Cracks in the moon and aliens in the sand

This is my COVID era blog post. Bit after the fact I know, but it still means a lot to me.

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I'm helping clear out some space above a huge retail unit in Coventry that will eventually become a gallery space and studios. It has no windows, only an array of four large skylights fringed with flaking paint. I took some scans of the paint flecks that had fallen. I will do a few more before the project is done. When I'm allowed, once the gallery is opened and the first show launched I will share some photos.

Thinking about Cracks in the moon and aliens in the sand / eyelashes & fluff as a title. I wrote notes before I made the scan:

Peeling and falling, letting go, leaving. Becoming leaves and falling. Hard material, chemical composition, covering; peeling away like bark on a living organism of a building. Fluttering down to be among the misplaced pigeon dung fertilising a painted concrete floor.

 

“A pigeon got in. You know what a mess they make.” Little fluffy white down feathers are amongst the small lumps of concrete and granules of sand that litter the floor in the room we walk through to get to the stairs. It is lit by a single ground-level flood light that sheds long pin-width shadows reminding me of the many, many images of Mars I categorised, on Zooniverse, the citizen science website, during the first spinning-out-of-control weeks of the first lockdown. Doing something useful - putting my brain to work so it didn’t make me sick. Planet Four was a citizen science project to help identify and measure features on the surface of mars – a caramel field dotted with blobs of soot (click if seen) that, sometimes extended out in ‘fans’ or ‘blotches’ (draw carefully on these to indicate direction) that scientists thought could indicate wind direction. These formed seasonally, possibly due to bursts from geysers of carbon dioxide gas through a layer of carbon dioxide ice. Clues to life the red planet. My tired mind just wanted to play join the dots, and I liked the idea that it helped someone else, somehow, to find out stuff, new knowledge, even if that was on another planet and couldn’t really help here. 

It brought Mars closer. Onto the screen on my lap. I was touching it. Deciding what it told me. Drawing on it.

Every image I saw was taken from the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter and each blob was somewhere between the size of my laptop and the sofa. https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mschwamb/planet-four/about/research

 

I wear a mask, a hat, old jeans – they have holes in – old clothes to protect me from the dust. They are comfortable enough but not nice to wear, simply protecting so my skin so it is not damaged by this alien building. 

 

Becoming leaves. Falling. No longer a fluttered eyelash window shadow or a margin of spinning salsa dancer fringe on the eyes of the peering, unconcerned sky, counted four times, two times two. An array of two.

 

These are skylights made of thick, discoloured plastic, flat, slightly domed. I was offered but No, I’m not going up on the roof to see them from the other side. I can see them well enough from down here. Four unnaturally square moons.

 

Becoming data. A moment of pixel-determined length.

 

I took the scanner in, and next day took five scans. Upped the dpi each time and the higher the dpi the bigger the size of the image and the size of the file, but there is so little detail there to capture - it's just a field of air and a few flecks of paint - so the files ended up being a reasonable size. 

The field is the same colour as Mars: brownish caramel and terracotta. The cracked leaves of fallen paint appear as instances of pockmarked surface with edges faded into the striped pattern of a digital imaginating of ambient light.  The feather I find and drop on the glass for the last two scans appears as an abundance of skeleton. It discloses its pigeon dna as complex structure that, next to the boring lines of digitally drawn air and the fallen paint, is unmistakably organically other; chaotic, rooted in algorithmic dna, flexible enough to bend to survive the rigours of our environment. 

The scanner is not flexible. I cover it and the laptop carefully with a sheet of plastic to protect them from the dust to which feather’s complex structure of delicate criss-crossed filaments gives no access.

It’s a surplus scanner. I wanted a printer but it was cheaper to buy a unit with a scanner. I’ve used the scanner loads and I don't like to use the printer if I can avoid it.

 

#remotesensing   Mapping climate change requires entwining of monitoring of ground level activity by satellites. Whether you like the idea of surveillance or not, they are helpful.

How can an empty room with a pile of sand and a lamp become Mars?

 

There is an immense distance between us and I can see land but I can’t touch it. I can touch the method of seeing.

 

As soon as I think of the thin shadows being similar to those sooty marks on Mars, the floor stretches out beyond the walls and the city and I am standing in my boots feeling the pull of shoelaces keeping me on Earth.

 

Up there is a metal, plastic and glass eye, mapping, looking, following commands.

 

There is something in the distance between us, circling eye, which tells me where I am and gives me an idea of what will happen. There is regularity in our patterns and the small ways in which they change. 

 

The way I see you changes what I can see. The scan can be imagined as a slow blink or an image in dots per inch. dpi - depths per instance, dpi - distance per image. Slow digital machine blink, by command in a room being changed. Space elevated by concrete, brick, paint, stairs, doors, elevators, breeze blocks, wood, plastic lamps, and configured by light from an array of windows.

 

I take great delight in the fall off of clarity in the detail of capture between the object of paint that is skin-skin with the scanner bed but which curls away and escapes it, fading into a blur of background space, unknowable by the scanner. This manifests as mist and represents missed data unknowable to this scanner’s capacity as a scanner. It represents failure. This is where the software starts to be imaginative, substituting an algorithm for data for what it cannot be sure about because it has to fill it with something. There can’t be nothing - there is no space between 1 and 0 - that distance where the paint curls out of reach, until the difference between paint and not-paint and light and not-light can no longer be defined and we reach a point of pure algorithmic conjecture. A machine anxiety which produces the pattern of stripes that is the scanner’s best bet on fulfilling the directive to show what is there.

 

Sensors shooting out beams of light speaking in 1s and Os. Hit something now. Become 1 now.

 

As I command an increase in the number of dpi the size of the image produced gets bigger. Sometimes, conversely and unexpectedly, the file size becomes smaller.

Making a Drawing of an Object

 

If I make a drawing of an object it’s not because I want to have a drawing, or make research in order to make another piece of art, it’s because I want to think about this object and get to know it’s surfaces and relation to others and me. Rather than trying to capture an essence of a thing, what I tend to end up doing is to find patterns in its surface that remind me of other patterns. So a crumpled sweet wrapper (the image below) may manifest its surface as crumpled rock strata. Both of these are things that are found at ground level. It’s always - this thing is alike in some ways to another thing I have seen. I experience everything I see through everything I have already seen, and I find the longer I look and think the more the other things I’ve seen come to mind and the less I see the object in front of me. 

I’ve given up trying to be authentic to the object in front of me. I’ve given up trying to see it for what it is. It plainly doesn’t care what I am, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t return the favour. Maybe it would see me as just another object like all the other objects that passed before it. Instead, I’ve become more interested in picturing how my brain thinks.