Commonplace Book

Thinkin' about telemetry and the aesthetics of the video overlay, particularly in FPV flying videos, but also as a look that goes farther back, to fighter-jets and (more powerfully) the portrayal of HUD tech in films.

Sidenote, lol, I implemented this writefreely website and loved the idea that it can't show images, but for this little sortie I wish I could show some pics – both of my own recent tests with minimOSD and analog drone cameras and of older canonical versions of the form. Too bad!

In FPV videos found on YouTube, I'm really taken by the live-ness of the image (including the overlay, which is deliciously vulnerable to the same interference as the initial analog signal – very different from the PLAY/RECORD and date-code overlays of VCR and 90s film-camera overlays). This vulnerability definitely plays into my love of liveness, live video in general – the forensic “proof” that the feed is not cut, altered, or otherwise mediated-in-time (although staging the whole affair being videoed is fair game, fertile ground!).

The presence of an overlay of real-time contextual data carries with it a bunch of implications: that the viewer “needs” to see the overlaid information as much as they need to see the video feed; that there exists a companion process/computer/entity that is creating this information contemporaneously but not necessarily nearby; that the feed's content will change in ways that correspond to changes in the video (but not necessarily directly, like the histogram or other diagnostic overlays of a DSLR viewfinder).

In the FPV community, it's often the case that the analog feed-and-OSD (I'll say OSD, On Screen Display, for the rest of this writing – it is the same as overlay) isn't the ultimate media collateral: the drone will also be carrying a “better” GoPro or other hi-res action camera whose footage is the actual deliverable of the flight, leaving the analog feed as a tool-for-the-maker, the cartoon before the paint. This lower status given to the OSD makes it an interesting site of private pragmatism, a place where all sorts of data are allowed to crowd the image, since the video feed needs only to be good enough to navigate with. Analog's low latency makes it durably popular even as digital video transmission gets better and better, and interestingly, to the “good enough to navigate with” remark, some digital transmission schemes designed specifically for FPV flying will privilege the preservation of detail at the center of the screen, allowing the edges to blur and chunk in a form of tunnel vision, aimed at keeping the pilot's path as low-latency and detailed as possible amid deteriorating transmission quality.

There's a beautiful intensity to lots of FPV footage – not just in the frenetic action on the video feed, but in the data whizzing by, and the visible degradation of the analog signal as distance-from-home grows greater and battery power dwindles. It's so limited in such fundamental ways – time in flight, space onscreen to display critical context, line-of-sight from home.

The opposite of an FPV “freestyle” run is a drone bombing – terminal guidance to a remote target. The screen's dissolution to static after final approach indicates a successful, even glorious, death of the transmitter. I say this now only to palpate the other edges of this visual realm; I'm not too interested in the glory of hurting people, but it's there in our cultural context as we watch any sort of drone footage nowadays. In fact, the terminal-guidance shot precedes any joyride/freestyle forms – the nightvision telemetry videos of laser-guided ordinance from the first Iraqi invasion; the HUD videos of various dogfights in film and news features, etc. The original analog-with-overlay version of airborne video is part and parcel of news-safe, 20th century forms of death.

So when we watch these giddy, weightless bando runs (FPV slang for joyrides round abandoned architecture), we're keenly aware of the system's, and our own, mortality – indeed, the OSD exists in order to help the pilot (and us, by projection) more expertly dance along the razor edge between an exhilarating sortie and snow-screen disaster.

What I'm working on now is ways to expand the context of the OSD layer – to augment the autopilot's telemetry stream and allow a more poetic, emotional form of address to take place alongside the critical sensor information. When flying FPV, the operator is in an extreme position: an absolutely engaged video-watcher, shutting out the immediate world in favor of a goggles-on, out-of-body avatarization in which they become the quadcopter. In this sort of cybernetic projection, the OSD layer is an unusually readable augmentation (fighter pilots wear more elaborate interfaces, like a tongue-based electrovoltaic device that helps them orient relative to the surface of the Earth).

I see in this moment of total and essential focus-on-the-image a moment ripe for me to speak with the sort of candor and urgency that precludes social niceties, and short-circuits the elaborate and overwrought prose I fall back on when I am trying to be honest about something important, like how close we could be, or what heartbeats are for.

