I wrote this in early January. Since then I’ve been berating myself about not sending this or anything else out. But I’ve been writing. A lot. And I’ll keep writing. Herewith I commit to sending out the biweekly Beyond Place you all so love and adore.
Thanks for reading this belated post.
January 11 2025
I have wanted to write about wreckage for a few weeks already and now with the impending U.S. inauguration and the last few days’ devastating wildfires in Los Angeles not to mention the relentless censoring of anything to do with the destruction of Gaza it seems alternately more urgent and utterly useless. If you want to read into this some larger political and environmental metaphors by all means, of course they’re in this but I’m not going to go there because I am too sad.
Today I am in my office in Oslo. The sun is still shining brightly and the sky is blue. Snow and ice cover the ground. I am pleased to have left my winter boots here and to have brought the spike things I put on the bottom of those boots so I don’t slip and fall on my ass. I am amazed by how most locals have a particular walk on this surface, a kind of vertical short hopping, that allows them to walk wearing any kind of shoes.
I have been thinking about Pamela Bergmann, with whom I spoke in late 2021 when I started my project about balloons. Pam had worked at Loon for its 9-year startup lifespan. Loon (now discontinued) was the Google X initiative I’ve written about before, an attempt to create high-flying stratospheric balloons that would fill that layer of sky and float around forever or as close to forever as physics allowed, delivering internet service to areas of the world that didn’t have access.
I have described the delight that people who worked on this project expressed at being able to work with unlimited resources to try to do the impossible. I’ve also talked about the problems with the project and my own concerns about an ideology that prompts this kind of “moonshot” tech project together with its potential impacts and misuses by tech and governments alike.
Loon failed and the project was shut down in January 2021. Google made its discoveries public except the IP they sold to Raven Aerostar, a stratospheric balloon company mostly working with the U.S. Defense Department.
Pam talked with me about her degree in fashion with a focus on textile science and how that led her to her position at Loon. She rose to the position of Senior Program Manager. Part of her job was to inspect the burst stratospheric balloon and analyze images of its material fractures and tears. To do this, retrieval experts like Nick Kohli traveled to wherever the balloon had landed, brought it all back, and put it on what might have been the worlds largest scanner to do high resolution imaging.
Part of Pam’s job was to look for where the material gave way. The registers of experience and breakage visible at a micro level. She would magnify images of the shreds to see what shape the rips looked like, which could tell the company something about the conditions in which it had been flying. One of the goals was to get information and document it, the other was to find ways to improve the balloon’s plastic manufacturing to make it more resistant to the pressures of the stratosphere without having to make the balloon out of heavier plastic.
Now I am trying to analyze the remnants of my own experience from the last few years of balloon and stratosphere explorations, gathering documents, lists, scouring emails for last names, preparing to finalize films and other works, trying to resist the pressure to make this project whole, but also to prevent it from flying off into incomprehensible, irretrievable bits.
A few weeks ago I downloaded all the Substacks that have anything to do with my current project. It turned out there were many. Like 80000 words’ worth of many (sans illustrations). This is not all of them, there are many more that are on other themes, but I tried to keep it “focused.”
It is strange to read so much writing from the past four years. I started writing these in early 2021. Still in Los Angeles under Covid-19 restrictions. Still zoom-teaching and finishing BUNKER and trying to keep it together and keep the kids together (neither of which was going well).
Writing has saved me these last years and I am grateful for the register of these fragments. Surprised at some beautiful lines. Embarrassed at much of the babble. Proud of the adventures and what appears to be a blinders-on kind of impetuosity in throwing myself into the adventures. There is a lot missing from these texts too, the daily life, shopping lists, the conversations with family, the bickering and caring words, the truly emotional (that is most often swaddled in endlessly unfurling metaphors that diverge from the point like a little dust storm heading your way that skitters off to the side at the least expected moment. See?). That’s the invisible wreckage, the static.
Other more banal wreckage might be that after consultation with wise friends I have cut down the two-channel video of the scientists at work. In doing so, I neglected, in parts, to utilize the original footage in the timeline but instead relied on the easy material which was a previously exported “finished” version that I then reimported into the edit timeline. Which means I now have to do what I tell my students to be organized so they don’t have to do (they also don’t listen), which is to use weird technical tools to try to match up audio waveforms of the edit to audio waveforms of the original material and slot those bits into the new version.
This extra labor requires a precision and focus that splits me into the two parts I know well, the obsessive editor who will try splicing footage of a hand turning a doorknob several thousand times to see if it feels right, and the non-technical “anything goes” experimenter who naively believes that a slip of my own hand on the computer mouse might be a form of predestination.
