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.

a re-blog from earth observatory’s siberia field work

“Western Siberia is, in places, remote.  However, much of the region can be accessed by a system of roads and rivers.  When planning this expedition, the scientists needed to find the location of GLAS footprints – measurements taken by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System aboard the ICESat Satellite - in the area as well as find routes to enter those footprints.  The goal of the expedition is to measure by hand, on location, as many GLAS footprints as possible in the study area. This is called ground-truth validation, and is an essential part of understanding data acquired by remote sensing instruments.  “

Need to find out more about this relationship between remote sensing and on the ground measurements.

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.

GPS track of the drive and walk. The triangular walk was about 5 miles.

Drawing of the reservoirs

I spent this afternoon wandering around Grizedale at the AND festival, mostly following Rob Ray’s ‘GET LOST’ disorienteering project.

I wanted to get lost. I had decided to try to commit to doing this piece of work. So I set off without any other map of the forest, just the booklet for ‘GET LOST’. (Actually I hadn’t considered taking another map, if the point was to get lost, then why would I need it?). The booklet asks you to put a compass in the middle of a page and follow the instruction that it points too. It also suggested that a GPS could be used, but the compass pointing to one of three options was much more satisfying, almost like spinning a pointer in a game to see where it lands by chance or by fortune. The GPS option just didn’t point so literally. I followed a couple of instructions which led me back to the same page without even moving so I started to follow the instructions more loosely. After a few e.g. to count the rings on a tree stump and imagine how big a tree my age would be, I  soon found that I had no other options but to find Carron Crag. With no map of the forest, I had to ask other walkers and cyclists where it was, and follow some of the forest walk markers. (Strange that I’ve been coming to Grizedale most years since about 1975 but never really remembered names).

I’d thrown myself into the idea of trying to get lost, but stumbled at the first hurdle of actually almost needing another map to find a specific location…….. how was I supposed to get properly lost if I needed to get to a named location in the work? I’d have to be pretty lazy or unresourceful to not find my way there, and then I wasn’t lost. (or am I just being too pedantic, too efficient, too obedient or too literal?) I had a Garmin GPS with me and an iphone with GPS but neither had maps that went beyond road detail.

What I really enjoyed though was having time ambling around paths and try to get lost, not having a time that I needed to be back, but a booklet making suggestions of things I might do. Usually if I go walking I set out with a route, but this time I set off with the artwork as the plan, so it was good to break with habit and meander. I still stopped short of retracing my steps in order to follow an instruction, the compulsion to always go forwards is strong when walking. I’m probably not the ideal person for the work as many of the tracks I recognised and knew their spatial relationship and rough direction to the visitor centre. I stopped doing the work after about 1.5 hours when I was asked to go to anther location without  a map to find it. I did a few more of the tasks picked randomly from the pages. In the end the artwork didn’t really change much for me, except for getting me out there in the first place, with no other purpose than to walk. It was great that I could do this alone, there was no obligation to make any of my reflections public, no reason to perform. So many ‘locative’ works make me feel self-concious in a way that restricts my movements and participation.

But I was glad I’d been led to Carron Crag, the panoramic views are amazing, especially with some snow on the peaks, the cloud base sitting just below the highest peaks, and the view clear to Morecambe Bay. In the mean time I had looked at the maps on my iphone where it was all green and roads and no names.

(ignore the address on the phone, it was the last place I looked for directions to).

It was interesting orientating to such an empty map – thinking about how it will be to orient to only water in my new work for Cheshire.

Also a nice chance to put old and new forms of mapping together, Trig points are like monuments to a time before satellite images.

Phone and GPS reception are both really good up there, so much so that I ended up having an incongruous feeling phone conversation standing on the Crag. And later was able to phone someone to say I’d just seen a deer on the path. Thinking about co-location, sharing events at a distance, wondering what it would be like if someone else had been connected to comob so that they could almost be with me while I walked.

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.

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?”