I had chosen to observe the northeast corner of Prospect Park, seen below:
The area is quite close to the Parkside stop of the Q train, making observations relatively easy to do over the course of the week. So far in my “observational sessions,” I’ve sort of flitted about the site, trying to figure out what I should be observing. Should I be counting how many people walk by? The number of bikers, the number of moms with strollers, the number of barbeques? None of these seem like the right way to observe or experience the space.
But the following collections came out of that line of thinking:
Garbage Found
Tree Abrasions Noticed
The collections are not exhaustive (for the sake of my own sanity), and I refrained from attempting to count or categorize these items (at least for now).
My most successful act of noticing came when I made an audio recording of the ambient sound at my site:
Audio Recording of Ambient Sound
Though our project instructions specifically task us with setting aside our phones, it also felt as though I often needed my phone to capture the kind of information I wanted. Audio was a little different – this actually required me to set my phone down, so as not to interfere with the recording. This was my most rewarding period of actually seeing what was in my site. As I began to look and listen, I began to notice the sounds of different birds, and gain a sense of where their chirps were actually located in the space (before, their chirps were just part of the environment, a sort of disembodied noise). It all felt quite Odellian.
I’m hoping to add a bit of counting and categorizing in my future observations. These are a few ideas of what I might do in future sessions:
Collect the leaves that have fallen on the ground. What species are represented?
Are there any fungal species at my chosen site?
Watercolor studies of the three large trees in my area.
Try to identify the plant species in iNaturalist (I’ve been having bad luck with this one).
“The Times and the Seasons: Sky Media II (Kairos)” Chapter from: John Durham Peters. “The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.”
James Bridle, (2019) “Phenological Mismatch” Eflux. Online: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/273079/phenological-mismatch/
Ted Chiang, Exhalation, 2019.
This week’s readings prompted me to think of several paintings I have encountered, two of which are noted below:
Giuseppe de Nittis - Passa Il Treno
Felix Vallotton - The Wind (1910)
I was really struck by the The Wind when I first saw it because I couldn’t recall, prior to that moment, ever seeing the representation of weather in an oil painting. Torrential rains (and the winds that often accompany them) figure largely in my own memories and imagination because they remind me of particular days of my early childhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the rains mean both disaster and excitement.
Aside from that personal rememberance, all of the readings otherwise evoked a key theme of our class: the importance of noticing. An aspect of science fiction pieces I’ve read recently (I’m thinking particularly of the Exhalation, but also of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem trilogy) is that there seems to be a certain amount of optimism around the fact that if humanity were to notice a problem, we would act to fix it. There is a notion that faced with an existential crisis, the brightest and best minds would be occupied with its resolution. This does not seem to necessarily be the case if we are awake to climate change as our greatest existential crisis (which even the U.S. Department of Defense believes it is). These writers, have noted, however, that there is a certain amount of denial that goes along with existential crisis–I would be unjust to ignore their representations of generations of humanity who choose to ignore crisis, in favor of “self-unpreserving” narratives.
Perhaps, I am merely surprised to find myself facing the possibility of being in a generation that ignores largely the crisis, rather than among one that does not. For the most part, we seem to carry on. Given the dire pitch of recent warnings, it is surprising to find complacence to the new awareness of emergency–both in our societal response, and if I am uncomfortably honest, in my own actions (and lack thereof). I worry about the catharsis offered by criticality, even in the absence of material action.
Most of my progress on the astronomical instrument has taken the form of technical research. In order to implement what I’m envisioning, I need to familiarize myself with the particularities of Open Space and NASA’s SPICE data (which provides positions and times for a number of space objects, including planets and rovers).
Python is the language I’m most familiar with, so this is immensely helpful. I’m realizing I may have to pre-process the data before I do front-end work in Open Space (the data is immense). Open Space already has some webhooks I can utilize, and I will likely use either Serial or Bluetooth to communicate between my physical controller and a web server controlling Open Space.
My goal is to have this completed in time for NASA’s Space Apps Hackathon at the Lowest East Side Girls Club on October 18th. The Girls Club has a planetarium that uses Open Space for shows, and I’d like my astronomical instrument to facilitate that.
The site produces an error log when 6 attempts at guessing the sun’s position has been made and produces a simple log, as errors.txt.
How did you think about the act of collecting data in this work? What relationship to the environment does your concept imply?
The project prompts the user to attend to their inner sense of time as it relates to environmental cues that may usually be ignored in favor of digital devices. It uses a digital interface to redirect the user’s attention back into the real world and to their own interior life (rather than continuing to attend to primarily digital concerns). In this manner, the digital measuring device attempts to subvert the conditions of its existence and propose what is perhaps a quaintly, idealistic (but important) possibility: our digital devices do not have to erode our interiority, but can support it.
What artists or themes were you thinking about as you formulated the idea?
I was primarily concerned about our relationship to time, and was inspired by works from the CW&T studio, and many of the readings we have been undertaking in Jeff Federssen’s Time class.
How did you use site? How did you use technology? How did you choreograph the audience? Did you utilize interaction and why? Who (creator, audience, other lifeforms) has agency in this work and who doesn’t?
The site is everywhere there is sun. It is arguable the mind of the user. The project is more strongly related to a when: the development of time sense it encourages must occur during the day time. The application allows the user to “guess the time throughout the day” and then save their error report, which they can examine for improvement.
What open questions did you have going in? How did making the work change or address these questions?
I am curious whether this software device is capable of improving one’s time sense — this question remains unanswered and can only be revealed through extensive use.
What surprised you about this task?
The surprising parts of this task was how hard it is to guess the time – I always thought I had more daylight hours left than I did.
If you were to do this again, what would you change to clarify or extend?
There are some technical items to fix, in terms of functionality. I would also consider building out a physical interface.
There are several ways this has room for improvement:
As we learned in class, the pathway of a clock is not half circle around the sky, but rather, the shape of the path depends of your location on the globe and the time of year (read: the earth’s path around the Sun). Right now, this prototype is very naively representing the path of the Sun, but this may be improved in future iterations by either building your own sun calculator to affect the geometry of the path or querying the appropriate API and by making the consideration of the Sun’s position with greater accuracy, with respect to its elevation and azimuth.
The mouse interaction is janky.
The feedback to the user about how their guess compares with the real position of the sun could be re-designed into something that reports more precisely about the user’s error rate.