The thing that is the most difficult for me is figuring out how these works will live in space. I have the enormous privilege of having just scheduled my final exhibition for the PhD this coming May, several months before I had intended. This is because of my own ego, wanting to show the work in a space outside the art school, and wanting to be connected to a particular institution here in Oslo, which is a nonprofit venue that with a focus on media art.
The space is difficult, a former church, pretty much one big room with many columns and remnants of the naves. It is all focused on an absent altar, now represented by a movie screen. One of my (stated) goals of the show is to reorient the space, or to destabilize the turn towards the altar. I have been interested in this for some time, I like to have people enter a space, see one thing, and then not be able to get the full picture when they go around a corner and see the related or connected work. As I write this I realize this is a longstanding fascination with making art and installations that work the way a thaumatrope does.
I remember when I was included in the Dreamlands show at the Whitney with my film Twilight Arc, the education department at the museum asked me to do a series of workshops for kids. I instantly thought to teach them about protocinematic devices and in particular, how to make thaumatropes. There are some pictures online of a much younger me (my hair still dark then) crouched down next to a child showing them how the simple spinning toy made two separate images come together.
So I like to do that with shows too. But damn, it is hard when you have made six or seven films, three of which have sound, and they’re all supposed to fit in a big old church. And you don’t know how to build things. I’ll try. And ask for help.
Since my last essay here I kept thinking about verisimilitude and speculation or imagination. I go back to my first filmmaking forays in college and how everything—all the problems and contexts and contradictions—were there from the beginning. I want to make a documentary, instead, I make a poem-film. I want to make both because I think they are the same thing.
The documentary (at least the way I conceive it) and the poem-film (ditto) are the outward manifestation of a deep-seated belief in human connection and fascination with the commitments people make, the knowledge they possess that often goes unshared; they are the rib-expanding cherishing an approach to the unknown, the unspoken, the feeling of music or of putting your face against another face, the near-touch, the that-which-is-deeply-held, empathic, intimate, that foolish attempt to describe the fall of light on a surface while knowing there are no words to explain it.
And so here we are, with a two-channel video installation that shows scientists hard at work on their boxes, boxes that I do not understand what they hold. The film doesn’t explain. The scientists put their boxes that sense invisible things onto a steel cube. They work hard, they play pool, they eat spaghetti, they sit at computers, they wait, they take pictures, they talk to each other in different languages.
In the video, the scientists cheer when the experiment works and walk dejectedly when it doesn’t. They seem outside their element and in their element at the same time. They long for data but are also building things and improvising in the moment. They are “doing science.” We rarely see the scientists outside their workspace or the space station cafeteria or game room. They stay inside. Their focus is on the boxes, not on the balloon or where it is going. They know the balloon is going to go to a place called “stratosphere.” They are preparing their experiments for what they understand or believe that space is.
The second channel of the video is of the landscape outside where the scientists are doing their work. Represented in a series of extreme long takes over the days, they mark time differently. The landscape is not dramatic, in the foreground is a huge gravel launchpad. It is visible from space and is pictured in one map shown in the scientist video.
The landscape itself is a massive forest of pine and there is a lake in the background. It is kind of boring. It appears empty. As time passes over the week the scientists are preparing their boxes, the landscape looks different. One day the sun is shining, the next it rains a lot and then it snows. In one section of this channel of the video I put my hand into the frame twice. First I show one of my experiments, then the second. You can see my hand is shaking from the cold.
The boxes I am holding are what the space center people have allowed me, an artist, to put on the stratospheric balloon experiment. They are made from empty plastic 16mm film boxes I owned. One of the boxes is called Lumière, after the early cinema pioneers, and also the word “light” in French. It is a pinhole camera, created to absorb light rays over long durations. It is an extremely simple camera, derived from the camera obscura, with no lens, only making one image, no moving parts. I learned how to make this kind of camera on YouTube. It is easy and, like the thaumatrope, fun for kids to make too.
The other box is sealed, it is called Méliès, after the early French film pioneer who was also a magician and performer. Hence the sealed “black box” in which magic might or might not be taking place. Inside the Méliès box is about 20 feet of unexposed black and white 16mm film, and some small film frames from works I had made decades earlier (those about the disappearance of Walter Benjamin’s suitcase containing the Arcades Project, following his crossing the Pyrenees and subsequent suicide, but no more on that now). And I put in that box a transparency I photographed in the 90s of cornfields from a car window as I passed the border between Ohio and Indiana, a border that is invisible, demarcated by historical decision-making of a particular time and place. And a landscape, one of several, that feels like “home.”
The Méliès box was put together to see if any super-secret magic ions or solar radiation might penetrate it and affect the various photochemical surfaces inside it. It was also meant to function on the border of joke and not-joke, a speculation, a hypothesis. Both boxes went up. The Méliès film was “blank” and Lumière unexpectedly produced a “sublime” image. The results of my experiments are not pictured in any of the videos.