I participated in a butoh dance at Battery Park last weekend – the first public performance I've done in at least a few years. The dance sequence was quite rough, about 35 minutes long, and only rehearsed for a total of 5 or 6 hours in the two days leading up to it. I'll write down a few things I thought and felt while they're still relatively fresh.

I was very surprised how little excitement/adrenaline I felt while performing. This was disappointing, because that feeling of the highwire act, of being on the threshold of disaster, is what I have always loved about live performance – it's what is lacking in a film, video, or other cut-together asynchronous medium. That taut line between an audience and a performer, and the wide band of expression and exchange that line affords between the two, is so rare and transformative. It makes you find places in yourself, capabilities you did not know to unlock, or how. And even rarer are those triumphant moments where you feel you did a good job in this situation – a live-success where you became something wholly different, and effective and beautiful instrument of space / in time.

In this performance, I felt like we had no chance of succeeding (where success here is the faithful execution of a choreographer's vision). It was more like an open practice, asking an audience to watch along as we tried to imitate the instructor's (quite lovely) moves. Which is fine! I did not expect transcendence from such a hasty and rough rehearsal process. For this reason it was not hard to perform in my underwear for strangers in New York – there was nothing at stake.

I was really interested, though, in how much I enjoyed being part of the procession of dancers to the performance venue – we took the subway in full costume from Prince Street to Cortland and then walked through the Oculus to get to the Battery Park site. Twenty mostly-underpantsed dancers wrapped in burlap and facepaint, dutifully scanning OMNY passes and waiting on the platform for the R.

This part of the evening felt the most alive, had the most potential for a transformative moment – an accidental audience, a crew with a mission and a theme, an open book of available interactions with the space. At various points, I tried out: acting deeply serious and stone-faced; acting like I recognized everyone who passed by us; acting exhausted and stressed, like I was in fintech; mimicking any children we passed by; telling people “I don't know those other guys” when they asked what we were doing / who we were.

The stark difference between the two modes of performance got me thinking about a sort of butoh/clown dichotomy. In our butoh performance it was possible, even important, to ignore the audience. And in butoh in general, the practice is (to me, so far, still a beginner!) deeply internal and personal – you are listening as hard as you can to your body and its interface with the space and air around it. In moments of flow-state, you don't quite leave your body but you definitely reconfigure normal parameters/limits of time and exertion in favor of another logic innate to the practice itself. It can be done beautifully in an empty room.

In clowning (again, even less than a beginner here!) the audience is the medium – clowning in an empty room is a one-person trust-fall. High-theory clowning can have rigid strictures about keeping mute and only miming, about costume and pacing and internal motivation/character, but it's still fundamentally about playing a set of rules off an audience. A successful performance has an unambiguous, immediate, irrepressible audience response and can take as long or as short as the performer desires.

The procession to the venue was clownplay; the dance itself was dead.

What would a butoh clown look like? I imagine a slow-motion pratfall, the unfolding of a body-joke over an impressively languorous timeframe, an exchange with an audience member that holds focus for minutes, not seconds; a way to take the sort of sublime motion-mastery of the dance and imbue it with the quick wit and deep character integrity of the buffoon.

It is traditional when running a weblog to have a post called “reviving this after X period of time” so heh. With that out of the way I am going to just use this place to talk about some concepts I'm thinking about. I'm not trying to make any hard-and-fast assertions, and I don't really want you to do more than read and think about them and maybe talk to me about them. I sure don't want to see links to these things, or rebuttals, etc – they're on my hidden little commonplace book for me to practice writing and developing thoughts, is all!

So. Smoke. Been thinking about using smoke for a few years now, how it works in video-images in particular. My piece TRANSIT features this, smoke dissipating in one way and uncannily backwards-coalescing into the sculpture when seen the other way around.

