At Rhizome I find Automated Beacon, an on-line work by Jon Thomson, London, 2007:
“At 00.00hrs on January 1st 2005 an automated beacon began broadcasting on the web at http://www.automatedbeacon.net
The beacon continuously relays selected live web searches as they are being made around the world, presenting them back in series and at regular intervals as a kind of concrete poetry.
The beacon has been instigated to act as a silent witness: a feedback loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves to ourselves in real-time, while occupying a kind of nostalgic now-ness.”
.
.
The Beacon beams data with the regular beat of an old fashioned lighthouse.
When I was 7 or 8, I stretched my small legs up to climb their spiraling staircases, following my father up inside to watch him fix their ‘eyes’ (their electronics).
At night I lay in bed with earphones, listening to crackled radio waves transmitting through a crystal set, through copper wire he had wound around a cardboard tube.
He built a television set that glowed flickering green and white pictures from a tiny cathode ray tube salvaged from a radar.
Perhaps since then I have been fascinated by the silent witnessing of machines.
.
.
In February this year I mounted a camera in my Sydney garden. Every morning (when I am not traveling), at exactly 8am, I take 4 shots, to track a year of change. I take 4 pictures to capture the movement in the landscape caused by wind, rain, or human activity.
Already I see changes in to the changes in the growth and colour of vegetation, the angle of the sun’s shadow cast amongst it, and changes in the general levels of light.
I have begun to observe the sound, anticipating changes over time, of insect and bird calls, and of ground and air traffic.
Thomson’s Beacon casts a wide eye on the world. It raises my awareness of the larger changes, through an unexpected, unremembered sense.
.
.
I set up the camera as a dummy run to test some time-lapse ideas imagining I am in Antarctica for a year.
Now, working with the journals of expeditioners who have worked South for much longer than I could go ever be there, I imaginatively make their journey, and compare their observations and experiences with my own here, now.
.
.
Moving to the words “aftermood, hollow deep blue, leaden clouds, untrustable silence”, of Jack Ward’s 1956 Mawson diary, I feel my way into the landscape he describes, and that I remember.
“Daytime brings stillness, sunlit warmth and we are in a great amiable space, with its beauty of immense extent and intensity. Beauty of contrast, of colour, of tone, of line, of limitlessness and of microscopic minuteness:”
.
.
I videotape moves for animating the pedestrian (rotoscoping).
ELEMENTAL is the word that springs to mind.
The Antarctic landscape is elemental, requiring a return to the first principles of motion in response.
Changes in the landscape can be gestured through the use of time, space and energy.