This is the last Beyond Place of 2022. When I started this weekly writing in April 2021 I did not know where it would go. My initial plan was to publish older writings I had stashed on various hard drives, to release them into the world and to stop hiding one of the things I love best to do.
So I did that. After a few weeks, I couldn’t find any more past writings, not even scraps. I guess I could have hauled out of the basement boxes of floppy disks replete with mournful poetry, abysmal screenplays and hasty essays. Then there’s always the box of childhood journals, but it seems more useful, or at least less mortifying, to write something new each week or so.
This space helps me practice not-hiding. I enjoy knowing there are a few people out there who read these meanderings.
The above is a long-winded way of saying thank you for being part of this project and process.
I wish you a wonderful and creative passage to the new (Gregorian) calendar year.
Jenny
Part 2:
AIR GIVES FORM TO THINGS
By way of introduction, if you’ve just joined, last week I wrote:
At the end of this calendar year, I turn my attention to the projects I’m continuing or assigning myself for the spring. Here’s a list that has become a very long essay. I’m dividing it into parts and will post them over the next few weeks.
On Rotoscoping
I’m slowly working through rotoscoping one of JP Aerospace’s YouTube videos. It’s this one (but just from 3:00-5:45):
It’s gorgeous and terrifying. The glowing globe, the darkness of outer space, the earth so far below, our bright and relentless star, and suspense—all captured by the unblinking wide-open camera eye.
In the video, you see the balloon burst in real time. Then it’s followed with the slow motion version.
Every time I watch this, I fail to anticipate the moment the balloon explodes, even if I’m looking at the timecode. There’s no sense of scale. It could be a kids’ birthday balloon or a balloon the size of a football field. I wonder if it makes sound in the stratosphere when it explodes. The video has a generic “action” stock soundtrack overlaid on it so viewers don’t get bored.
A blast, then shards of plastic balloon fall off into space or fly around and dangle down, flapping around the camera. A couple of seconds pass and the whole image starts to wobble. Then the image starts to spin and fall.
Video cut: the glowing orb is restored and the sun is there and image is steady and that’s when I start feeling unsettled. We’re watching the slow-motion version now.
The time-sense unhooks from the relationship to the earth. I wait. I can’t anticipate. I feel my lungs start to constrict. It takes forever. Maybe it won’t happen this time, even though, like death, I know it is inevitable.
The slow motion burst is a flower, a fractal. I see physics in action, not knowing anything about physics. I think: that bursting shape, that star-octopus shape, that’s got something to do with physics. It expands as wide as its tentacles can, then gravity takes control. Chaos, governed by the forces of life down below.
I imagine I hear it. Flapping, thumping, slapping sounds, plastic on aluminum, hollow arrythmias. Bits fly off into nowhere. I suck in more air.
Then the dreaded wobble again, the image pitching and heaving. The airship hurtles downward. Then the video stops.
There’s an option to choose more like this, or repeat video.
Usually, I repeat video.
Rotoscoping is the process of copying each film frame and creating an animation out of live-action footage. In the past, it was done by expanding the film frame through frame-by-frame projection, putting a piece of tracing paper over the image, and tracing the outline in as much or little detail as you chose. Now it’s done with a combination of computer technology and hand-work.
I’m rotoscoping the JP Aerospace balloon burst by drawing each frame digitally. To learn this simple technique I found a three minute video online made by a teenager named K. Schroeder. It was the clearest and simplest one I could find. She also has tutorials about how to make a clay vessel in the shape of a snail and how to make handmade paper. I’m sure there is an easier way and an AI tool but I don’t care.
In 2019 I did rotoscope a short sequence from Jean Cocteau’s 1960 film The Testament of Orpheus, but that time I did it with a sharpie and about 4000 sheets of copy paper I taped one at a time onto the front of my laptop as I pressed forward on the video one frame at a time. So, as far as technology is concerned, I’ve upgraded.
At the time of this writing I have drawn 183 frames. I’ve got 3658 to go.
It’s very relaxing. So far, circles. This will go on. More for the spring.
On Rayographs, Photograms, and their Futures
In April I made a six-minute-long 16mm film rayograph. The photographer and filmmaker and genius from Philadelphia Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) claimed to have invented this method, or, to be more accurate, he put his name on a photographic technique that had been used since the advent of photosensitive emulsion. Or, frankly, the sun.
