Blog / Notes & Experiments

War Panoramas

date: 2012-04-03-war-panorama
tagged as: panorama, war

Inspired by recent visits to 1453 Tarih Müzesi (Panorama 1453) in Istanbul (see also my preliminary Istanbul notes) and The Battle of Bergisel in Innsbruck (Austria), I updated my old panorama shot of the October War Panorama in Cairo, Egypt and put it into an OpenLayers container.

full(screen) site version here..

I still wonder why this "ancient form of immersive media" is so popular up to now for nationalistic celebrations of regional or national identities based on ancient battles won (in some cases it does not even matter if the war afterwards is lost). Do we crave so much for this scenes to come back? Impressive they are in any case, so it comes as much less surprise that most of the audience is normally barely old enough to qualify as literate..

mASCIIcam

date: 2011-10-26-Hello-Android
tagged as: android,ascii

I just released my first "Hello World" on Android - an ASCII camera viewer without bells and whistles. simple, pure, minimal. It's available in Android Market...

barriers and walls

date: 2011-06-20-barriers
tagged as: linescan, walls, experiment

"Twelve years prior to 9/11, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. This event seemed to announce a new beginning of the "happy '90s", Francis Fukuyama's utopia of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won out, that the advent of a global liberal community was hovering just around the corner, and that the obstacles to this Hollywood-style ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance whose leaders had no yet grasped that their time was up). September 11, in contrast, symbolized the end of the Clintonite period, and heralded an era in which new walls were seen emerging everywhere: between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, along the US-Mexico border, but also within nationstates themselves." (Slavoj iek: First as tragedy, then as farce, London/New York: Verso 2009, 3)

The Ceuta border fence between Morocco and Spain

If you ever walked over the Chinese Wall you know it is an impressive and intriguing building: a huge and absurd monument of fortification. One might think that this medieval structures of exclusion and border protection are outdated for a long time now in the 21st century, or at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. However that's not the case - walls and separation barriers are booming everywhere.

Most attention went to the Isreali West Bank barrier planned to be around 700km long - around 50% are already built. The US are not only fencing their borders with Mexico, but also building walls to seperate Sunnis fro Shi'its in Bagdad. Even larger attempts happen in India: They are fencing off it's border to Bangladesh as well as to Pakistan... The list goes on and on (see references below). So what about Europe? "Luckily" Europe has the Mediterranean Sea as a natural barrier to the South that keeps off most unwanted immigrants, but it has a few human-made barriers as well surrounding the Spanish enclaves in Morocco. Greece has plans to fortify it's borders to Turkey(but likely no money at the moment), whereas Bulgaria dropped its plans to rebuild the communist border fortification against Turkey - at least for now.

Compared to the Chinese Wall, those contemporary barriers are ugly and unpleasing buildings: just blocks of concrete or fences with barbed wire, certainly equipped with sophisticated electronics and sensors. Yet I am afraid there are more to come as a heating planet will likely increase the demand for structures of exclusion, protection and fortification.

I used my aerial push-broom scanner (originally developed for What If You Would Pull Rivers To A Straight Line?) to trace a few of them. The very first results can be seen here.

Autoput / A1

date: 2011-06-08-Autoput
tagged as: Linescan, Experiment

After rivers and sea horizons I pointed the line-scan camera towards one of our most essential but also most boring contemporary infrastructure landscapes: The "Autobahn" (high- or freeway). It enabled easy, fast and cheap individual mass as well as cargo transportation, but certainly it's also source of noise and pollution over-shadowed by increasing energy consumption and rising oil prices.

Sampled with more than 4000 lines per second this scans create unique representations of a modern commonplace landscape.

A brief excerpt example follows (to see more go here):