Kristina Stallvik
The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning*
“Further Reading”
Y Gallery (Reykjavik, Iceland)
May - April, 2024
Curated by Joe Keys
*title adapted from Eve SedgwickThe webcam eye acts as a prosthetic extension of the human, not only in the sense that it extends our scopic reach. It also redesigns the habits, norms, and systems that structure how we see and what we do with that sight. Mediated by corporate platforms and embedded within broader circuits of capital, desire, and power, videotelephony has a protean nature that goes both ways: as new uses are invented, its users transform as well.
Video-telephonic technology transmutes its subject onto a rudimentary grid. A limited amount of pixels can be reproduced from a webcam to a user’s screen in close to real time, uniform parcels of information compressed from an indefinitely detailed real world. The first iteration of this technology was the Fernsehsprechstellen (far-sight-speech-place) - 160 kilometers of coaxial cable from Berlin to Hamburg, Leipzig, Nuremberg and Munich, enabling remote video conversation from inside a stationary booth. On record, the webcam’s succeeding practical use was in office kitchens: a small lens mounted to the coffee machine so that employees could monitor the depleting and repleting levels of liquid in the pot without leaving their cubicle.
The landmass of Iceland is surveilled by 300 public-access webcams. They vary indocumentary purpose: road condition warnings, harbor traffic control, and scenic viewpoint admiration. In 2011, members of parliament proposed a resolution for the establishment of an online webcam museum: “The design of globally networked cameras has evolved such that they are possible to install in the most beautiful, peculiar, and unlikely places. This gallery would contain a photo album of the coun- try, the person of Iceland at every moment. Each station would have 2-3 lenses, the angle chosen by remote viewers on their computer. Observing human life, business life, culture and na- ture is an incredible opportunity; observing wild flower beds, rivers in lakes, nesting sites for birds, hot spring areas, waterfalls and mountains, seals in harbors - everything gives a picture of the face of Iceland.”
The channels carved by this continuous flow of footage carry physical bodies too. Tourists are deposited through viral tributaries like loose pieces of gravel and sediment. In 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull abruptly halted this relentless stream. For an entire week, the ash cloud from its eruption grounded 100,000 airplanes in the European IFR airspace. At the end of the day, even the dazzling circuit of global consumption could not bypass geological forces without endangering the lives of those it promised to enrich. A gaping exposed crater fallacy.
I have been “webcam traveling” back to Iceland since my residency stay in 2022. When I opened the feed in March 2024, multiple streams were obfuscated by a new ash cloud from Sundhnúkagíga, a volcano located on the Reykjanes peninsula just north of the now-evacuated fishing town, Grindavík. In the process of deciphering what had happened to the usual footage of dormant, gently sloping mountain plateaus, I discovered the story of Vestmannaeyjar: in 1973, in- habitants of the critical fishing town on Heimaey island managed to save their harbor from the lava flow of volcano Eldfell with an absurd amount of jetti- soned cold sea water. Now I am watching a stream of slowly undulating globules, or sometimes, the pixelized static of the webcam’s maximum internal processing capacity reflected back in the unchanging pale gray. A string of geological fictions produced by the contiguous proximity of ash and lens. Emerging and subsiding at the frequency of the webcam’s frame rate.
Surveillance is not total. Things spill out, escape, mutate. Despite their ability to accommodate disruptions, control diagrams contain leaks that enable new forms of life and modes of experience that cannot be reduced to protological mechanisms. Everyday mutinous practices of opacity, transparency, passing, camouflage, duplicity, and code-switching all gesture toward ways of abstracting identity to scram- ble state-sanctioned practices of computation*
In the fall of 2020, Californians tried to capture the smoldering red skies of forest fire after forest fire. In order to hack the iphone’s default factory settings - encoded to “correct” any sky to blue - Twitter users in San Francisco advised citizen photog- raphers to cover their camera lens with a finger, only uncovering the aperture right before triggering the shutter. This maneuver disorients the camera application’s software, suddenly flooding the lens with light before the computer com- prehen- sion of a smoky magma red as sky. Light travels faster than information.
I put my thumb over the camera lens and press hard. Smudging and smearing theconcentric ridg- es of my fingerprints. Leaving ash flakes of skin on the glass. Now I am watching slowly undulating globules on my iphone screen.
Documentation by Leifur Wilberg Orrason