If you’ve made sunprints as a kid you’ve made a rayograph. All you do is put objects onto a piece of light-sensitive material and expose it to light and develop the image somehow. You get shadows as images. Sometimes they are crisp and sometimes they have more gradations, depending on what the object is or if it has been in motion in some way. You can make a rayograph (or photogram) on any light-sensitive material, including 16mm film.
Last spring I felt a strong urge to make a 16mm film rayograph, something I had not done for decades, though I have my students do it every semester.
Making rayographs is a wonderful way to get students’ hands on materials and help them discard some of the worry about “damaging” film. It teaches them to take risks, to see what happens, to use their bodies, and to make a mess.
I needed that too. So I went into the darkroom and took objects that were in and of the darkroom and added in some balloons from Party City, clear balloons because I wanted the light to go around them but also through them in a diffused way. I knew that would look good.
In the darkroom I rummaged around and found some glass filters, screws, enlarger bulbs, and lens caps. I pulled out a piece of unexposed 16mm film, arranged the objects on it, hit the expose button on the enlarger, rolled up that small portion of 16mm and put it into a light-tight bag, then rolled out the next length of film. About 18 inches at a time, about two seconds of film time when projected at 24 frames per second.
Making the 16mm rayograph took hours, just like all the other things I like to do: rotoscoping, animating, transcribing. I listened to a lot of music and podcasts. I danced around the darkroom when I needed a stretch. After finishing all the film I had (about 200 feet, 6 minutes’ worth), I ripped it into three lengths to handle it easier and turned to the trays of chemicals in the darkroom sinks.
I love the darkroom, unspooling film into the chemistry. It feels sacreligious. You’re doing all the “wrong” things to film. It’s going to get scratched. It might not develop evenly. Your chemistry might be the wrong temperature.
I smush the film around with my (gloved, sometimes) hands. I swish the chemicals back and forth by rocking the trays. I let the film sit. I marvel at what appears. The image, in negative.
When it looks done developing, I pick it up. It drips. I throw it into the next tray filled with water and smush it around in there too. Water stops the developing process. After that, the fixative, which keeps the image stable. Then I put the film in a tray of running water for a long time. To rinse the last chemicals off.
After that, I drop the tangled mess of tiny images in a tray and untangle it and use clothespins to hang the film up on a wire to dry. This entire process is very relaxing because it requires only physical activity, instinct and very little thinking.
A few months after I made the rayograph I decided to make a positive print of the 16mm film. It is very simple to do. You repeat what you did before but this time you lay a second strip of unexposed 16mm film underneath the first one you’ve already made. Then you expose each section to light again as before, but in two layers. The first rayograph (negative) is now the object you are putting on the second. So you’re making a rayograph of a rayograph.
And that is how I spent many hours in September, pulling sections of unexposed film and sections of the already created film and exposing the film sandwich to light.
Then you process the second layer of film in the messy way you did before. And then you have a print. It’s not at all perfect, because sometimes you’ve repeated bits of the original film and sometimes the original negative slides around and is not laid down straight so you see sprocket holes on your new print that you wouldn’t notice in the original and that is exactly the way you want it.
Messy and scratched and faded and gorgeous.
It took several months until I felt I understood why I wanted to make these rayographs in the first place. It only struck me after returning from the balloon launch at Esrange in Northern Sweden, having observed the engineers and physicists and trying to understand a little bit about their work.
These rayographs (to me) are what I imagine happens up in the stratosphere. They’re a chemical reaction that I envision and apply to my medium of choice. I’m trying to imagine launching unexposed film to 140,000 feet and seeing what kinds of strange bombarding photons and rays hit it.
Maybe my rayographs are like the balloon, under so much pressure and chemical activity that they explode into flowering forms. Maybe they’re me in the midst of this project, buffeted by the winds of imagination and perceived expectation.
And now on to the photograms.
In addition to these two non-matching films, in negative and print, I decided to make traditional photograms. Rayographs. I made about forty small ones and 15 large ones. I wanted them to feel like the 16mm film but look more like something the balloon might “see” while in the stratosphere.
I did a few tests using the ordinary darkroom materials, lenses and springs and such, but they were boring. So I decided to become more literal about the image, or at least in the way I imagine literal to be.
