(Note: the following fragment of a first draft of an introductory portion of my dissertation work continues from my previous post. I have posted here this here for feedback by friends and fellow scholars. Everything here can and probably will change by the time the work is done.)
And then there is the webcam browser.
The webcam browser is something I am proud of, because, like the desktop computer it runs on, I assembled it myself out of available parts. Software parts, pieces of code shipped with the Linux operating system. Like Linux itself, the implementations of these pieces of software I am using have been worked on by various collectives of volunteer programmers, though some have much older roots. In brief I used the venerable Unix scheduler, cron, to tell the computer to run a simple program for fetching files from the network, wget, at regular intervals to grab images from web addresses where automatically updated images from web-connected cameras and other imagers are stored. Wget dumps these images into a folder on my machine, where a slideshow screensaver program, glslideshow, has been told to look for images to display on the screen. Once the screensaver activates, glslideshow cycles between random images drawn from web-connected cameras somewhere in the world once every 10 seconds or so.
The effect is quite meserizing. The screen goes blank as the screensaver activates. The first image appears: a view of the full round disk of the Earth from geostationary orbit, 22,240 miles up, assembled about 3 hours ago from a mosaic of images taken by the GOES-12 weather satelitte. A hurricane is visible in the Gulf. The terminator line, dividing night from day, is visible as a gentle arc running down the center of the North American landmass, across the Isthumus of Central America, and on into the Southern Pacific. The next image flashes up, from a source much closer to Earth, a department of transportation traffic camera watching an intersection on Interstate 75 just north of me. It shows traffic flowing, and the weather clear. This image is replaced by a display of local weather radar stations complied by the National Weather Service, showing a few rain storms over Indiana as dull green splotches, they could reach me by the afternoon. The next image is one of the Miraflores locks on the Panama Canal, provided by the Panama Canal Authority. At the moment captured by the camera, a few seconds ago, the lock held a great green ship, stacked with rectangular shipping containers in blue, green, and dull red-orange. The image is high enough resolution that I can make out the name painted on her stern. She is the Ever Diamond, a 54,000 ton containership built by Mitsubishi heavy industries and managed by the Evergreen Marine company of the United Kingdom. She flies the Panamanian flag.
There have been days when I, ostensibly engaged in reading a book of theory or some other more respectable pursuit, have spent the better part of a day watching these images process across my screen. I watch the terminator slowly march across the Earth, from East to West, and with it the sunrise over San Francisco Bay (image provided courtesy of a local resident and webcam enthusiast), over Yellowstone’s Old Faithful and Yosemite’s Half Dome (images captured by National Parks Service cameras), over LAX (image of the tarmac provided by some Aviation fans in a nearby law office). I watch the light shift in the canyons of Manhattan streets (image provided by a NYC area community web-page with a camera stuck in the window of a mid-town skyscraper, looking south toward the Statue of Liberty and New Jersey). I watch radar reflections of thunderstorms springing up and processing across the mid-west plains. I watch ships rise and fall in the canal locks, and an Air Korea 747 frieghter disgorge its cargo. On one, lucky, day I watched the Space Shuttle roll ponderously up to its launch pad on its giant, tracked crawler.
For me, this experience of global channel surfing made the sometimes esoteric-sounding theory of Donna Haraway understandable in an immediate, visceral way. In her essay “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway describes the power and danger of vision.