Smoke's process goes from a finite volume to an infinite one; from contained to immanent. It's a way, over time, to point to barely-perceivable metamorphoses but not from one form to another (which feels intentional, didactic, analogic) but instead from one form to its absence, its no-form. Smoke's particular animation, the quality of motion of its diffusion, tells observers a great deal about the environment – prevailing winds, the oppressiveness of the air and the closeness of the room, the thickness and heft of the smoke itself (revealing the ardor of the often-unseen burn fueling it). I have a video-sketch that seems always to be in the works, I hope to make it someday soon just to scratch the itch, but here it is: it's a high aspect-ratio shot, vertical, lush resolution and pencil-thin. The shot frames a delicate, unperturbed wisp of cigarette/incense smoke (that thin, pale blue of a cigarette-sized ember, never fully opaque). The smoke moves straight up and we know from this the room is absolutely still. Maybe we hear a monologue, or a person on one side of a phone call (once I was honored with some acting award and got to choose what to perform – it was the final phone call from Franny and Zooey (but LOL, an admin told me, after I'd rehearsed for weeks, right before I went onstage, to cut every instance of the word “goddamn”)). No person or motion is ever shown onscreen – just the imperturbable smoke. The sketch concludes with a door (offscreen) opening and closing, obliterating the tendril.

The progression of smoke in a video-image intersects with something common to most of my video-performance ideas: the idea that the video is not cut, edited, or sequenced in a way that deceives. The video of the performance may be highly contrived, and apparatuses, wires, actors, etc may be staged out of frame, but the video itself is more forensic than illustrative, more a (deranged, maybe) documentation than visual composition on its own. The composition is the scene-in-the-world, and the video image is just one residue of the actions taking place in that scene.

Smoke is useful, then, as a temporal watermark – a way to entangle an unfalsifiable physical process (itself symbolically rich and never unrelated to the action taking place) with the events playing out onscreen. In TRANSIT, the action of the smoke is one of the very few elements in the shot that is absolutely detectable as backwards-in-time. This highlights, for me, how much of the rest of the frame is basically temporally symmetrical – wind in the leaves, the sound of wind and branches, the motion of sun and shadow – all these elements do not read to a viewer, especially an ambient viewer (as is the intention with most of my landscape-painting-type videos), as backwards or out of sorts. That uncanny coalescence of smoke-into-form is an enormously powerful but subtle crux of the piece. An immanent order coalescing out of the wild, only to shatter in an instant back into the eternal.

In the Danse Macabre piece, I'm working with the idea of, in at least one vignette/sequence, smoke eventually filling the frame and totally obscuring the dancer and jumping-jack. Here, the smoke is again a temporal watermark but also an hourglass, a ticking-clock, illustrative of a process that, however gradual and continuous, eventually reaches a point of catastrophic, overbearing interference. In wider shots, when I was making test footage summer 2023, I liked the action of colored smoke exuding from the terrain, seemingly started synchronously (and by a remote-initiation system I spent awhile designing, only to find that the smoke effects themselves are only like 50% viable in terms of wicks catching from an e-match). This conjured a four-horsemen, hellfire-of-war atmosphere, a jungle LZ or charnel pits. But thematically not quite cohesive, unless maybe this can work specifically in reference to the gradual-suffocation shot described above. The shot above, by the way, is a portrait-orientation shot in which the dancer appears on a large 4k screen as 1:1 life-sized – like the Danse Macabre motif, it is a picture with the viewer staring out of the frame, trying to warn/communicate even though, for the dancer trapped in the frame, it is too late to be saved. Maybe the juice, then, is that the whole field becomes smoke – a hundred synchronous smoke effects, all filling the open-air field with startling and inexorable efficacy? And the color, something deeply unnatural like red-orange, can be what ties them even more together?

Smoke's nonvisual aspect, for example as incense in a censer, is also pretty interesting to deploy – an unseen scent is ominous, threatening – something deeply intimate gets inside your body without anything you can do about it – once you perceive it is too late, it is already inside you. A censer swing on a slow walk through a space, on the other hand, stakes ownership to this intimacy, performs its deployment, makes it clear that scent is an element in play at the moment. It is intentional, and it is both ephemeral (in time) and infinite (in space) – but with the consequence that as it suffuses into infinite space, its power/impact are diminished to the point of imperceptibility.