***
I usually find things I need at the grocery store, it’s where I spend so much time anyway and as a teenager the town I grew up in was so boring that all we’d do for fun was go to the one grocery store and make fun of weird products. I knew there would be ingredients for making rayographs there, so I wandered around aimlessly waiting to discover the right products.
Different kinds of sugar, large crystal, small crystal, decorating. A range of salts. Peppercorns. And a couple of bags of whole star anise. I decided to keep using the balloons and the enlarger bulb that I’d found in the darkroom along with some glass lenses and translucent plastic lens caps. And then I got to play.
***
How to make variations without feeling bored or resorting to habit or a useless kind of arbitrariness? This question applies to all the different tools and “methods” I use. I look through a camera to shoot an image. I make ten thousand ink drawings of the same square. I copy texts letter by letter and photograph them one by one.
Why isn’t this stupefyingly dull? Why does it “work?” How does my delight spent in this process transmit to someone looking at the image when it’s done? When can you know if it is active, not dreary? I don’t know the answer.
In the case of these photographs I decided that as I made each of them I’d add to a long-winded story I would make up on the spot. Each image would be a chapter. I assigned (secret, mutable) functions and personalities to the objects.
Intergalactic travel stories, stories of blockage and escape, of being included or excluded, tales of rest and refueling and refusal. Each image contains one or more, derived in real time as my hands hastened to scatter light bulbs, balloons, glass, salt, sugar, peppercorns and star anise. You can make them up too.
This spring I’m going to look back through the photograms and see if I can recall and write down the stories of each one. Maybe I’ll reveal them or maybe they’re just for me. But they help bring an order to the making without crushing the imaginative process I so love.
On Crashpads
In the hours before the balloon launch at the Esrange Space Center (see last post for details), the team would bring in a huge crane and they’d hook on the steel cube with all the attached experiments.
After the cube was lifted off the ground, the engineers gathered around it, attaching cardboard rectangles about two feet tall to each corner of the bottom of the cube. They used plastic rip-ties to attach them, being careful to ensure the rectangles were well-mounted and even.
These cardboard pieces are crashpads. Their job is to absorb the shock when the balloon payload lands back on earth.
Even though the exploded balloon and its cargo descend with a parachute, the landing is still hard and the experiments need as much preserving as possible. Armelle, the woman who has been facilitating my Esrange trips, promised to mail me the crashpads after the next launch. I want to use them in the project. Right now I think I’d like to stand a video monitor on them, or maybe use them as pedestals for the glass pieces Kai is making for me (see last post). I don’t know right now. But I am excited to see them.
Because Sweden is better funded than, say, the DIY JP Aerospace operation in the Nevada desert, and because other people at startups might be using fancy Silicon-valley-style crashpads, I wrote to Dan Bowen and John Powell to ask them what kinds of crashpads they use. Maybe they’re different from the Esrange ones.
Yesterday Dan sent me a 1964 article about the development of balloon crashpads. Design Considerations for Soft Landing of Balloon Payloads is a title both extremely concrete and, in my opinion, a useful metaphor for describing any number of emotional or social situations.
Design Considerations… was written by J.P. Jackson of Vitro Labs. Here, I would like to point out the proliferation of the initials J.P. in the project, including my own. I’d like to read something into this, but it’s probably best not to.
The crashpad varieties in the article include cardboard rectangles built using an interior honeycomb structure (as seen at Esrange), aluminum built in similar style (for heavier payloads), plastic cubes framed with balsa wood, bags filled with gas.
The gas bags are direct descendants of the 18th century balloon methods. It seems hard to believe they were still in use in the 1960s. Gas bags seem more like the 18th century use of the ship’s anchor, the initial, absurd, method for slowing and stopping the balloon.
At this time the cardboard honeycomb structure is most interesting to me. I have fantasies about casting them in bronze, but that may be for a time if I ever get funding. Meanwhile, cardboard it is.
On Affirmation Provided by Reading
I’m reading poetry and prose by Susan Howe, essays by Lydia Davis these days. These to help me improve my writing and to seek out alternative models for writing about history and the present. It’s a pipe dream to approach these authors’ skill, of course, but what is a new year if not a place for dreaming.
Otherwise, I’ve been reading a scattering of articles in history, history of science, and geography. I read in these fields to try and confirm my ideas in a general way. Since I am neither an historian, geographer, or expert at anything, I find myself bumping up against the walls of a labyrinth of method, motivation, and interest.
