video web log [-\\/] video blog

27.1.01 patience

patience.

[technical note, this movie appropriates live webcam feeds from Bergen, Norway, courtesy of the Bergen Daily paper, Bergens Tidende.]

my little map of bergen. the harbour, the mountains. there are 7 mountains around bergen. the 7 mountains of bergen. everyone says so. i've never counted 7. i think they might cheat.

this is how i envisage bergen, always from this point of view. from somewhere out in the fjord and high seeing fløyen to the left, urliken higher and past, and the vidden behind ulriken. this is not the perspective of my walk or cycle to work, but is the perspective that would let me see the landmarks of my walk. it is also the perspective that would let me see each of the cameras and what the cameras see. memory as panoptic fantasy but really its a gestalt of air and earth (and not the ocean).

this drawing is from memory and these pictures are from the bergen daily paper's webcams. (nice of them, isn't it?) the photograph is now, as barthes understood, about what is. (or as Bergson reminds us, it is only the past - what was - that actually is.)

the 'live' is found in the impossible interval of the about to be sliding into the was. webcams are not what is, they open a false presentness in the interval between the indifferent any moment whatever of surveillance and the assumption of presence that a mouse click prescribes.

memory lies between these two fields. one the imagined gestalt of place that sees all, analogical, iconic, imaginary - able to grasp a whole. the other the false 'live' image, indexical and subject to the promise and fantasy of verisimilitude.