The day she got laid off, she told me she encountered a perfume that was to smell of an electronics shop in Bombay – it smelled, she said, of sandalwood and something acrid. Weeks later she performed in a dance for the first time in years, and I was on another coast. Over there I had a dubious expert page me through an exhausting fusillade of perfumes he hoped would answer my challenge: find me the smell, I asked, of theater lights warming up in an empty performance space, the smell of hot dust and vague electrics as the venue opens a few hours before curtains. Not quite smoke – the moments before it; not quite fire but a sequence of embers flinting out into the space, detectable only in those intimate moments before the audience arrives.

Ian is taller than average, built like a husky energetic boy. He has a slightly loose tongue and lips, imprecise, and in moments of excitement one might notice (unkindly) them glistening more than usual with saliva from this loose-lippedness.

He came to moments of excitement easily, not lustily or knowingly, but with a good-natured panache all the same. I knew him at college; we hung out and drank beer and smoked pot together. We were part of the same crew that mostly socialized in each other's dorms (much cheaper than going out), and there were some dominant personalities (not me; not Ian) who spent most of that time playing asinine video games and “letting” us watch, insisting that what transpired was, in fact, fun. Even typing this out it's clear this was pretty miserable, but yeah; we were all pretty miserable in our own ways and this is how we hung out.

Ian was in Mather house, a 70s labyrinth that could have been truly Brutal if it had tried harder. His room, though, was quite comfy – all the rooms had at least one non-right angle wall, and his room featured two windows on a corner that both opened, making for great breezes (summer cooldown, conceal smoke, etc).

Ian was taller than average and when he was in his cups his eyes had a charming, faraway quality – simultaneously sharp and bright, like an Irish uncle with a joke on his mind, and sleepy and faraway, like Alec Baldwin if he was a good person.

Silhouette-wise, Ian was a little torso-heavy. Not overweight, but imbalanced. In Disney comics, there is often an innocuous, slightly vacant-and-aloof character called Gus – Gus is Donald's cousin and when he visits, he innocently/relentlessly eats, eventually clearing out all of Donald's food.

Ian had been sleeping poorly for a few weeks; he was dealing with some stress, and all of his friends were acting exactly the same as they always did.

I don't know how it happened exactly. In the dead of winter some dorms got really hot – they turn on the central heating and expect you to open windows, install window-fans, etc to regulate your temperature. Ian had a pretty robust box-fan setup that Wolf had contrived (one semester Wolf took fluid dynamics, and went around everyone's dorm weathersealing and installing fans so they could smoke anywhere and be confident the smoke would leave through a known (inoffensive, covert) route).

Ian woke up in the middle of the night and was sweat-hot. Well, he didn't wake up – he jerked out of bed and, semi-asleep, tried to rearrange the bedclothes so that he could sleep on cooler surfaces. In the process of this, he opened a normally-closed window, immediately creating a strong vortex in the room (the window had not been part of Wolf's air-management plan; opening it would drastically change the pressure differential he had created throughout the rest of the 7-room dorm). In this unexpected maelstrom, the half-asleep Ian had tried to flatten and re-puff a dorm pillow – it ripped neatly in half as he flapped it against his legs, pouring 2-3 gallons of down into the maelstrom. Ian was confusingly and thoroughly caught (still half-awake, quarter-sober) in a whirlwind of feathers.

We knew this had happened not because he volunteered this experience, but because the next day at lunch, he reached into his pocket for his ID and a tiny cloud of feathers followed his hand out of his pocket.

The feathers had been pervasively, thoroughly incorporated into his laundry. They would not go away with a simple washing, because they matted down and adhered to the insides of pockets when wet. Inevitably, when he wore a garment fresh from the laundry, every dig into a pocket would yield a curious, subtle puff of down. It was as if a witch had cursed him to always be in a cloud of feathers.

The crumpled-up note goes on at quite some length, explaining that the puffy head, radial stellate symmetry, and yellow stamen may look like the features of a dandelion, rest assured it is a rare orchid of top-quality and without peer. The note is signed twice, once with “Love from John” and once just “Danny (flower shop owner).”

My buddy Harold has recently been doing some HR work for the State Department, basically trying to clean up their filesystem and, in the process, harmonize like five different HRIS schemas. I meet him usually to give him a free joint he can parallel-smoke with me in these pandemic times, which I get from my delivery service (they are low-quality j's so I don't mind the loss, he digs the roller's technique and has asked me to relay that roller a bunch of questions but that's another remark for another time). Harold has been cleaning up a bunch of personnel records from the miscellaneous / special-contracts part of the Dept, so it's been a bit more spelunking and lore-gathering than usual in these database-cleanup gigs. So he told me about a person who he's only pieced together from some admittedly sketchy records, but it's inarguable, just from the volume of lawyers' complaints alone, that Twin does exist.

