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.

“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)

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2010109/ – general satellite imagery page for real time images from Nasa’s Modis rapid response system

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=43684 – Images of Iceland and the volcanic eruption from Nasa’s ‘Earth Observatory’ pages

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/43000/43684/Germany_TMO_2010106_lrg.jpg

http://flightradar24.com/

and use of these images in a blog http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/tracking-the-volcanic-ash-cloud/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/8623301.stm

An image made available by NEODAAS/University of Dundee which shows the volcanic ash plume from Iceland, top left, to northern France as pictured by Nasa’s Terra Satellite on 17 April, 2010. All flights in and out of the UK and several other European countries have been suspended as ash from a volcanic eruption in Iceland moves south.

Photo: NEODAAS/University of Dundee/AP

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.

Living Cloud
Media iphone/Nokia application, processing application, projector, paper, sharpie pen.
Dimensions approx 8ft x 8ft – adaptable.
Keywords Locative, GPS, walking, iphone, social connection, sense of place.

Project outline

Movement around the city is both social and spatial, this project explores how  individuals in groups are aware of where each other are and how that affects their experience of place.

I will find one family or group of friends to use comob (our own software that tracks and links groups rather than individuals) for a week and to make diaries  about their use of it. Their movements will be visualised in the gallery, projected onto satellite imagery of the city partially obscured by cloud. The audience will be  able to see the movements of the family as a whole and their relative dispersal and grouping over time, but not their actual location under the cloud cover. The  situated and temporal nature of weather will allow privacy from the usually panoptican vision of satellite imagery.

Alongside this will be their text messages to each other from within the software, revealing how they use the visual links between themselves to co‐ordinate
movement and travel. This experiment in social movement questions how new live mapping software that visualises connections between people can change  group identity, self‐awareness and use of space and transport.

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?

http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/africa-september-2009-floods-and-droughts-the-luxury-disasters-of-other-nations/

I saw this article on nettime, it suggests that in the west we have early weather warnings where often the impact may only be to cancel an outdoor event, while in countries such as africa where flooding or drought are much more severe there are no early warning systems using the kinds of technologies that are now available for accessing live weather reports. The relationship between mapping and action on the ground is very clear, that the ability to see weather systems developing across the globe allows people to act on a local level to protect themselves against severe weather conditions (to some degree, in situations such as flash flooding perhaps,  it would be harder to do anything about prolonged drought)

I just read “Windsurfing: An extreme form of material and embodies interaction?” by Tim Dant and Belinda Wheaton.

The main discussion is around the lifestyle and physical investment involved in Windsurfing, and whether it can be described as ‘extreme’. But the part that most interested me was about the physical engagement of the sport. the embodied physical capital, and bodily skill. “the control of the sailboard is wholly achieved by fine-tuning the orientation of the body to the object. At the highest level, all sports require a very high investment of physical capital, but with windsurfing () in order to participate at the lowest levels, the ability to achieve control must become virtually intuitive: it must happen without conscious thought so that the equipment becomes like a prosthetic extension of the sailor’s body.”

“the meaning of participation is articulated as the embodied performance of the activity, around the felt experience of doing it. The sport has a participatory ideology that promotes fund, involvement, ‘living for the moment’ and other intrinsic rewards.”

“The meaning of windsurfing for the participants is found in the body, in their creative and self-actualizing potential.”

“The motivation to engage in the action and the pleasure derived from engagement are linked to how the body has learnt to be in the world. this is indeed a cultural process in the sense discussed by Mauss as a ‘technique of the body’ (1973) that may be acquired through particular circumstances.”

“Rinehart and Sydnor (2003) have termed activites like windsurfing ‘expressive’ sports in contrast to what they see as the more reward-driven ‘spectacle’ sports, as they are rarely conducted for spectators or competitive practice, but rather emphasize the aesthetic realm in which one blends with one’s environment.”

this posting will turn into all quotes soon, but the thing that interested me is about the physical engagement in the sport, its aesthetic or expressing elements.

“Parlebas includes windsurfing in the class of sports that he labels ‘ludomotricité: that is, they are characterized by the pleasure achieved through the play activity itself (1999a: 225). the sorts of modern sport practices that he includes in this category are scramble-biking, hot-air ballooning, hang-gliding, surfing and white-water canoeing. they have, he suggests, a series of featurs in common: they take place in wild environments beyond social control and management; the subject acts as an individual and interaction with others is not essential; the locomotive force is external to the body, although the pleasure is in the motor and decision-making skill in relation to that force; they involve a visceral response to the normal mode of posture and movement which is thrown vertiginously into confusion (parlebas 1999a).”

These quotes speak directly to some of the things we were thinking about when we were using kiting in our work, to reference physical engagement with the world through the kite.