[Translation added 100501]

I’m looking out over the quarter courtyard and listening to the city. The sun is shining from a clear blue sky and lighting up the red roofs. The birds are twittering and nagging, flying around and building their nests. The children are playing outside the nursery school and above the steady noise of the traffic come their shouts and laughter. It is a fine April morning here in Rudviken and everything is as it should be. In the soundscape though there is something unfamiliar, a strange stillness. It feels like I’ve woken up in another country, or in another time. I am reminded of the little town where I grew up, in Shropshire, England, and when the airforce base was shut down, in the late seventies.

It’s been this quite for just over a week now and it’s no mystery. We live about three miles from Bromma airport and in the last few days there has been a complete stoppage of flights over most of Euorpe. It’s been this quite for just over a week now and it’s no mystery. We live about three miles from Bromma airport and in the last few days there has been a complete stoppage of flights over most of Euorpe.

I have sympathy for all those who’ve suffered from the latest flight ban. It’s certainly not much fun spending your time a long way from home in the sterile environment of an airport hall. Some will no doubt lose their jobs and a good many businesses and projects will be put a risk. As consequences of a volcanic eruption these are, however, relatively small inconveniences. We’ve heard no talk of a death toll. Compared with the last year’s earthquakes for example, the crisis surrounding the present ash-cloud is a relatively mild and manageable thing.

Of all those affected by the volcanic eruption it is the Icelanders that are in front line. We have seen television pictures of people herding their horses and cattle fleeing great billowing clouds of dark ash. The media focus, however, is invariable on the more familiar and immediately accessible: irate passengers, empty airport buildings and stressed-out airline executives. As usual, it’s the commercial perspective that’s of interest and primarily on the domestic front. As for the people of Iceland, we’ve not heard much from them at all. It is, of course, quite difficult for anyone to get there. Then again, they might not even want to be seen on television, and far less be perceived as victims. Icelanders seem to be able to accept such natural events with an objectivity that’s rather lacking elsewhere. They are of course well-practiced in adapting to the demands of the local environment.

Close-up pictures from helicopter flights round the volcano give a strong impression of the magnitude of forces released there. We see the ash-cloud being formed from a great, flowing column of airborne dust rising high into the atmosphere. It’s appearance and mechanics are roughly similar to the blast of a nuclear detonation. Similar dust-clouds from nuclear weapons can spread over vast distances and cause long-term damage to all forms of life. We can be thankful that the ash cloud from this volcano does not contain any hazardous radioactive material. In this respect the Earth is significantly more lenient than the technologies created by humans.

Among the more bizarre descriptions I’ve heard for the last little crisis is “the greatest disruption to European air traffic since the second world war”. Just who said it first doesn’t really matter. Such meaningless hype as a tendency to spread itself through the air and the original source become insignificant. However, it is worth giving some thought to the possible basis for such an assertion. For example, I wonder, what was the volume of civil air traffic in Europe around 1939 and roughly what proportion of the region’s economy was dependent on air travel? I have no figures to hand and if I had it would take a good few thousand words to give a thorough presentation. Broadly speaking though I would guess the answer would be about one percent of the corresponding values for 2010. That being so, one could say that the influence of the last few days of ash-cloud is of the same order of magnitude as the whole of the last major European war. Can that really be true? We see no signs of devastated cities and there is, as said, no death toll. It is perhaps instructive to shift perspective and consider other means of viewing the world. Great disasters, before they occur, are usually quite invisible.

To get rough estimate of the sheer, physical impact of modern air transport one can simply enough google up a bundle of shocking statistics and try to make a few meaningful comparisons. For most people though it’s probably more rewarding to study an well-made visualization of such data.

The dark image on the right is taken from Flight Patterns an interactive, digital art-work by Aaron Koblin. Flight Patterns is a visualization FAA air-traffic data for the United States. The thin tracks of light in the picture represent individual flights. The original visualization represents a survey of air-traffic for a given period, where you can move the viewpoint, change the scale and select colour mappings according to altitude, aircraft type and manufacture. Unfortunately there are such images for other geographical areas or time-periods but it is still a fascinating object.
For me, the most striking thing about Flight Patterns is how it shows, with photographic objectivity, a global phenomenon that is familiar to us all but would otherwise be bot invisible and beyond comprehension. Among those looking at these images, almost all have the means to fly, yet it is seldom that anyone would get so see such a complete overview of the air transport system. When I navigate through the meticulously imaged structures of Flight Patterns it feels like exploring some kind of biological tissue, like a gigantic fungus or a brain. This whole, glowing fabric has been sculpted by thousands of semi-autonomous systems and machine which are steered through the air in great virtual arteries created by an invisible global intelligence. It is like a living being though it is not made of organic material. It has arisen through human activity but it is, most definitely, not human. This global organism is not a we. It’s an it.

I find myself thinking further of the symbolism of these pictures and the realities that lie behind all these fine, glowing filaments and bright knots. To create each tiny trace of light an offering has been made of several tons of a refined petroleum product, like lamp oil. That liquid fuel has been drawn from wells that will never, ever be replenished. The aircraft that burned these fine trails are, or were, made of thousands of components all of which were created from finite material resources. The lifetime of aircraft is less than that of a human being, a few thousand flight hours. Navigating the abstract, digital space of Flight Patterns I am overwhelmed by the scale and speed of the whole unseen conflagration. These are paths of fire. Yet see the elegance and grace with which the inner sources of the Earth are being exhausted, transformed into gases and vapours. The combustion products are like a great transparent ash-cloud. The global air-transport system with it’s subterranean energy sources is in many ways like a distributed, interactive volcano.

I would like to see a visualisation like Flight Patterns for air traffic over the whole world, with a function that made it possible to follow it’s evolution in time. It would be especially interesting to explore the weeks around the 11th September 2001 and the latest little crisis with the ash cloud. It would be possible, for example, to see how the movement of the ash cloud is followed by a black, empty space where the flight-tracks are extinguished over the whole of Europe and then how they’re all lit-up again when the system recovers. If there was similar data for sea and land traffic one could construct an even larger visualisation showing how the whole process is connected. From that, you could show how the process of combustion was distributed throughout the whole mechanism and where flows of energy and waste products were directed. That would be something worth looking at.

I would like to go even further though and use simulation techniques based on numerical models to look into the future. One could use available data for oil reserves and the known scenarios of consumption in large-scale simulations to study their interaction with the global air transport process. I’d guess that in the next twenty years we’d see an intensifying swarm over China. There would be a mass of glowing stars linking the flight-tracks over their hundreds of million-plus cities. Under the later years though the great tissue of flight-tracks will disintegrate in a ghost-like dispersal. That is when Peak Oil is a few decades past and the world is forced into the new epoch of hard-won, synthetic fuels. Air-travel will then be once again accessible only to the richest of individuals and powerful companies with urgent business abroad.

With the help of such numerical simulations, open and globally accessible, it should be possible to avoid catastrophe when the oil starts running out. With a global perspective and with artistic means, which make the essential data-sets into something comprehensible, perhaps there is a chance of avoiding the great resource wars that so may are predicting. Perhaps then, after a few years it might once again be calm in the skies over our cities. That might even be achieved without years of famine and sickness.

I would like to think that a few years from now there will be a white haired old man looking out over this same part of the town, that he’ll notice the sunlight on a clump of daffodils then look up at some birds flying between the trees and making their nests.

I’d like to think that his mother’s out there now and playing.
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