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I heard stories recently about the strange lights known variously as earth lights, will o’ the wisp, jack o’ lanterns or corpse candles, which traditionally vary from flickering glows seen hovering over bogs or other damp ground to enormous bright glows that can light up an area as if it was day, being seen regularly in the Longdendale area of the South Pennines. Apparently the area around Longdendale between Glossop and Crowden has been an area of many sightings of unexplained lights, including small glowing spheres dancing above car dashboards to ‘brilliant incandescent blue light’ that ‘lit up all the bottom half of the mountain, all the railway, the reservoirs and about a two mile stretch of road.’ (from Longdendale Lights). The lights have been commonly seen around the aptly named Shining Clough and the Devil’s Elbow on the Woodhead Road to Glossop.

Theories about what the lights actually are range from the inevitable UFO and supernatural connotations to marsh gases and tectonic electromagnetic activity. An automated monitoring system in Hessdalen, Norway where there has been a huge amount of earth light activity is still to deliver any concrete analysis and scientists such as Paul Deveraux and Michael Persinger have been working on the phenomenon for years.

This is the crux of the theory from wikipedia;

The theory goes that the strain causes heat in the rocks, vaporising the water in them. Piezoelectric rocks such as quartz then produce electricity, which is channeled up through this column of vaporised water, until it reaches the surface—somehow displaying itself in the form of earth lights. This theory would assert that the majority of earth lights are seen over places of tectonic strain. If it is correct, it would explain why such lights often behave in an erratic and even seemingly intelligent manner, often defying the laws of gravity. Paul Devereux’s explanation, however, is much broader. He thinks that the link between the lights and the landscape is more tenuous. He says that they are probably related to many things: tectonic strain, weather conditions, local geography, ‘ley lines‘, terrain, water table depth and so forth. This explanation, however, is rejected by most experts as highly unscientific.

A recently explained phenomenon of weird lights much higher up in the sky, and another previous UFO theory has been put down to iridium flares. The iridium satellites are part of a communications network and have the unique feature of 3 highly reflective aluminium antenna panels mounted 120º apart which reflect the sun when the satellite performs one of its preprogrammed turns.

Often these flares can be seen in daylight at a fairly high magnitude and there are several websites, widgets and applications that predict when and where these flares will be visible. Maybe the best of these, Heavenly Bodies, predicts that the next one visible from Huddersfield will be on 21st July at 19.07.23 hrs at 239º WSW and 71º elevation. This will be Iridium 35.

Some of my readings and research during this residency that has touched on GPS, messaging and radio communications has led me to want to place a network of small radio beacons on the trig points all over this region of the Pennines. These beacons will broadcast the encoded landscape information from samples taken from the site of the trig point. Maybe these transmissions could be triggered by photocells or other sensors picking up earth lights or iridium flares.

After too many hours of messing about and getting nowhere very fast I took the decision to limit myself to the 256 values and to work with that. It means I’ve had to seriously reduce the pixle dimensions of the images within the max patch which pretty much rules out any ideas of conveying the romantic style I’d been hoping to work with. Now what I end up with look more like abstract versions of those invader mosaics you see on buildings around the world these days.

No matter, it just gives me several other avenues of cultural resonance I can work with. The space invader thing for a start, the problems inherent in broadcasting meaningful image data to the future etc, the compression of data for transmission etc etc, the modern pixel/icon representation of landscape etc etc etc.

So here’s the new patch:

I added a mechanism by which the image could be converted to audio with the 1s generated a click/pulse and the zeros nothing. A tone playes for the whole length of the image audio to demonstrate where the code begins and ends.

click here for audio because I haven’t worked out how to embed it yet….

I like the sound that is coming off this thing and would like to do something with it. Maybe I’ll build a sonic attack mode for the artist version ‘forget real science’ fermenter I’m planning to build and see what effect it has on the culture of bacteria, algae and nematodes.

