

There are also comments of the embodied experience of flying: (p141) ‘It changes your perspective of the world, once you see it from the air. This was the sensation that interested me: a wonderful feeling of expansion.’ (Roberta Sandoz in an interview with Whittell).

And this account of the calculations that went into navigation, with no radio and only instruments to fly by.  In returning from the first international flight made by a woman in the ATA, in 1944, Diana Barnato got stuck above cloud.

p257

“When asked much later whether at any point on this flight she had felt completely lost, Diana said airily that if things had got that bad all she would have had to do was fly up the North Sea and turn left.

It did not seem so simple at the time. The first decision was easy enough: she could not turn back. The chances of overshooting Evere and ending up behind German lines were too great. Then there was the choice of continuing on a compass course that might or might not deliver her to RAF Northolt depending on wind and visibility over north London; or going as low as she dared and nosing around until she recognised something from her map. She chose to descend and eventually saw the hills of St Omer rising to meet her. Soon afterwards she crossed what she hoped was the French coast south of Gris Nez. If it was, seven and a half minutes on a course of 295 degrees should put her over Dungeness. She adjusted her course and began counting down. But the Channel was covered in sea fog thicker than anything so far, right down to the water. She climbed to 4,000 feet to get over it, and started finding distractions – another aircraft, which she dived to follow hoping it might be Derek’s, only to find it was a Dakota flying in the opposite direction; a change from white fog to yellow fog beneath her (did that mean land?); a gap in the yellow fog just where Dungeness should have been (if she had managed to get back on the right course and allow for the right number of lost seconds after chasing the Dakota).

She stood the Spitfire on its wingtip to peer through the gap. No land. Now her brain began rewinding involuntarily to what she thought had been the French coast. If that had been east of the Cap, not south – Belgium, not France- she might already be over the North Sea rather than the English Channel, with no hope of a landfall unless she turned west. But if it ahd been where she thought it was and she turned west too soon, she’d fly straight down the Channel and run out of fule somewhere over Cornwall. With one half of her mind racing, the other half hammered out a practicable compromise. After twenty-two minutes flying north-west with no sight of land she reasoned that she must have crossed hte Frnch coast further south than she thought, putting her over the Channel now rather than the North Sea. She dived to 200 feet and turned right, skimming over the water on a bearing of ten degrees.  “Suddenly there was a little sheen of light ahead, a line of white in the yellow. I peered at it anxiously; and yes, it was something. Land at last? The White Cliffs of Dover, perhaps? I flew on. It was not the White Cliffs of Dover, but an east to west line of lovely sandy beach. There, right behind it, looming up beside me with a rusty grin, was the huge gasometer at Bognor.” Diana was 100 miles west of where she’d meant to be, but no longer lost. “

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?

I just finished reading Murakami’s book ‘After Dark’. The story takes place through one night, and the narration is through carefully described ‘view points’, like carefully framed camera shots, with one character slipping slowly through a screen and back again. Some of the descriptions of viewpoint take us in and out of the detail, and describe the kinds of perspectives i’ve been talking about in relation to GPS.

p3

“Eyes mark the shape of the city.

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature – or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythmn of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonoous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

Our line of sight chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it – a sea of neon colours. “

I went to a great talk by Melanie Ord last week, she was talking about 17th Century travel writers, and there was some interesting stuff about digression in walking and digression in writing, and a place as a digression.

And some images i hadn’t seen before from “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” by Laurence Sterne.

The lines that describe the narrative really remind me of gps lines, there are particular spikes in the lines that remind me of data spikes in gps lines.  When we were working on our Landlines software we were surprised when our programmer ironed out these errors in the data. We had thought the inaccuracies as metaphors for the mind wandering whilst walking, when you realise you hadn’t really been thinking about where you were going and your mind was somewhere else, to our programmer they were just errors.

“

Melanie Ord, Dept of English, University of the West of England

‘Methodological Innovation in Seventeenth-Century Travel Writing‘

This paper explores the discourse on method in seventeenth-century travel texts and pays particular attention to John Dunton’s Voyage Round the World (1691), an experimental travel report that privileges the narrative personality of the traveller over the scenes he witnesses. The paper considers Dunton’s attempts to establish literary digression as a form of travel for both reader and writer. It also discusses his travel narrative alongside that of Thomas Coryat (whom Dunton recalls and rivals), considering the impact of Coryat’s travel text and its critical reception on Dunton’s own self-representation, and exploring ways in which Dunton further develops the association made in the pages of Coryat’s Crudities (1611) between the personality of the traveller-writer and form and style of his book.”