Landing Sites
Year: 2025
A live-streamed “clock” for display in places of transit, dimensions variable, duration variable
1_ Introduction
This work has been undertaken in the context of my artistic-scientific PhD at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (Potsdam, Germany), and constitutes one in a series of artistic experiments investigating the aesthetics of realtime and computational complexity in the context of earth simulations. In this broader project, I am interested in (a) how realtime and computational time is formulated on the level of computational logic and (b) how this logic is further articulated within a number of case studies of earth simulations in the areas of video games, climate simulations, digital twins, virtual globes, and others.
2_ Description
Landing Sites is a live-streamed “clock”, intended for display in places of transit where people may pass by but not remain for long periods, such as train stations, airports, public squares, or the lobbies of public buildings. Built within the simulation engine Microsoft Flight Simulator and streamed via twitch.tv, the work may be shown on screens of various sizes, and for variable durations - in theory constantly (in practice depending on multiple factors, not least computing resources).
The camera of the clock’s face cuts continuously between a series of sites around the planet in real-time, alongside displaying a number of variables relating to the location of the shot, the local time at each site, and CPU/GPU performance of the local machine on which the simulation is running. Each of the sites - the so-called “Landing Sites” of the work’s title - lies on a standard meridian, and therefore aligns with the boundary of one of the earth’s time zones. The camera is able to jump between all these sites thanks to the 3D “digital twin” of the earth within MSFS, which in the game serves as the backdrop for the flying experience. MSFS also displays live weather conditions at each site based on API data from METAR weather stations around the world. The “clock” cuts to a new scene once per minute, and so completes a cycle of the earth in 24 minutes.
At each of the sites is placed a sculpture - at times clearly visible in the frame, at times receding into the landscape. Each sculpture takes as its base a 3D scan of a natural object (rocks and trees) that is subsequently transformed in a 3D modelling program using boolean operations with primitive shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders). The result is in essence a series of prosthetic architectural follies, which may on first glance be mistaken for utilitarian structures such as airport terminals, but in fact serve no function at all.
3_ Dramaturgy
The dramaturgy of the work evolves over time through the interplay between the metric montage of the shots, the sculptural installations, and the real-time conditions of each site. Due the nature of the film being rendered in real-time, rather than pre-recorded, it is in essence a different film every time it is encountered by an audience, depending on the time of day, year, and weather conditions. It is therefore also durational, having no fixed starting point nor end point, and no fixed running time.
The work addresses a number of themes, out of which (hopefully) arise some productive tensions:
a) “Real” time of the planet vs. “realtime” of the computer
The first tension is between the “real” time of the planet and the “realtime” of the computer. Much has been written both about the construction of realtime within technical systems (e.g. Ernst, 2013; Stiegler, 2018), as well as of the relationship more generally between computation and the category of the “real” (e.g. Krämer, 1998). Landing Sites presents at least 3 levels of abstraction through which to observe the playing out of the “real” of realtime: the debug stats in the top right-hand corner of the screen, measuring among other variables the frame rate and the clock cycles of the CPU (microtemporal); the digital clock interface in the top left-hand corner, showing the local time at the location being shown (mesotemporal); and the scene itself, where the time of day (and year) is indicated by the position of the sun in the sky (macrotemporal).
b) Stream vs. Stasis
The tension between stream and stasis in audiovisual media is perhaps most classically described by Paul Virilio in his anecdote about a hotel pool in Tokyo with a steady artificially-generated current, such that guests could practice swimming lengths without ever actually moving through space (Virilio, 1999). In the contemporary context of social media and live video platforms the “stream” takes on a special relevance as an increasingly dominant cultural technique.
If in the experimental film scene of the 1960s and 70s a cinema of stasis (Remes, 2015) emerged in the context of structural interrogations of the medium and as a form of resistance against mainstream film practices, in digital media such practices can be seen in the work of David Claerbout, among others (Walmsley 2024). In Landing Sites, this tension is drawn out in the interplay between the live stream of the work on twitch.tv, the datastream of the CPU clock cycles visualised in the interface, and the almost completely still realtime representations of the landscape and sculptures.
c) Map vs. Photograph
If the photographic image has a long history in the employment of map-makers and draughtsman in producing cartographic abstractions of space (Parikka, 2024), in the age of simulations the map becomes the basis on which images of space are produced. This is exemplified in the images of landscapes that form the backdrop of each of the scenes in the work: they are the product of a patch-work of satellite imagery draped over Digital Elevation Models, and run through an image-classification algorithm in order to identify buildings to be processually generated on the surface of the earth. The images exist only for the duration of the shot, before they disappear upon scene change as they cease to be pulled from memory (this can best be seen in the first few seconds of each shot, when the landscape is loaded from memory in fits of data).
Bibliography
Ernst, W. 2013. Chronopoetik: Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien. Berliner Programm einer Medienwissenschaft, Band 10. Kadmos Kulturverlag.
Krämer, S. 1998. Was haben die Medien, der Computer und die Realität miteinander zu tun? Zur Einleitung in diesen Band. in Krämer, S. (Hg.) Medien, Computer, Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellung und Neue Medien. Suhrkamp.
Parikka, J. 2023. Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. University of Minnesota Press.
Remes, J. 2015. Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis. Columbia University Press.
Stiegler, B. 2018. La technique et le temps 3: Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être. Fayard.
Virilio, P. 1999. Polar Inertia. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Walmsley, A. 2024. Landing Sites. xCoAx 2024 Conference Proceedings. DOI 10.34626/2024_xcoax/classof24_009
Further Links
Paper presented at xCoAx 2024 — 12th International Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X. 10-12 July 2024