Saturday 9th June
Before our Time - a 10 mile guided walk to look at the prehistory of the Marsden Moor area.
10 miles : 5.5 hours

I’d been looking forward to this walk for a while thinking it would give me a lot of useful information about the history of trade routes and networks across the Pennines whilst exploring some areas I hadn’t been to before. In the end it did a little of both but not as much as I hoped. I learned that the area across the moor around Pule and March hills is the narrowest point of the Pennines and thus provided a good crossing and strategic point - there had been people using it as a gathering place for since 6 or 7000 BC. I learned that the trees disappeared around 6000 years ago and that the peat layer is 15m thick in places and that 8000 years ago it all looked very different.

The route was similar to the one I did in my first walk but nudged upwards a little, going the other side of Haigh Clough to the reservoir, climbing to the top of March hill, dropping down to the Pennine way along millside edge (again), then cutting across the moor to the old tunnel workings engine house before climbing Pule hill and dropping back down to Marsden. There were a few new sights such as 5000 year old tree remains, the crash site of a WW2 plane and the remains of the old packhorse route built on top of a roman road - and not forgetting the new sight of all this in sunshine. And the new sight of my arms and neck getting redder and redder as I burnt myself to a crisp.

5000 year old tree stumps with Pule hill in the background

packhorse route and roman road remains

the tunnel works engine house. This place is actually sited near as damn it to where the line from Rock Stones to Holme Moss masts crosses the tunnel route - which means I’ll probably try and do something with the site at some point.

Monday 11th June
A quick circuit to March Haigh and back.
5 miles : 2.5 hours

I was out in Standedge having a meeting with the waterways board people so I decided to take the opportunity to go out and grab some more samples from crossing points. Taking along a big water bottle, a plastic tub and an improvised scooping device I set off along the same route as the first part of Saturday’s walk to March Haigh. My initial plan was to take a soil sample from the crossing point at 53°36′39.70″N, 1°57′46.89″W but I got my physical location and GPS coordinates mixed up and abandoned it deciding instead to head for the crossing on the other side at  53°36′32.72″N,   1°58′18.18″W. On the way I stopped to grab some water from a gorgeous little waterfall and pool which I marked as Water4 and will serve to provide algae cultures back in the lab. The other crossing was found easily enough and Soil4 was duly collcted - it was just next to a tempting mini-bog with loads of interesting green slime - couldn’t resist adding some to Water4 thinking that it should guarantee algal growth of some sort.

Soil 4 has now been placed in the enricher in the studio and will be connected to the eco-probe device as it evolves (more on this device to come).

water4 location

view to Pule hill from Soil4 (and Water4b)

Despite being pulled really strongly to the various masts and transmitters that surround the high moorlands of the Pennines I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do with them. They tie into my ideas of history of networks and of the informational ether which blankets the landscape as well as just plain turning me on. I’ve found a bunch of seven of them which form a loose ring around the Marsden moor area - Vicar’s Lot, Cop Hill, Moorside Edge, Rock Stones (not sure if this is the correct name), Crow Knowl (ditto), Saddleworth and Holme Moss. Its a shame to have to leave out the incredible Emley Moor mast but its jusy too far away to be of any use - even though I just realised you can see it from many parts of Huddersfield.

The latest thing I’ve done is to add them all to my Google Earth map and join the dots to see where the straight lines between masts intersect the paths of walks I have done or plan to do. Aswell as remind me of my hippy days with an OS map and a ruler hunting ley lines its given me a series of crossing points which may serve as good locations to take earth samples to culture the microbes that they contain. Its a lot less arbitrary than just choosing a location because it looked nice or because it was time for a rest like I was before. Maybe I could even get the calcite producing bacteria to build models of the masts they are located near, or of the two they were between.

It would be a joy to transmit one of my encoded landscapes from one or more of the radio masts however briefly but I’m not entirely sure thats going to be possible…

The red diagonal line is the rough course of the Standedge tunnels.
I’ve also been finding out a little more about what the various masts actually do and how to tell thanks to the wonderful http://tx.mb21.co.uk

For example I now know that Moorside Edge is a MW radio transmitter and will have little or no trouble spotting others of its kind for the rest of my days. Here’s a few others to help others with their spotter’s badges.