In this two-channel video work, the landscape is empty but has clear effects on the scientists’ labor. The balloon launches are scuttled due to rain, fog, snow, wind direction and speed. Everything is a risk. Even the successful launch, engineer Armelle Frenea-Schmidt later told me, happened almost by luck. Winds were way too high but the engineers took a chance. Any one mistake could have destroyed all the scientists’ years of hard work, never to be retrieved.
Those silent lakes and trees beyond are also affected by the activities of the space center, its infrastructure, history, and politics. Hidden bunkers throughout the region were built in the 60s to “allow” the indigenous people to hide if a rocket or balloon were coming down in the landscape. Traditional reindeer-herding routes through these empty-looking landscapes were also marked, mapped and transformed due to the space center’s security perimiter.
The air is filled with intermittent sirens and horns. Satellite signals and radar are beaming up and down, imperceptible to humans but nobody asked the landscape what these frequencies are doing to them. So this channel of my video is of the landscape being there, neither witnessing nor not. Doing its thing. And if its thing fucks up the scientists’ work, oh well. Having this as a second channel of the video installation feels important to the project.
In the second-to-last scene of the installation, the two channels are identical. In this part, I wanted to show the landscape differently, and to reveal me being outside in the landscape, but not with the balloon and not with the scientists. In the video you can see from a distance the fabric the balloon is to be laid out on. You see trucks and cars driving around, you hear generators buzzing. But you still don’t see the balloon. It’s in a wooden crate on the back of a truck, out of sight.
Until the last possible minute, the balloon stays in its crate, protected as much or more as any Cézanne, because any gravel or dust or fragments of wood could put a microscopic tear in the plastic and ruin the whole launch. A shot in this “doubling” section that I love is of the three buildings where all the scientists and engineers have been doing their work. In this shot the balloon launch area is behind me and the scientists’ buildings are in front of me. The clouds are dramatic and the workspaces look tiny, like they are made of Legos.
After that, there’s a cut, we are back inside the main hangar and applause breaks out, indicating that the second balloon has launched. There’s music playing and people packing up, a young man from the Portugese team using my small scissors to cut packing tape to fix yet another box, the very fragile looking cardboard ones he will then pack his equipment in to ship back to Portugal.
While everyone is taking apart their experiments and packing up, the second screen shows a massive granite boulder. I had walked by this rock many times between the hangar and the main building. I was always rushing off to film something else.
This enormous stone, mostly granite, thousands of years old, sat, ignored, between the carport and the hangar. Behind it, a wire fence. A small gully channeled water past it and the gravel road it stood next to was where trucks and cars and people moved the important things to do with stratospheric balloon missions.
I filmed the stone. It too was a landscape, a reminder of an entirely different time and space than the busy work of scientist (or artist). I stood and filmed for a long time. Then, instead of zooming in, I moved towards the boulder. I filmed more. I moved closer, filmed again. Each time, the stone took on new life. Spots of moss and lichen, ants and crystalline particles took on new scale. Each one its own fractal universe.
For me, the boulder is another thing I cannot know, like the landscape, like the stratosphere. I can project my romantic or metaphorical imaginings onto it, but it will never tell me if I have the right answer. And I have to live with that not-knowing.
Somewhere in the space will be the video The Wonder, which is the single channel, silent and very long video of three different balloons at Esrange, one at a time waiting for a long time and then suddenly launching. The Wonder is meant to seem like it is not doing anything and then just when you get sick of watching the balloon doing nothing and you start to walk away, out of the corner of your eye you realize you missed the launch, or only caught part of it.
There is clearly something about tricksterism and foiled expecations in the whole project. Each piece is about things not turning out the way you expected them to. I guess that is a theme in my work. It’s in those spaces of the gap that you learn what you can’t grasp and you won’t be able to fully understand. And that’s why it keeps going. Verisimilitude.
Three other films will be in the show, or two, but probably three. I’ll talk about those another time. I have talked about them before. More partial data coming back.
At the same time, I have to write what they call here the “written reflection.” Needless to say, the Substacks are there but I do have to explain things in a summation. I don’t know what it is the last couple of years but I just want to make what I am calling “relentless” works, films that are too long, films that foil expectations, my own little rebellions or acknowledgements that maybe my “inabililty” to do things the right way was not an inability at all but a choice.
Wish me luck.
Thanks for reading.
BUNKER continues to be available for streaming on Amazon, Mubi, Projectr. tv and Metrograph, if you would like to see it (or watch it again).
Film is a trickster. Good luck with the gaps.