December 8th, 2010

A Calamitous Plague Cloud Descends

Earlier today I popped out to deposit a canary in Ford Park to gather more data. As I felt I needed the exercise I took a walk over hoad hill on my way to pick up some more wool from Loopy’s in Ulverston. Coming down off the hill into the town I immediately became aware of a faint but foul stench, reminding me of both Painthorpe pig farm and the smell of burning hair during boring science lessons at school. This smell grew stronger as I got further towards the town centre. I spent a little time trying to locate the source of the smell but most of the clouds emitted from the buildings in town were pleasantly fragrant in comparison. The situation continued to get worse and a thick mist descended upon Ulverston. I returned quickly to Lanternhouse to get a mobile canary in order to investigate any possible correlations between what I was smelling and the overall quality of the air. I followed the cloud from Neville Street to the edge of Ulverston along Stockbridge lane, at which point the smell began to disappear, so I headed back into town to gather what data I could.

Despite the canary not being calibrated and therefore not being able to give precise readings on what amounts of which chemicals are present in the air, we can contrast the results gathered using the same equipment on different days. Ruskin characterised the plague-clouds descending upon Coniston according to their erratic movement. While I can’t comment on the visual movements of the cloud surrounding Ulverston this evening, the reading I was getting while seeking out its thresholds were certainly erratic in contrast to that which I’ve become accustomed to seeing while walking around the area. The first two images above show a plot of air quality against location gathered earlier this evening. The faint green line shows the route taken through town and the size of the circles indicates fluctuations in air quality. The third image is a plot of a similar walk taken a couple of days ago, on what can be considered a fairly normal day in Ulverston with only very minor fluctuations in air quality throughout the town. There was something in the air tonight, and it wasn’t very nice.

An alternative plot of this evening’s data:

December 8th, 2010

Atmospheric Proxemics

Some notes on the broader concerns of the invisible cartographies project:

There are two sides to the invisible dynamics of the landscape revealed by this project. The first presents these dynamisms as components or qualities of the landscape as an objective reality, as fluctuations that are part of the landscape itself and not simply perceived fluctuations or subjective variations determined as such according to given thresholds of perception. The second is not wholly separate but certainly different in that it is focussed upon these same fluctuations as they occur within the proximity of a human body. This latter point refers to the data gathered by the mobile or bluetooth canaries which log fluctuations in localised atmospherics against latitude and longitude, fluctuations occurring around the human carrying the device and therefore charting an atmosphere to which the carrier or walker contributes through their breathing or other gaseous expulsions.

Proxemics

The above image is an attempt to show the second of the two orientations mentioned above. The faint green line shows a walk around Ulverston, the centre of each circle indicates a point on the walk at which a sample of the air was taken. The varying diameter of the circles shows fluctuations in air quality. This seems like a particularly suitable way of expressing a kind of gaseous proxemics visually. Proxemics is a term taken from the work of Edward T. Hall. Proxemics can be thought of as the study of personal space, but more precisely it’s socio-cultural or broadly contextual flexibility. A proxemic boundary can be considered broken when another person stands too close. Anyone with a sibling has surely unknowingly experimented with proxemics on long car journeys as a family: one child puts a hand close to the body of the other while claiming that they’re “not doing anything” as their is no physical contact being made. The other child calls out to the parent that their brother/sister is “in my space”, the limit of this space being perceived to be highly ambiguous and often getting little support from the parents. The proximity of the hand to the body of the brother or sister is, however, certain to annoy due to proxemic or personal space being transgressed. While from the outside, or the front of the car the boundaries of the spaces between kids in the back are hard to determine, the kids know precisely where they lie and how to manipulate them. This is of course a really simple example of the complex components and contextual determinants of personal space, which Hall describes in more detail (see The Hidden Dimension). Of particular interest to my own work is Hall’s discussion of auditory and olfactory proxemics, or the contribution of sound and smell to the determination of personal space. The work I’m doing as part of this residency can’t really be considered proxemic research as proxemics are always concerned with the thresholds of interpersonal space, and much of the work I’m doing involves walking alone or in small groups with the focus being placed upon the material composition of an invisible space rather than the interpersonally determined thresholds of personal space, invisible or otherwise. The reason for bringing this up here is that the work being done in mapping atmospheres that circle the body can perhaps be thought of as impersonal proxemics, insofar as it is concerned with the particular elements that contribute to a personal atmosphere that circles individuals and constitutes an ambiguous boundary. While this is less about interpersonal space, this is due to the fact that it is more concerned with how impersonal and inhuman elements nonetheless contribute to what we think of the personal or the space of the self.

