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.

An illustration (in Mapping England by Simon Foxell) of a map by Thomas Baldwin from his book Airopaidia. It’s taken from his flight in Lunardi’s balloon from Chester castle over Cheshire and Lancashire, and is said to be the first published aerial view, and the first account of aerial navigation. This aerial, embodied, weather shrouded view of the world is the kind of partial and situated view that I’ve been thinking about. Views that speak of the detail of an experience rather than the over view of power.

In a recent talk at Lancaster University Dr Leon Gurevitch described the changing meaning of images of the globe, from the famous photograph of the earth from space referred to as ‘the blue marble‘ in which weather systems and a lack of visible borders enabled people to think of the earth as a whole, fragile, interrelated organism, and influenced the whole earth movement and James Lovelock. Gurevitch contrasted these views of the globe with google earth in which all the weather has been stripped away and the national borders drawn in.

This was useful in my own ongoing research and attempt to re-claim an aerial perspective that is not panopticon. A sense of the aerial view as something that can mediate a closer relationship between the individual, specific locations and connections to the global. This research has included finding examples of what I call emobodied views from above, descriptions of flight by Saint Exupery, from women spitfire pilots of WWII, Helen Sharman the first British Astronaut, Astro_Soichi who has posted his own photographs from space on Twitter, often with a very specific individual perspective (and has discusssed with and responded to comments via twitter), my own experiences of flight in light aircraft, balloons and jet planes, WWII silk escape maps, the current air pilots handbook description of an emergency landing, and the same text from a WWII pilots handbook, pilots accounts of emergency landings read at the RAF museum in Hendon, artists like Simon Faithfull and Martin John Callanan, animated films like pixar’s ‘UP‘ and Studio Ghibli’s ‘Porco Rosso‘ and observations of places in google in which the earth is permenantly covered in cloud in a reversal of the clear sight of the seemingly timeless, weatherless satellite imagery.

These partial and situated views that allow a greater connection to the ground rather than a removal are also seen in the work of Per Sandstrum at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science in Umea in his work with the indigenous Sami people using GPS to track their Reindeer herds, and the work of the Arctic Perspective Initiative in Nunavuc, northern Canada. Both projects work closely with indigenous populations to develope technologies such as aerial views, GPS and live data links to mediate and enable relationships between people and the land within traditional nomadic or migrationary journeys. These journeys are tied closely to the ground and are spaces in which those technologies are being used to enable further relationships rather than disconnections.

These uses of mapping and viewing technologies could be articulated in contrast to traditional maps as seen in the Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library. Subtitled ‘Power, Propaganda and Art’ the exhibition and its printed guide describe how maps have been used to impress, intimidate, over-awe and rule, to convey power, status, dominance and military triumph, to associate the owners with God and eternity, to reflect intellectual accomplishment, wealth and extensive travel, as propaganda, advertising, and strategic planning, and to make an impression through education and indoctrination. And although they often express the intricate local knowledge of the map maker they were often made for the uses of those in power. An exhibition of vernacular maps, of hastily drawn maps used to show the way from here to there,  would have been a good counter point to this exhibition.

first step in the production of new work, a tracing of all the water. Thinking about partial forms of maps, maps that don’t give a panopticon perspective, but only allow partial and situated perspectives.

I visited the reading room of the RAF museum in Hendon last Thursday to look at their escape maps, accounts of pilots escaping from France and Denmark, and to read the training manual for forced and precautionary landings in 1942.

The silk escape maps were quite different, varying thicknesses of silk, everything from full colour printing to just black on very fine silk. The edges were not finished, most were frayed, some very evenly cut, others quite approximate. The silk in most cases was very finely woven, so that the threads formed a dense surface for the ink, and were less prone to fraying I guess. There was also a tissue paper map which showed much more sign of wear and tear than the silk maps.

I also met an 87 year old man who had been an aerial photographer during the second world war, who had come in to look at a handwritten book the he had written about aerial photography that was in the archive. I arranged to contact him and interview him sometime soon. The archive are interested in any recording or transcription I might make of an interview with him too.

Just consulted a satellite map on my phone to see how far i’d gone, then saw a stone saying marple 8 miles. Which would have done a similar job. On the canal it shielded in some parts from other parts of the place, like motorways are, it would be good if the bridges said which roads they were.

Another silk escape map arrived yesterday – this one is of Helsinki and Trondheim and from 1953, showing lots of water in the landscape. The nearest thing perhaps to the silk maps I’m making for the Macclesfield show.

I expected silk escape maps to feel smooth and silky, but instead they feel like a combination of waxy and chalky somehow. I was expecting them to be printed like a silk scarf would be, dying the fabric, but instead they have a surface on the silk that the map is printed onto so that it can be double sided.

