Flickers of comprehension and clarity. Followed by a tangle of thoughts. The unraveling isn’t like yarn or rope or twine, it’s more like the tiniest filigree chain snarled into a ball in the bottom of your jewelry box. Or mine. Which isn’t a box, but, for whatever reason, a small pillowcase. Probably because on some level I like the tangle.
The last couple of weeks I have been reading back and forth between articles by geographer Doreen Massey about space and time and a four hundred page report from Google X about what they learned from their “discontinued” nine-year stratospheric balloon project called Loon. I’ve had these on my computer for over a year and am so often stubborn about sitting down to read them. Then when I start I think “why did I wait so long?” Maybe it’s all coming at the right time.
What I’m appreciating in the Massey is the discussion about the relationship between time and space and how time is always privileged in theory and philosophy whereas space is the thing “out there” where stuff happens. And Massey so brilliantly calls for a reintroduction or reconceptualization of the importance of space, space in time, and time living in space.
In “Places and their Pasts,” Massey talks about the politics of how people look at “development” in different locations through a particular temporal lens without taking into consideration the diverse lived experiences and how various time trajectories unfold in specific spaces. And that any space, your country, your state, city, or corner store, contains multiple intersecting times in it. I think I understand this part, but it gets confusing. Let me look for a quote.
Here are two. Maybe they seem obvious but the clarity is useful to me.
(W)hat I want to consider here is the ways in which places also stretch through time. Places as depicted on maps are places caught in a moment; they are slices through time. Yet, not only does that particular articulation of social relations which we are the moment naming as that place have a history…but also any claim to establish the identity of that place depends upon a particular reading of that history.
and
Do we have to choose…between temporality and spatiality? Perhaps the answer lies in insisting on both, but on forging a different relation between them. Perhaps a real “radical” history of a place would be one which did not try to present either simple temporal continuity or only spatial simultaneity with no sense of historical depth. A way of understanding which, in the end, did not try to seal a place up into one neat and tidy “envelope of space-time” but which recognized that what has come together, in this place, now, is a conjunction of many histories and many spaces.
From “Places and their Pasts” by Doreen Massey. (History Workshop Journal Issue 39, Spring 1995.)
The other Massey article I read recently was called “Space-Time, ‘Science,’ and the Relationship between Physical Geography and Human Geography” (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1999, Vol. 24, No. 3).
One reason why I’m reading these older articles is because while I have several of Massey’s books at home I couldn’t fit them in my suitcase. And I’m away. So I have these ancient articles on my nearly-as-ancient Kindle.
“Space-Time…” was great because it talked about how often geographers (and other academics in the humanities) who are trying to support their findings turn to the so-called “hard sciences,” in particular, physics.
Though this article is nearly 30 years old, I noticed some parallels with one of a particular art world’s current fascination with quantum physics. A few months ago I was part of a group asked to pose questions at a public online talk that feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad gave to the art academy in Oslo. I loved reading their writing and hearing their talk and found myself very inspired, as so many people are.
While I am no expert in art and certainly not in quantum physics, what I do perceive here is that in its best iteration, the use of metaphors about quantum physics in the art world allows a space of multiplicity where creativity, complexity, and radical politics can emerge. In the more disappointing uses that I’ve seen, quantum becomes a buzzword, yet another way for artists to obfuscate their relationship to their work and to a particular art market.
In “Space-Time…” Massey talks about Latour and Bergson using a direct and committed tone. As I read I found myself eager and ready to learn more. I’m always looking for models, for ways to write and make, for shapes in which I can play and explore ideas. Or let the ideas play in new ways. Massey writes:
The concept of space for which I want to argue is one that holds that space is open and dynamic. That is…’space’ cannot be a closed system: it is not stasis, it is not defined negatively as an absence of temporality, it is not the classic ‘slice through time.’…Rather the spatiality that I envisage would be open, would be constantly in the process of being made…and would have elements of both order and accident (the latter deriving from the happenstance juxtapositions and separations which—I argue—are intrinsic to space). It would be integral to space-time.
And where are you going with this, you might ask? Good question. When I read these articles I felt like a lot of things made sense in the disparate aspects of what I am working on, what I work on in general. Which is to say, there’s a current of time, of “novelty unfolding” as Massey quotes Bergson, and there is space that in my experience is indeed constantly changing and being changed by its relationship to time.
Space, for example, like what goes on when I go to the space center in Kiruna, space like what happens at the corner store before, during, after I made my film Associated so many years ago. The narratives unfolding, claims of knowledge, ownership, historical accuracy, belonging, in each location in process.
Then I had a flash of understanding about my current project. Maybe I can articulate it here. Like the flash-turned-tangle, it all seems to make sense and then suddenly not quite. But we’ll see if this holds a bit. Bear with me.
I envisioned the balloon and the stratosphere as an axis, both of which are in flux. The balloon as a vertical trajectory, moving through, but also as its own ecosystem. It’s a space, it’s multiple spaces in motion. And the stratosphere is time: novel, changing, unpredictable, experientially rich.
