Month: June 2010

[Image: “Stonehenge at Night” (1944) by Harold Edgerton].

In 1944, Harold Edgerton, one of the forefathers of stroboscopic photography, produced an extraordinary image of Stonehenge. According to the authors of Stopping Time, that image was commissioned specifically as part of a larger military/optical experiment:

Illuminated by a 50,000 watt-second flash in the bay of a night-flying airplane 1500 feet above the ancient monoliths, Edgerton’s pictures of Stonehenge served as a demonstration to the Allied commanders of the potential for nighttime reconaissance photography. Edgerton was on the ground with a folding pocket camera braced on a fence post as the plane flew overhead. Simultaneously, the monument was recorded in perfect detail by a camera in the plane. The target was chosen because it was remote enough to allow the equipment to be tested without arousing unwanted interest.

Edgerton’s photograph was pointed out to me recently by architect Nat Chard after he read an earlier post here about the illuminative possibilities of aerial weaponry—or military chiaroscuro.

But the idea of a stroboscopic light-bay opening up in the base of an aircraft and illuminating scenes of human prehistory from above is breathtaking—as if dropping illuminative ordnance into a world of darkness, far below. Indeed, as a photographic technique, pinpoint-flashes of high-powered aerial lighting would also be something well worth exploring in other archaeo-architectural contexts, from Angkor Wat to the Spiro Mounds. Light-bomb archaeology.

(Thanks, Nat!)

[Image: “A 1566 rendering of ‘terrible and curious’ quake damage” in Istanbul; courtesy of the New York Times/Collection Kozak].

Five quick links for a Thursday morning:

1) “AT&T is launching a free wi-fi network for its customers in New York City’s Times Square,” Business Insider explained last week. “This will take a load off AT&T’s battered 3G network, by pushing peoples’ email, web, and app traffic onto wi-fi and off of 3G. And it should speed up downloads for AT&T customers in the area.” I’m reminded of Charles Komanoff’s proposed transportation policy changes for New York City, in which bus rides would always be offered free of charge, “because the time saved when passengers aren’t fumbling for change more than makes up for the lost fare revenue.” In other words, both cases suggest that offering certain urban services for free, at moments of high-intensity usage, often makes much better financial sense than charging for everything, all the time.

2) “In these hard economic times, when much of the country could use a walk in the woods or a night in the mountains or a wade in the river or a picnic by the lake, states across the country seem to be creating obstacles to the great outdoors… Campgrounds are closing, fees are increasing, employees have been laid off.”

3) In a look at impending, and possibly extreme, seismic activity in the Pacific Northwest, Nature writes that “public officials should maybe look at the new numbers and think about this earthquake as a real possibility in the next 50 years.” Watch this video to see what a strong quake hitting Seattle can really look like. This brings to mind the overdue earthquake long expected for Istanbul, “where tens of thousands of buildings throughout the city, erected in a haphazard, uninspected rush as the population soared past 10 million from the 1 million it was just 50 years ago, are what some seismologists call ‘rubble in waiting.'” After all, “expected earthquakes in this region represent an extreme danger for the Turkish megacity.”

4) Genetically Modified Fruit Flies Can Smell Light: “Blue light smells like delicious bananas.”

5) “Exploiting a political crisis, Malagasy timber barons are robbing this island nation of its sylvan heritage, illegally cutting down scarce species of rosewood trees in poorly protected national parks and exporting most of the valuable logs to China,” the New York Times reports. Worse, following a March 2009 coup and the island’s now “weakened and tottering government that is unable—and perhaps unwilling—to stop the trafficking,” the illegal timber trade “has increased at least 25-fold.”

Extra Credit:
a) Register for this competition to design a Lunar Capital City
b) For Robots, By Robots: Japan Plans a Moon Base by 2020

(Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12).

The diagram below explains two simple lighting strategies for use during “military operations on urban terrain,” or MOUT, taken from the U.S. Army’s Infantryman’s Guide to Combat in Built-Up Areas. While there is nothing particularly surprising about an army using light to its advantage, a number of interesting things arise when considering weapons from the perspective of their optical effects.

[Image: “Trip flares, flares, illumination from mortars and artillery, and spotlights (visible light or infrared) can be used to blind [the] enemy… or to artificially illuminate the battlefield,” from An Infantryman’s Guide to Combat in Built-Up Areas].

In another army field manual, for instance, called Tactical Employment of Mortars, the practice of running “illumination missions” using “luminous markers” and “specified amounts of illumination ammunition” is explained, such that mortars become less kinetic weapons used in the destruction of buildings than surprise lighting effects—decentralized chandeliers, so to speak, hurled down from above at high speed.

Indeed, “medium and heavy mortars can provide excellent illumination over wide areas,” whereas with lighter rounds “the illumination lasts for about 25 seconds, and it provides moderate light over a square kilometer. The gunner must adjust the elevation to achieve height-of-burst changes for this round. The best results are achieved with practice.”

One of many reasons I mention this here is because I wonder how these techniques could be de-weaponized and used for the purpose of civilian illumination. You visit a small town somewhere in Scandinavia where night’s fall is disturbingly total, with no street lights of any kind turning on after the sun has long since set; yet people are still out there milling about, even sitting on public benches with books in hand, as if preparing to read in utter darkness. But then a lightburst flashes in the sky above, burning for half a minute or more; and then another; and another, at odd angles, turning the streets and squares below into stroboscopes of moving geometry; and this continues for hours—strange nets of light popping in the air above you—as the city goes about its unexpected nightlife, illuminated by repurposed mortars fired by a light brigade camped out on the urban fringe.

Finally, any discussion of how urban lighting effects can be militarized reminds me of a stunning scene from Anthony Beevor’s retelling of the fall of Berlin during World War II. There, we read of a Russian general who ordered such extraordinary use of spotlights during the Battle of the Seelow Heights that his own soldiers became totally disoriented when the shelling began: massive clouds of smoke and dust rose up into the beams, forming an impenetrable glowing mist that quickly enveloped them, robbing the battlefield of detail. Light came from every direction and no direction at all, in a complete loss of the shadow-casting effects needed to hide their own troops’ movement—a failure, we might say, of military chiaroscuro, or the controlled use of shadows during invasion as seen in the diagram, above.