I was just playing around with getting a stream of zeros and ones that represented a drawing of the landscape that might be made by the bacteria that lived there - my version of the graphic sent by the Arecibo dish in 1977. Ultimately I’d like to transmit this data - partly for the hell of it and partly to see if i can pick it up remotely and do something with it.

Here’s the original shot, taken from a video still from the footage of soil sample 3 being taken

and here’s the image turned into a low-res black and white image of the kind suitable for etching or drawing

This is still 360 x 240 pixels at 36pixels/inch and will produce a huge stream of numbers. I built a Jitter patch using the jit.spill object to unload all the data into a list after taking it down to 90 x 60 in the hope that a 5400 values would be manageable but unfortunately the limits of the object are much lower than that. This means having to use an offset and scroll around the image from various starting points. Maybe using a sequence of offsets as starting points and dumping sets of 256 values at a time into a larger list would be an option to look at.

It sort of works but there are a few issues to sort out - plenty of them to do with programming but also to do with how you make an accurate representation of landscape painting in the romantic style using only a few hundred pixels…

Yesterday I did an 8 mile circular hike laden down with stills camera, video camera, sound recording equipment, GPS and sampling pots from Marsden across the moors and across the lines of the Standedge tunnels after driving out to visit 3 of the transmission masts not far from here. It rained pretty much non-stop but it was fantastic anyway. I did the walk with the aims of reconnecting myself with the landscape, getting some decent stills and video of the area and collecting some soil (mud) and water samples from which to cultivate the microbes that will hopefully be doing all the work one day soon. More musings and meditations on the meaning and experience of the big wet hike later, a few pictures for now.

the route

A certain feature of the Pennines around Marsden which seems to be presenting itself in an ever more forceful, serendipitous and interesting manner is the Standedge canal and railway Tunnel/s. Having been built just prior to the dawn of the 19th century, they are a fine symbol of the advancing industrialisation of the area forcing itself physically through the landscape and embody the spirit of intrepid networking of trade and information that was typical of the times - often ignoring (or denying) the human and financial cost of the work itself.  Above the tunnels are the remains of much of the quarry workings and spoil from its construction and nearby are other industrial remnants and more recent transmitters and masts. The sequence of canals to rail to radio to digital can be easily followed above ground and there should be plenty of interesting microbial life on the moors above the tunnel and within the canal tunnel itself.

above Standedge near Red Brook, the spoil heaps clearly visible

inside the tunnel. no idea what the slimy looking stuff is but i’m dying to culture it…

as usual there is more information to be had at wikipedia

The main problem with communication to an alien or far future species is making sure that a message that makes sense here and now, with all its attached cultural meaning and context, still makes sense there and then, without them. This is a serious issue being faced by those responsible for burying nuclear waste and needing to warn people not to dig it up for another 10,000 years. There is a high probability that our current form of civilisation won’t be around in 12000AD so a simple ‘Danger, Keep Out!’ may not work. 10,000 years ago ‘cavemen’ were daubing images on to the walls of their caves - we believe they depict hunting scenes and have some kind of ritualistic or atavistic purpose, but we can’t be really sure.

The U.S. Department of Energy has been recently looking at this issue and wondering what to do about the warning markers at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) at Yucca Mountain. Various plans have been proposed such as making it a big spikey forboding landscape

building ‘menacing’ earthworks

building forbidding blocks

or creating some kind of complex warning system with constructions and plaques

The thing is though that if any future civilisation is as curious, inquisitive or just plain stupid as this one they are going to attack any historical monument they find with their future jack hammers and JCBs and find out whatever the hell is in there anyway. Isn’t it just better to hide the stuff in a remore location somewhere and not tell anyone?

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160 and http://downlode.org/etext/wipp/ for more information.

thanks to Iman for the lead…