Diffuse Bodies

This project is orientated around the diffuse interactions of bodies, human bodies, bodies of air, micro and macroscopic bodies; it busies itself charting the spatio-temporal contingencies of the confused and corpuscular space of which the self is composed. The human as one such body appears in this schema as being composed of―as well as constantly decomposing into―a corpuscular space or atmosphere that both surrounds and permeates individual, proxemic territories. This project approaches the self in terms of a corpuscular space that determines its proxemic territory, the self and not just the body, as this would be both too simple and reductive as the body is clearly observed as being composed of a number of potentially autonomous units. Perhaps there is a tendency to think of the self as a more unitary and unified mode of existence, such as where we write “I” but could just as easily read this symbol numerically as 1. The self thought as diffuse and dependent upon a corpuscular space is thought in a manner more thoroughly confused with a wider environment or atmosphere upon which it depends and with which it is enmeshed. In this model the self is thought as the composition of every element comprising the confusion of body, soul and ecological atmosphere.

The Particular Importance of the Invisible and Corpuscular

Foregrounding the invisible movements, interactions and constitutive contingencies of that which is apparently solid and stable serves to alter and embed a critical function within those thresholds of perception that are allowed to contribute to ontological determination where we hold too strongly to empiricism. We currently face catastrophe, and a factor contributing to the denial of our own implication within this calamitous future is the common ease with which stability and solidity are taken as the chief characteristics of reality, as it is perceived by the eye, ear, or senses in general. We cannot rely upon that which gives itself to perception, upon that which is easily and readily perceived according to inherent sensory capacities, and so we must forcefully bring to the fore elements and qualities of that which resists, ‘withdraws’, or rather exceeds the possibility of perception according to the thresholds of perception as they are simply given. The example that always springs to mind here is of the enormous problem of plastic in the oceans. I once heard a radio programme where two Women out doing research in the pacific described beautifully clear water on a lovely sunny day. They then went on to talk about how the water for miles around was saturated with microscopic particles of plastic that were clogging the up the bodies of marine life. The visible plastic was less of a problem, but would eventually be broken apart and spread itself over thousands of miles into the guts of thousands of fish, mammals, birds and so on. Where we remain focussed upon an understanding of the environment that relies upon that which is empirically justifiable such problems pass us by. In a similar way we might think of Ruskin’s plague-clouds and ‘calamitous winds’ which can be thought as close relatives of smog. While the smoke and smog of the industrial revolution may have cleared and been sandblasted from the walls of our cities, we now face an invisible yet nonetheless substantive threat in the form of pollution that persists, in part at least, due to its imperceptibility. On the subject of “plague-winds”, “smoke-cloud” and “dense manufacturing mist” Ruskin commented on “the uselessness of observation by instruments, or machines, instead of eyes”. It is this sufficiency of the given thresholds of perception that we must continually move beyond in order to take account of the substantive operations of the invisible and imperceptible, embedding them within our image of reality.

A Technical Note

gnuplot commands for the above plot:

set terminal png
unset tics
unset border
unset key
set output 'proxemic.png'
plot '~/Documents/FLI/Walks/24thNovember/[email protected]' u 2:3:($5/470000) w circles lc rgb "black", \
'~/Documents/FLI/Walks/24thNovember/[email protected]' u 2:3 w lp
November 25th, 2010

Twin Peaks

For getting quick results from the data gathered on walks over the hills of Ulverston I’ve been using gnuplot for some basic visualisations. Once the plots are generated they can be quickly and easily arranged for cross reference using imagemagick. Commands below.

