I'm teaching a class in the Spring 2022 semester called "Field Sensing in Environmental Engineering." The intent is to share with undergrads the fun of making sense of environmental data collected by electronic sensors. While the class has some technical goals to prepare students for jobs in industry, I am looking forward to some of the early lectures with a more open-ended air. What is a sensor? How do sensing tools relate to our innate senses, or reflect the programs of the sensing paradigms that create them? Lots to explore, maybe more on that later.
One specific thing I want to remind students of is that a camera is a sensor. The ubiquity of cameras in life today makes this easy to forget, but this does not undermine their value. In fact, ubiquity can be great for scientific ends! Some of my recent work in remote sensing has reminded me that a normal photo, with RGB intensities at each pixel, carries a huge amount of data, and there are interpretations and derivatives of the data that yield a lot of value. One of my colleagues is using cameras to monitor ocean conditions in northern Alaska, where use of in-water sensors would be risky due to cliff failure and sea ice. Basically, with regular captures and a little calibration, a camera becomes an insight-rich data stream.
I'll be speaking on Friday, December 17th at the Are.na Annual event because I have a short piece published in the Are.na reader this year! The piece is shaped around my "surfline cam screenshots" channel, a compilation of screenshots I've taken from Surfline.com cameras. These cameras are 24/7 live feeds of surf breaks around the world, letting surfers "know before [they] go." The images the cameras capture are evocative, for me and thousands of other users, I'm sure—channeling joy of surfing and being in the water. But they're also dense with information that we attempt to sense from our screens at home: most surfers (all amateur coastal oceanographers) desperately squint at the pixels on the screen, reading them into a cohesive understanding of the wave conditions.
When was the last time you watched the entire sunset? Watching, from before dusk until after dark? Sometimes it makes me cry, how beautiful it is. And what I love about the sunset is its banal sublimity: it can be soul-stirringly beautiful, but there will be another tomorrow. How lucky we are! I feel something similar about these automated cameras. They always show the same view, telling me about the wave height at Malibu in a kind of mechanical, standardized way. And yet they capture some sublime sights, some sublime waves. And the often high vantage point of the cams lends a cinematic air to their images.
Thinking down this line has reminded me of a few other projects that sit with the nature of automatic landscape imagery. First is Jon Rafman's seminal 9-eyes, aestheticizing the gaze of Google Street View. Street view as a platform for hyper-regularized image capture, seeking to be purely "informational" (i.e. as a platform for spatial data and directions), ends up serving as a frame through which we get to see snippets of the wide, bizarre, world. The intentional capture of the artist is removed, and the viewer feels as though we can find the disturbing and the magnificent around any corner. I think 9-eyes plays with voyeurism, too, in that the scenes catch many folks in the photo unprepared, so the viewer feels as though they are peeking into something not meant to be shown.
Standardized webcams are much more pre-planned, often with a carefully chosen frame of view, although each particular capture is still somewhat "unplanned" in time. There is less surprise than with Street View, and that reliability can be some of the joy. Reminding us what else is out there. I speak to this a bit in my Are.na Annual piece, how the cameras don't just fuel "I wish I was there" FOMO—they also just remind us what's out there, as a dependable reminder of the world outside our heads and screens. Jon Gacnik wrote about the Mt Wilson Tower Camera's 2-minute refresh rate and its slowing pace in an otherwise merciless internet media landscape. (I see Jon and Jon-Kyle's channel as a spiritual cousin to my surfline shots.) It serves as a microcosm of escape: the camera as a peaceful window to the world. Having a camera view also becomes something to look at with others. My surfing buddies and I are always texting about what the cams look like. During early COVID-19 lockdowns, my friend Tristan published a site to connect people to watch the poppy bloom together, with music that responds to the number of people in the audience. I like this project because it's a great example of connecting people by celebrating the affordances of the automated camera. Not encouraging people—with any immediacy at least—to go to the place itself, but for the different experience of enjoying the landscape from afar.
By sharing the view, we can share in sensing and feeling the landscape out there, together!
Watching the tide,
Lukas
One specific thing I want to remind students of is that a camera is a sensor. The ubiquity of cameras in life today makes this easy to forget, but this does not undermine their value. In fact, ubiquity can be great for scientific ends! Some of my recent work in remote sensing has reminded me that a normal photo, with RGB intensities at each pixel, carries a huge amount of data, and there are interpretations and derivatives of the data that yield a lot of value. One of my colleagues is using cameras to monitor ocean conditions in northern Alaska, where use of in-water sensors would be risky due to cliff failure and sea ice. Basically, with regular captures and a little calibration, a camera becomes an insight-rich data stream.
I'll be speaking on Friday, December 17th at the Are.na Annual event because I have a short piece published in the Are.na reader this year! The piece is shaped around my "surfline cam screenshots" channel, a compilation of screenshots I've taken from Surfline.com cameras. These cameras are 24/7 live feeds of surf breaks around the world, letting surfers "know before [they] go." The images the cameras capture are evocative, for me and thousands of other users, I'm sure—channeling joy of surfing and being in the water. But they're also dense with information that we attempt to sense from our screens at home: most surfers (all amateur coastal oceanographers) desperately squint at the pixels on the screen, reading them into a cohesive understanding of the wave conditions.
When was the last time you watched the entire sunset? Watching, from before dusk until after dark? Sometimes it makes me cry, how beautiful it is. And what I love about the sunset is its banal sublimity: it can be soul-stirringly beautiful, but there will be another tomorrow. How lucky we are! I feel something similar about these automated cameras. They always show the same view, telling me about the wave height at Malibu in a kind of mechanical, standardized way. And yet they capture some sublime sights, some sublime waves. And the often high vantage point of the cams lends a cinematic air to their images.
Thinking down this line has reminded me of a few other projects that sit with the nature of automatic landscape imagery. First is Jon Rafman's seminal 9-eyes, aestheticizing the gaze of Google Street View. Street view as a platform for hyper-regularized image capture, seeking to be purely "informational" (i.e. as a platform for spatial data and directions), ends up serving as a frame through which we get to see snippets of the wide, bizarre, world. The intentional capture of the artist is removed, and the viewer feels as though we can find the disturbing and the magnificent around any corner. I think 9-eyes plays with voyeurism, too, in that the scenes catch many folks in the photo unprepared, so the viewer feels as though they are peeking into something not meant to be shown.
Standardized webcams are much more pre-planned, often with a carefully chosen frame of view, although each particular capture is still somewhat "unplanned" in time. There is less surprise than with Street View, and that reliability can be some of the joy. Reminding us what else is out there. I speak to this a bit in my Are.na Annual piece, how the cameras don't just fuel "I wish I was there" FOMO—they also just remind us what's out there, as a dependable reminder of the world outside our heads and screens. Jon Gacnik wrote about the Mt Wilson Tower Camera's 2-minute refresh rate and its slowing pace in an otherwise merciless internet media landscape. (I see Jon and Jon-Kyle's channel as a spiritual cousin to my surfline shots.) It serves as a microcosm of escape: the camera as a peaceful window to the world. Having a camera view also becomes something to look at with others. My surfing buddies and I are always texting about what the cams look like. During early COVID-19 lockdowns, my friend Tristan published a site to connect people to watch the poppy bloom together, with music that responds to the number of people in the audience. I like this project because it's a great example of connecting people by celebrating the affordances of the automated camera. Not encouraging people—with any immediacy at least—to go to the place itself, but for the different experience of enjoying the landscape from afar.
By sharing the view, we can share in sensing and feeling the landscape out there, together!
Watching the tide,
Lukas