In a talk I gave in the fall someone asked me about surveillance and ballooning and I had to admit not only did I not think about that but it didn’t interest me. And that interaction has been haunting me, or rather I feel like I have to ask myself why it doesn’t interest me, because it seems like the most obvious reason you’d want to go up in a balloon.
Then I read a book of essays called Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture. While most of the articles are, in fact, about the view of below from above, one was about a 1786 book by the English aeronaut Thomas Baldwin. The article is titled Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia, or the Aerial View in Colour, by Marie Thébaud-Sorger, a research professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
In the article, the Dr. Thébaud-Sorger describes how early balloonists were so overcome by the experience of being airborne that they hardly looked down at the ground at first. It took them a long time to even find language for what they were experiencing in their bodies as they moved through the air, let alone what it looked like seeing the whole world in miniature.
In other words, early airborne experiences may have been less about the view than about the physical experience of traveling into and above the clouds. Baldwin’s descriptions combine detailed, scientific accounts, charts, notes, and measurements with language of the sublime, the unimaginable, the inexpressible.
Baldwin wrote a whole chapter to explain to the future aeronaut how to figure out if he is ascending or descending. In his balloon he carried measuring instruments which included a barometer, thermometer, a length of twine, a pigeon, a quantity of pepper, of salt, and of ginger. And every time Baldwin is overwhelmed to the point of losing language, he describes colors. Those paragraphs are followed immediately by lists of measurements, as though he is striving to maintain an even keel in the face of overwhelming emotion.
I like to look for the gaps, the stutters, the loss of language in these moments and I’m looking forward to reading Airopaidia to find more of that.
Dr. Thébaud-Sorger emphasizes that the swirling, unmoored experiences like those in Airopaidia, fused Enlightenment and Romantic sensibilities in precisely these moments of loss. When I saw this, I got excited because this readings map onto my understanding of Poe’s way of describing the (fictional) balloon journey to the moon of his protagonist in The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall. Poe wrote this satiric, yet scientifically accurate story in 1835, when balloonomania had already swelled and burst in Europe but was just on the ascent in the United States.
As I’ve written and thought about way too many times before, Poe’s stories join together a science-like logic with heart-stopping freeze-frame imagery. In his last piece of writing before his untimely death at age 40, Poe’s “prose poem” Eureka presents, in turn, analysis and roiling tempest.
Poe’s view into the depth and distance of the universe is both infinite and unfathomable. You see this back-and-forth not only in Hans Pfall…, but Descent into the Maelstrom, Manuscript Found in a Bottle, Murders in the Rue Morgue, even in Fall of the House of Usher or The Telltale Heart.
Are we upside-down or right-side-up? In ascent or descent? Are these clouds or are my eyes fogged at this height? Is that a rope or a river? The sun or the moon? Dark or light?
Aeronauts’ bodies change up there: they’re cold, blinded by sun, disoriented in clouds, battered by thunderstsorms, dizzy from thin air. They try to make measurements but their technology fails or breaks. They wonder if they can get down to earth again; they’re rendered helpless by invisible currents and tides of air and wind.
I am not a deep researcher. I cast a wide net and pluck out whatever gets tangled up in it and use anything at hand that suits these mutable ideas. My imagination-balloon bobs and weaves. But even while bouncing in the turbulence, I peek my head over the edge to see just a little bit of what’s down there. What I seek is invisible, but felt, scattered through the atmosphere.
Then I think to myself, well maybe that’s how a lot of academics, scientists, and artists work. I mean who really chooses to write a book on the phonemic analysis of Old Church Slavonic or to spend forty years laboring to build a telescope that will gather the light from a distant galaxy? It all feels quotidian, clumsy, and utterly pointless when you’re doing it.
And then the wind changes and, together, we’re whisked into color:
The Parts next to the Sun were of a snowy Whiteneness. Then of a bright, luminous Yellow melting into a dusky Sulphur: afterwards of a Purple…a transparent Blue like the Onyx. These delightful Tints must ever be eclipsed to a Spectator on the Surface of the Earth, looking upwards through the gross Atmosphere that surrounds it…*
That’s where the art begins.
Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.
*Thomas Baldwin, Airopaidia, 1786 (emphasis by the author)