First and Last

Seems the First and Last Inn is proving difficult to leave so this journey will continue as a pub conversation.

An associate I know (Mocksim) was in Arles which is where I mistakenly thought Van Gogh died. I asked him to take a picture of a sign that I had once seen in a documentary placed in the field whereVan Gogh shot himself . A little research and it turns out that Van Gogh died in Auvers sur L'Oise which is north of Paris so I went trawling in Streetview for images. I found this video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yWEDFdddXs a walk through the fields to the place. Streetview can't go there but some images have been posted of which this is one. The sign depicts a painting presumably where it was made and perhaps  where Van Gogh shot himself.

The path followed in the video is very clear in the satellite picture and the particular tree in the video can be referenced with the ones taken from the satellite. It's even possible to see the sign with the patch of earth worn bare by the feet of visitors. At one point the video pans to the right and it is possible to see the cemetary where Van Gogh and his brother are buried, a corner of a foreign field that is for ever The Netherlands.

The sign can be seen in Streetview from the road near the cemetary looking towards trees that I imagine contain a rookery where the crows nest.

However the sign in the field isn't unique and they are scattered about Auvers each at a spot where a painting was made.These can be seen in Streetview either directly as below or in photos uploaded.

Here is one at the church.

There is a striking correlation of virtualities between a town imaging itself so thoroughly through paintings and its presence in Streetview. In the same way as the world can now only exist in reference to Streetview, Auvers can only be seen through a set of temporal and spatial displacements between the absent paintings and the restoration to their site of origin through these signs. There is something Ballardian and chilling in their totalising vision being so widely cast in real space. A church clock stuck at ten to three morphs into a reproduction of a whirling eye from the nineteenth century. The painting itself in Paris spawns a penumbra of fridge magnets, mugs and tea towels that swarm north to the town. In Auvers the whole place is in danger of foundering in time through these shuddering portals. The sense of otherness engendered by the art object collapses and its hard won relationship with the world is betrayed. The only redemption now is an app (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/afghanistan-war-iphone-images?INTCMP=SRCH) that will turn your photos into Van Goghs.

These guys have the right idea http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/06/vertical-wall-van-gogh.php.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO AUVERS

I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO ST JUST

The floors creak here in The First and Last Inn and I try to wake from that dream of being trapped in fishing nets and a rising night tide. The phantom of Annie George breathes her memories into the heads of sleepers.

http://www.firstandlastinn.co.uk/history.html

http://basetrack.org/

http://www.jennyodell.com/

Cov

At Coventry a railing reshaped by a car fender simultaneously forever pristine.  The evoked Ballardian fetish impact unwinds as time reverses between two images.

The bird feeder moves away in Streetview and the birds flock down to feed in my photo behind the twisted railings.

The turf that clothes the bankings we will have sped by in the rain on the journey south, too quick for a photo but slow enough for memory, retains a brick like pattern - a wall of grass - that may one day fade into a continuous steep lawn against the honeycomb of concrete slabs.

farewell lands end

The plummet from a satellite image into a prisitine landscape. The body has taken the form of a yellow figure standing on a green pointer. The man who fell to land's end.

There may be evidence that country smells might once have existed - flowers or the smell of manure. What blooms in the hedgerows of Streetview? The left fork beckons and the landscape blurs between each hyperlink.

The car that was ahead has vanished and more horses have appeared in the field a sign possibly of mysteron activity. A lovely sunny day and  flowers blooming in the verge.  A pink interloper marked with an A. A potential starting marker ready to burst with seeds of information that would have already determined a potential B.

A totem guards what appears to be convincing piles of horse shit in the field. I can't quite shift position in streetview to get the clear plane of the field behind the subject instead of the horse's arse. but maybe an engine of country smells and its guardian should be conjoined

Sentinals are placed along the entire field. They are silent and no rollover springs up when the cursor passes them. They retain their secrets - black holes of data.












Passing the mobile home site I am reminded of the book Red Shift where the main characters are trapped in time loops forever replaying variations of their own histories.


Looking back from the Sea View holiday park the sea is a blue signal from itself squeezed between the sky and distant fields.

Sennen and the First and Last Inn gets in the spirit of the quantum zeitgeist. I fire off an email in the hope of some interaction.

hi daphne

a couple of so called artist types are passing your way over the next few days imagining ourselves as a kind of withnail and i combo. we are generally harmless but wondered what kind of welcome to expect? lurid images of werewolves or homicidal villagers gleaned from films crowd our minds and to be honest we would probably prefer brusque than anything mary portas might endorse. not that we are lacking in courtesy or civilised ways ourselves. we are also taken by the heavenly overtones of the pub's name he who shall be last shall be first and vice versa as the good book says. let's hope that doesn't refer to getting served (just kidding)! we're fans of live music and lively conversation.

in google streetview there are a couple of shady characters in high vis (if that is possible) walking by the side of the pub and we wondered who they might be.

yours,

mike and huw

But no reply not too surprisingly. As is somehow to be expected the sign is different depending on which way you approach it.

Unexpectedly the First and Last pub sign is on the event horizon of two stitched panoramas - a kind of Streetview joke - and is beginning to vanish like the fading smile of a Cheshire cat. Two reality bureaucrats enter from another world with compact monitoring equipment.

divertimento

On 27.01.11 I was on a rail replacement bus from Haywards Heath to Three Bridges. At 13.25 according to the enbedded info in the jpeg file I took this photograph from the upper deck.

I was trying to take a row of traffic cones but ended up with one due to the delay with focusing and metering. As it transpired my picture was taken from almost the same point as the one taken by the Streetview car - at the same node.

The traffic cones were a temporal event in the scene that provided a kind of reference between the world and Streetview. Would the cones be there in Streetview when I checked later so that these transient monuments might atain a degree of permanence?