It seems Twin drove a big truck and he did not care what happened to it. He was hauling helium for the Department of Energy, and was the most dangerous man on the road. Every day was taco day.

Harold found all this because he was, technically, committing a federal crime: he was using non-sanctioned software to parse official government HR records. In his defense, the gig pretty much explicitly required oblique activity such as this – it was well-known and understood that Harold was to maintain plausible deniability after getting unlogged root access to the machines in question. And it wasn't a secret that he was trying out some handmade sketch/parser scripts he had found in an old home directory. But again, technically: federal crime to run unfudge-dirs-v3-final-v2.py in his particular situation.

Helium is pretty easy to transport, since it's a liquid in a relatively small volume of well-protected trailer space. Lots of times he would also take a load of puppies up in the front cab, running them from shelter to shelter as they reached capacity or otherwise failed to sustain the inexplicable increase in dog fertility we've seen on his route over the last 5 years. But I digress:

Things you do not want to mess with, or be seen messing with: * dogs that appear to be having fun, especially immature dogs i.e. puppies * lonely and/or discontent-looking men in command of a large, poorly-cleaned truck * Any super-cooled, energetic-release type of trailer load * the Department of Energy, in any form

He drove wildly, with a freedom and energy ordinary people would associate with mania. But people in the grip of a mania, manic people, do not generally eat tacos / access taco experiences at as high a level as the driver. The receipts were legendary, circulated among sub-branches of the GAO and, at times (times of dire need on the part of the country's energy systems, times necessitating all manner of blackbudget countermeasures) reaching even the Post Office union listserv in terms of lore and legend. No puppies were harmed in the course of his duties.

In his domain, roughly the Northeast of the US with much of Quebec and the Carolinas as well, there was no stretch of more than 70 miles or so for which he did not know the optimal navigation solution given a situation's time/velocity constraints and its demands in terms of Mexican or Tex-Mexican foods.

Not to say the exhaustiveness of the coverage of taco-knowledge was an important or laudatory point – it merits mention more to establish the length of time the driver had spent in the region, and also to subtly highlight the (in this author's opinion, startling) geographical diversity of the customer base of the Department of Energy's Hazardous-Hauling concern. In reality, there were only a few taco locations on the planet worthy of sustained attention, and they formed neat nicely-distributed Voronoi watersheds spanning the map of his domain. Someone claiming first-hand knowledge told Harold about how Twin had at times contemplated on his driving as a harmonious and altogether unequivocal “good” sign that he had chosen a wise way to spend his days. “Tally ho,” as they said in the fighter-jet bars.

Which is all to say, in part, that there was a special and indelible joy in his driving, a deeply absurd engagement with the full gamut of forces and consequence-type relationships in the universe. Swerving wildly across lanes and even down off-ramps, all the time using the superfluid properties of his load to execute superb and alarming stunts. Cornering with a 45-foot bulk-isolated trailer in tow, when modeled in commercially-available physics engines, generally ends up looking like a demolition sequence shown in either fast- or slow-motion, but in real life it was truly balletic – Twin used the sloshing of the liquid helium to smartly “scoot” the back-end around into alignment at just the right moment on the apex of what was looking to be a total disaster of a turn, niftily lining up the body with the next straight shot out of the city. Any puppies present in the cab at the time would invariably get the zoomies.

Inevitably, when you are at the height of your form, you get some critics, your “peanut gallery”. Lots of people, watching a 40-ton tractor-trailer with matte black government plates powerslide across 8 lanes of outer Worcester SPUIE interchange, will think that somehow they are witnessing an excess. An excess that is literally “remarkable,” in that they call the police and remark upon it. This approach strikes us immediately as lacking in dignity, and we deplore it.