Gnuplot commands for the above:

set terminal png
set output 'layer1.png'
unset tics
unset border
set dgrid3d
 
splot '[email protected]' u 2:3:4 lc rgb "green" w l
set output 'layer2.png'
splot '[email protected]' u 2:3:5 lc rgb "blue" w l 
set output 'layer3.png'
splot '[email protected]' u 2:3:($5-$4) lc rgb "magenta" w l

ImageMagick command to combine into a single file, organized vertically:

convert layer1.png layer2.png layer3.png -append layers.png
November 24th, 2010

Terraforming

This afternoon was spent working on further power saving measures and then another test run up the hoad and down through Ulverston town centre. After getting back to Lanternhouse and thawing my icy fists, I thought it might be nice to try out some methods of combining the elevation data with the data gathered from the various gas sensors being used on these walks. The three images above are i) latitude, longitude, elevation ii) latitude, longitude, ozone intensity iii) latitude, longitude, elevation - ozone intensity.

November 20th, 2010

Ozone


Above is the terrain data from today’s test walk, just latitude, longitude and elevation in gnuplot’s beautiful default colour scheme. The sniffer has been fixed and bottled up.

It’s interesting that where yesterdays walk plotted general air quality against landscape and came up with something not too disimilar from that which is visible (see: http://invisible.folly.co.uk/hoad-plots/) plotting ozone concentrations (z) against latitude and longitude (x,y) produces a dramatically different image of the landscape. In the above image the terrain data (green) and a plot of latitude, longitude and ozone concentrations (purple) are overlayed to stress this difference. Below are some further maps of the route taken today and images from a few notable locations.




Nearby, someone was building a house.

Slimy and decaying seating, found just beyond the border of Ulverston.

November 19th, 2010

Hoad Plots




After spending yesterday evening working on a low power version of the sniffers, the sun finally shone on Ulverston today, so I did a quick test run up to the hoad monument which towers above the town. The images above only really show half a plot as I broke the power cable at the top, hopefully tomorrow will be equally as nice a day and I can do some more thorough tests. The data for these images was gathered during the 35 minutes it took to walk from Lanternhouse to the top of Hoad Hill. The first shows the gps coordinates and elevation, the second shows airquality against latitude and longitude, the third shows the sniffer shortly before I broke it, and the fourth shows the route taken.
(Thanks to Martin Howse for the introduction to gnuplot).

November 9th, 2010

Knitting and Plotting

Tests of the sensor and GPS logging are coming on well. After meeting up with the Lanternhouse knitting group last tuesday I’m keen to pursue wool as both a means of representation of the data gathered during walking, yet more more excited about the social structure of the knitting group as means of discussion and working with the ideas of interest and the data gathered. My knitting is still terrible but slowly getting better with the help of this blog: http://www.bellaceti.com/blog/2009/03/how-to-cast-on/ Below is some documentation of both of these things. The test walk in North Shields and Tynemouth resulted in me being caught out in a storm on the sea front, otherwise this walk would have been more circular. For now this is just logging ambient light for testing purposes while I await the arrival of the gas sensors from across the ocean.
A quick gnuplot of the sensor data against location can be found here: http://willschrimshaw.net/inv/plot.html

Potential code to be developed: conversion of gps log to knitting pattern/code such as:

1st Row: (Yo, k1) 3 times
2nd Row: Yo, p5, k1
3rd Row: Yo, p1, k2, yo, k1, yo, k2, p1
4th Row: Yo, k1, p7, k2
5th Row: Yo, p2, k3, yo, k1, yo, k3, p2
6th Row: Yo, k2, p9, k3
7th Row: Yo, p3, k4, yo, k1, yo, k4, p3
8th Row: Yo, k3, p11, k4
9th Row: Yo, p4, k5, yo, k1, yo, k5, p4
10th Row: Yo, k4, p13, k5
11th row: Yo, p5, k6, yo, k1, yo, k6, p5
12th Row: Yo, k5, p15, k6
13th Row: Yo, p6, ssk, k11, k2tog, p6


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