The balloon and how it rises and where it is floating is not being “taken” or “driven” by the air’s current, nor is it traveling along the current in an organized way. It’s not one power exerted on the other. The relation is mutual; the presence of the balloon changes the way the air moves and vice versa. Maybe those intersections, taken in a larger frame, could be what this whole project, actually, not the project, but what I am exploring. Not what it’s about.
—
Good lord, self-doubt is heaving its whole enormous body against the door of my consciousness right now. Am I merely repeating the same theoretical drivel I learned in college or is there something there? And what does it matter when I have a hard drive filled with footage I can’t even bring myself to look at? Thinking through arrives as much in the being present, the filming, the editing, the darkroom, the hands as it does the eyes straining at a PDF and the so-called mind mucking about in the dark.
The other thing I’m reading is, despite its lighter-than-air subject, much more concrete and therefore more fun to impose meanings onto. I am finally getting around to Google X’s 2021 report about its discontinued Loon project. It’s called “Lessons from Building Loon’s Stratospheric Communications Service.”
Loon was a nine-year effort to create stratospheric balloons that could stay up there for a year or more and float around delivering internet to remote areas of the world. I’ve written a lot about my conversations with the people who worked at Loon (with affection, they dubbed themselves Loonies) in previous essays.
The stuff in this report is fascinating. To me. The whole thing, all its politics and problems and the nomenclature and acronyms and the graphs, charts, models.
I am appalled by the project’s premise that the entire stratosphere should be filled with superpressure balloons that can stay up there for years. Filling—and I mean filling—that layer of space with giant, semi-controllable helium-stuffed plastic bags. I envision the stratosphere as the saddest barrel filled with apples that you can’t even bob for (see, I told you I’d refer back to that picture). Or one of those sushi boat rivers I’ve never actually experienced, filled to bursting with sushi boats all bumping into each other.
Google claimed the project was meant to deliver internet to unserved markets, but there’s no saying what they did or would have rented out the fleet to do.
Thousands of superpressure balloons floating for a year or more that can be controlled to utilize varying stratospheric currents to change directions—it’s ripe for exploitation for any kind of espionage, imaging, or military service. And in fact, when Loon ended its project, they published this document and sold the patents to Raven Aerostar, which I wrote about before. It’s a for-profit aeronautics company “solving challenges in Aerospace and Defense.” I won’t link to it here.
I guess I have a bit of a cynical take on the project because, long before reading this earnest report, which sounds entirely well-meaning, I did what I usually do, which is talk to all kinds of people who worked at Loon and gathered their stories. So now I like reading through the lines of the technical writers’ adept, clear language. Where they write of “we learned” and “further optimizing” I read “it broke” or “it failed.”
I enjoy reading about the two kinds of failure described in this report, one being that the whole project didn’t pan out after nine years of work and money and effort and then about failure in the engineering: how parts fail, how you have to test things to the point of failure. And that failure necessitates redundancy.
Redundancy means if you have balloons that burst unexpectedly, or motors that shatter, or rotors that fall apart, you need to add another one, or more as backup: more balloons, motors, or rotors. Doubling, tripling, quadrupling the number of plastic balloons bumping around in the sky trying to track the sun to charge the solar panels to deliver an impermeable cover layer of cell service to the customers below. Filling the gaps.
Another element I’m enjoying in this document so far thing is the way the prototypes and test balloons looked. In the last stages before the project was shut down, Loon designed a balloon that was going to end up looking pretty funny.
In addition to using air as ballast, the balloon was also using steel grit as ballast. I wrote a lot about ballast in another post and made some drawings using the ballast too. But that’s another story.
To try to remedy some of the control and steering issues for their superpressure balloons, Loon engineers were going to try to put propellers on them. In the end these high tech machines would have wound up looking like balloons during the most absurd height of 18th century balloonomania. Here’s a picture of the 18th century one followed by one of Loon’s Seahorse beta propellers:
Finally, it is funny to me that they named the various iterations of the balloons after birds, Nighthawk, Osprey, Osprey Large, Ibis, Plover, Quail.
And what did these plastic balloons do? Well I remember Nick talking to me about trying to retrieve ballon bits in the jungles of Peru after they burst, and Dan telling me about the enormous hangar in Florida where they dropped the temperature to sub-zero to test how the balloon would handle stratospheric temperature variations, and Pam telling me about the room-sized scanner (named Billie Jean, for who knows what reason) she used to inspect the balloon after it failed and was returned to her to see what kinds of stresses the material had undergone (“witch-hat” fractures being my favorite term so far), and nobody really telling me about what exactly happened at the Loon trial in Kenya but everyone telling me how amazing it was to have an unlimited budget to experiment and how none of it actually worked the way they had intended.
Finally, I like the new word I learned, “ballonet,” which is the balloon that goes inside the balloon, and how Loon tested it in various ways, either the outside balloon filled with helium and inside the ballonet with air as ballast, or the opposite. And one of the balloon/ballast models they dubbed “yin-yang.”
Which, given where I started this essay, seems to intersect well enough with “space-time” for me to end here.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. A shout-out and a thank you to Mark Wallace for his kind words about The Beyond Place in his excellent Substack called inlooking. We could keep going like this, but I will simply send my admiration along and encourage you to check it out.
My documentary BUNKER is on Amazon and Projectr.tv for your viewing pleasure.