However, it is reasonable to wonder what becomes of those complaints! The number of the payload, and an exhortation to call if “my driving” isn't sufficient, are both clearly printed on the back of the truck. Inevitably, some number of critical comments are synchronously relayed to the internal Customer Success Program at the Department of Energy: this is where my buddy Harold has been able to clock the rough dynamics of Twin's hold on the system.

Just as there are a series of associable invoice entities in the oldest of the HRIS that Harold is working with, all of them basically “twin” references like Gemini Systems and Twin Systems; there are equally as many Customer Outcome Codes that appear to grant these programs unusual levels of access to the IVR system that routes Customer Success Opportunities (complaint calls) to various Customer Success Ninjas (DoE team, unsure where budget is allocated). Billing codes run the government, and this billing-code-sinkhole around Twin was difficult to ignore. And so.

The earliest record of a “twin” pun on a government procurement sheet is back in 1932, which is as far back as queryable records go.

Ambient Devices – Christmas hires and fires

Christmas (and the 2 weeks after) at Ambient was the rush season, when thousands of people would learn about how RF propagation works, and learn perhaps more than they intended about the business-prognosis of the pager-bandwidth airspace market at the time.

One Christmas was particularly heightened because it began with a bang – midway through December our entire building was evacuated due to an electrical fire that ultimately killed a technician. At the same time, Boston had some substantial snowfalls, which made temporary help harder to guarantee.

PG managed to get us into two contiguous suites in the hotel across the street, so he and Andrew borrowed a van and rustled up the necessary folding chairs and tables to make a rudimentary call center with – AB spent most of a night setting up the PBX system that would let us route calls form the 800 number to the suites. It looked, and this would become relevant later, like a classic boiler room / pump-and-dump setup.

We often had to hire temps, which was difficult because our support task went deeper than most CSR temp roles – the standard role was basically a human who would help customers through a phone tree or debug tree, and that's about it. Because of how returns work, and because the product was often given as a gift, there was an extra stage of customer-education we had to go through in order to get a customer to believe us when we said that their device was not broken, but it also would never work at their home (because it was not in an area covered by the pager network).

I spent perhaps more time than was needed explaining the actual mechanics of the situation to each CSR, possibly because I was ashamed to know-but-not-reveal how unanimously the verdict (“out of luck”) would be dispensed each day.

One of the temps was a gregarious dude who resembled Cedric Yarbrough (Jonsey in Reno 911), and would make a point to hold your eye contact while he was “expertly” handling a customer for us. He liked to emphasize frequently that we were his customer, and how much he was doing to elegantly serve the callers because that seemed to be the best way to flatter us into compliance. But he also loved sports! So much so that he would often mime sports-actions (lining up a golf swing; being hut-hutted the football) in concert with the dynamics of the phone conversation he was having on his earset. Most unsettling was football and other multi-player sports because if you failed to shake his eye contact, he would continue to involve you in the ghost-sport – you'd be on the hook to catch his pass or field his homer. I fantasized, but never found out, what would happen if you suddenly inverted the game, fumbling the catch or complicating the situation.

The manifestation of this was that you could easily lose double-digit minutes deftly managing eye contact with the various temps on the floor at any point – implicated at every step of the way in the drama you'd staged.

What is a graceful system? I will try to explain here, but like the concept of grace itself, it naturally evades neat categorization.

I think of the interactions and systems I design from the perspective of a host – in compiling this (incomplete, developing) list of thoughts, I'm trying to call out what constitutes a successful visit, what endures after departure, what the essential duties/functions of a host are in a particular context.

Humans

Graceful systems operate with an understanding that humans necessarily imbue an interaction with uncertainty and risk. On the human side of this encounter, a graceful system accepts the person as they are, and requires little in the way of contortion to use the system. (And by contortion I don't mean every system must have fully-conversational speech recognition, I just mean that it is reasonable, and feels fine, to use the system: setting a specific temperature on a kettle can be fine if I'm just turning a dial, but it feels like a contortion when it becomes a chore, involving pairing wifi or giving away usage info, etc).

On the computer side, a graceful system eschews the record-everything approach currently used to hedge the maker's bets and easily afford

ambiguity and the implicit One way a graceful system might acknowledge this risk would be to embrace ambiguity in places traditionally left explicit

Forgetting

A great deal of human interactions and relationships depend critically on

Forgiving