A photograph once had a more or less indexical relation to the world with an image being a frozen moment of a mostly unrecoverable reality. The world extends away in all directions and is capable of being traversed and returned to. A photograph cannot be physically entered and essentially remains materially unchanged on subsequent visits. It exists within the world.

Streetview is a special case of panoramic photograph that gives the illusion of being entered and traversed.

Since Streetview neither the photograph or the world can exist, either independently or with relation to one another. The indiscriminate nature of the image harvest and the extensivity of the  project approximates to the world to the extent of being a form of reality to be entered. Now the world is no longer the sole signified and the landscape photograph only exists after Streetview as secondary deja vu phantom. A photograph is no longer the repository of memory but a portal between two worlds that can both be visited, moved through, traced and compared. A sense of a slow elision of real and virtual starts to take hold. Representation's other terms are now storage, search and retrieval, the simulacrum's rider. Applications that match Facebook profile pictures or search for the title of music tracks presage a moment where you can point your camera phone at the presented scene and ask 'where am I?'

"Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an overexposed picture. Photographing it with my instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detatched series of "stills" through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge it was like walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank."

A director scouting locations for a film already made. The landscape with traffic cone exists in a new temporality - the traversable past. I travel in Streetview within the latest update. I visit the place where a photo was taken of a traffic cone in the way I might return to the tree along the London Road near Balcombe but in a perpetually out of date present.

Some works have occasioned the destruction of the fledgeling hedge and the cones no doubt are warning of the hazard. The fate of sheep visible from the satellite picture is unknown. Search online to find the owner of the field and the story of the sheep. A collating algorithm app will assemble all this information which will be projected through Google goggles directly onto my eyeball. Every glance will engender data. This will be tradable. Others will hack into the cameras in my eyepiece and view everything I see or distort it for their own purpose.

Two more images from the same journey. The man captured in my photographis no longer walking in the world. He oscillates between two topographies like a photon neither here nor there until observed. A fence will always be falling into disrepair. A tree can be potentially gone. A new gate never appears. Lines on the road have changed dot dot dot . A wheelie bin was abducted by aliens as a refuge. Winter came.



The route recommended by google maps walking from lands end to the traffic cone

la strada

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
 (proust - who else?)


the club

http://www.endtoenders.co.uk/docs/membership_form.pdf



first fork in the road vehicular moment

Rafman is apparently based in Montreal he might as well be gazing at life on Earth from a distant space station – and gazing on it longingly.

sat nav with voice of the mysterons option

le2jog or letojog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leto

Lands End to John o Groats as a path for potential encounters.

Well known start and end point.that is also pointless and mundane according to: http://www.parryphernalia.com/?tag=paucity-of-ambition
 
Google has its own ideas about the ideal route for an end to end walk:

in the next jump west from this point the car park is full

The Duchy of Cornwall

frame

"Walking as an artistic practice is a well established method (and it is worth recalling that “method” itself is derived from meta- (above, or after) and –odos (road), roughly designating the road once taken): from the “anti-walks” of the Parisian Dadaists of the 1920s, to the psycho-geographical Situationist dérives of the late 1950s, the cross-country treks of the Land artists, and the contemporary erratic ambulatory architecture of the Stalker collective, art-informed deambulation has achieved the status of an autonomous artform."
http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/367

Google Streetview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetview is an online digitally encoded landscape photograph of near indefinite extensibility (limited to where the camera has been). The user has the illusion of moving into the photograph as though it were a real space along prescribed paths - eg public roads - with the facility of being able to pan around each scene using a computer mouse and onscreen aids. Clicking on a circle that appears as a rollover hovering above the road ahead allows the viewer to progress to a different vantage point, proceeding in incremental hops rather than a smooth transition through space. During the transition the landscape blurs like a cinematic jump through hyperspace. Each panorama is assembled and stitched together as a composite and one is proceeding in digital leaps from node to node from one panoramic image to another. The photos made with a special camera rigged on top of the Google car aren't necessarily contemporaneous and there are points where you can travel along the street and change seasons for example. The user moves in the present through an image of the past that contains events frozen in the manner of a photograph while still retaining the sense of being present in a passing landscape. There are intriguing glitches where photos don't quite align and the bottom of the frame is often rendered as a distorted blur. Sometimes the Google car captures its own shadow. At time of writing it is still possible to see Trinity Square car park in Gateshead and the street events organised by some artists for the Google car in Sampsonia Way Pittsburgh http://public.fotki.com/punkpedal/sampsonia-way/. The technology doesn't have the total immersiveness of a videogame or Second Life and seems to occupy a transitional point in the evolution of computer interfaces with the world. At present Streetlview lacks the kind of user generated information already available in Wikimapia but has started to include the kind of commercial data that Augmented Reality technology will eventually make ubiquitous. Users can upload photographs which hover between being landscapes in their own right and data for the Streetview project - a total visual catalogue of the world in places not available to the camera car, with all the concomitant implications of self surveillance that may have. One data layer is a superimposed line oriented along the road and suspended above it that contains the name of the road and other information. Streetview has already been added to mobile phone mapping apps. The latest Google cameras have 3-D mapping capabilities which will eventually enable a much more immersive virtual experience.

The convergance of mobile technology with satellite navigation and the move away from a phone handset to heads-up display spectacles will potentially make every glance a cornucopia of facts and retail opportunities layered on to the world in real time. As a clunky, already redundant tool of representation Streetview provides something of a rehearsal for the world to come but at present it is an anomolous ideosyncratic place where virtual travel may be contemplated. Blogging about a virtual world combines two aspects of web technology and creates the potential for exporing new ways in which writing and the world may be combined more directly.