The ex-military white silk parachute that I ordered also arrived…

I went to see the Decode and Quilts exhibitions at the V&A yesterday. I was really disappointed by the Decode exhibition of digital design. The most positive thing about it was that it was showing digital, interactive and networked works in a major museum space, and its three themes of CODE, NETWORK and INTERACTION made the exhibition very accessible. But where was the content? Even the social media works felt devoid of social impact. The works that were chosen made digital design look like digital wallpaper and mirrors most of the time. At times I was reminded of seeing a video camera linked up to a monitor in a TV shop window when I was a kid – we could have played in front of them for hours, with the novelty of seeing ourselves in real time on a screen. There were four pieces in this exhibition that did almost exactly that, but with different technologies and at different speeds. To me, none of them were as interesting as Bruce Nauman’s 1970′s video work ‘Live-Taped video corridor’. It reminded me of the best of our undergraduate degree work for the BA Multimedia Design course at Huddersfield, although of course some of their work was inspired and influenced by some of the older works in this exhibition. A good exhibition for introducing techniques of digital design, but disappointing if expecting a reflection on the current state of digital design.

Then on to the Quilts exhibition, still thinking about code, network and interaction, and immediately Ele Carpenter and Open Source Embroidery came to mind (a great project in which the shared ethos of open source software and embroidery are brought together).  The code of the complex patterns handed down from person to person through patchwork and quilting patterns, each adapted and developed by subsequent stitchers. These networks evolving through design are also reflected in the communal production process and the social use of quilts as objects passed down between generations. And the codes really are complex, the patterns of tiny pieces in traditional patterns that evolve over time. For obvious reasons a favourite of mine was the Mariners Compass quilt design and a sampler made by 10 year old Ann Isabella Reader in 1800, “Silk satin ground with a design showing a map of England and Wales, with the counties outlined and labelled in stitch. Embroidered in silk in running, outline, split, stem satin and long and short stitch.” (from V&A collections). Each county stitched around with at least 4 silk threads, for her eduction in needlework and geography, an interesting link for me to other textile maps.

In the quilts exhibition code, network and interaction also became social actions, political commentary, historical record, tactile experience and adaption through everyday use. What was disappointing about Decode was there in abundance in the quilts, and is there in other digital work, just not the ones exhibited here.

One of the best contemporary works in the Quilts exhibition was Jennifer Vickers work ‘The Presence of Absence’ (as described here) a quilt made of paper with a square of blank newsprint for each person who has died in the second Iraq war.

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.

Last week I was a visiting lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, working with the first year undergrad Landscape Architecture students. They were a great bunch of students and really applied themselves to the challenge I set. It was a two day project, and the brief was titled “Hacking Maps: The map is not the territory.” The challenge was: How can we use easily available mapping tools to represent places as we know them on the ground?

This question is closely related to my own research interests in relationships between digital mapping, particularly google maps which has a very static, monolithic view point, and how we experience the world on the ground.

The work the students produced, having never made anything in google maps or google earth before was, in the most part, very thoughful and engaged. And while many worked with how they experienced the city on the ground (e.g. a map based on how far you can freewheel on a bicycle in the city), others immediately thought about their current location  in relation to other people and places, and there are two groups in particular I want to describe. The first made a project called ‘I am here, this is me’, basing their work on the idea that you may be on one location, but that where you have been previously and where you want to go in the future are as much part of your identity. They asked everyone in their class (quite an international group of students) to name a location that has shaped them, and where they picture themselves in the future, and to draw both locations. These images were attached to markers in google maps and linked to the current location of that person.

A second project asked where home is, and what image they associate with home.

Both these projects produced maps of ‘the ground’ and their experience of now, that is intrinsically linked with elsewhere.

(My introduction to the project included work by locative media artists such as jeremy woods, christian nold, esther polak, Jeff Knowlton & Naomi Spellman, Teri Reub, Glowlab, and google map projects such as Mr Beller’s Neighbourhood, uksnowtweets and meipi. I had framed the talk with Monika Buscher’s work with landscape architects and the problem of the view from nowhere within the view from somewhere, and talked very breifly about De Certeau’s reading and writing the city, Tim Ingold’s wayfairing and Nigel Thrift’s notion of qualculation.)

A few days later Doreen Massey is an invited speaker at Lancaster University, discussing the 1991 essay ‘A global sense of place’ in which she calls for a new way of thinking about place that is not reactionary, but allows for peoples feeling of fragmentation in a globalized world. This sense of place is about active social relations, not a static history, it is about links to elsewhere, rather than boundaries with and us and them, it is of the multiplicity in all places, rather than a notion of a singular local identity, and a uniqueness of place that is continually reproduced through wider social relations, the uneven-ness of experiences of globalization, and the multilayered past of a place that also has global linkages. In other work Massey links static ideas of the local to the shift of tectonic plates, so that even the ground we stand on has moved in from elsewhere.

It was striking to me that the combination of the challenge and using google maps as a tool, very quickly provoked a response from students that is in line with this notion of place, as outward looking, linked and multiple.

In thinking about landscape architecture, this also relates to Andrea Kahn’s  Keynote at the AHRA conference ‘Field/Work’, that there are three territories that an architectural site encompasses, an ‘Area of Control’ (the site to be built on), an ‘Area of Influence’ (the broader territory that influences the site) and the ‘Area of Effect’ (the territory that is effected by the design actions of the architect). She also talked about the site as a constellation as Massey does, site as a relational construct.

A google version of the Borges classic ‘On exactitude in Science’