The Messengers

The Messengers – e-space lab project for Liverpool ‘08
Philip Courtenay, Peter Hagerty, Peter Hatton, Jonathan Kearney

This project is called “the messengers”. In actor-network theory “the world is made up of diverse networks of association which are constituted by that association - by the links rather than the nodes of the network and, more than this, by the traffic through the links.”

Taking a leaf from the work of Michel Serres, “the most important elements of the world are counted as the messengers which do the work of keeping networks connected and folding networks into each other. These most prominent performers of association stitch the world together.”

The project is about messages as “knowledge transfer”, and how this connects to ways of seeing, and finding out where (and when) we are, as well as seeing what is happening elsewhere! 

This “seeing” also connects to Liverpool (and Merseyside) stories, to Liverpool locations, and also Liverpool’s location, as a port, on the river, by the sea, and connected to other ports, on other rivers, by other seas. 

We want to create links with Stavanger, Bremen, Gdansk and Shanghai as part of this project through our developing expertise. e-space lab works with electronic and visual communication, experiments with video-streaming, builds international groupings (currently in Shanghai and Gdansk) and connections between people in different places, using photography, video, and promoting conversations “in situ”. In other words we are all “the messengers”.

“Edginess” for us is an adjunct of this work and process, as we explore the possibilities for new types of perceptual relations in the hybrid space of an event, or events, happening in several places linked by sharing a virtual space. Edginess is also about being at the edge, and in Liverpool’s case being at the edge of the land and the ocean. The people and places we want to work with are:

A. In Liverpool, the original site of the Liverpool Observatory: In 1845 Liverpool Observatory was built on Waterloo Dock, to determine the exact longitude of Liverpool; to give accurate time to the Port of Liverpool, determined by observing the stars, thus calculating Greenwich Mean Time. A daily signal was given at 1 p.m. by the release of a time ball; to test and rate ships' chronometers against the stars; and to commence meteorological observations in order to provide local forecasts for shipping.

B. Liverpool University’s Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory on Brownlow Street, originally housed in Bidston Observatory on the Wirral, that researches and monitors storm surges responsible for flooding, global sea level rises, oil spill movements and the dispersal of pollutants.

C. The World Museum Liverpool. The changing nature of research at the Bidston Observatory has enabled the museum to acquire all its past astronomical equipment as well as non-electronic oceanographic equipment. These include the Roberts-Lege Tide Predictor, Doodson Current Gauge and Fave and Lege Tide gauges.

D. Bidston Hill on the Wirral: the site of the relocated Liverpool Observatory in 1864, due to the expansion of Waterloo Dock. Earlier, in 1763 a telegraph service was set up to give early notice of the arrival of ships in the Port of Liverpool. Over one hundred signalling poles were erected, belonging mainly to the merchants in Liverpool. As the ships carrying their cargoes were spotted out at sea, the relevant flags were raised and could be seen from Liverpool. The advance knowledge of their ships' arrivals enabled the owners to hasten the unloading of their cargoes. The first Bidston lighthouse was built in 1771 and became part of a chain of stations fitted with semaphore signals, between Bidston and Holyhead, in order to 'give alarm upon any intelligence of an enemy'. It took only eight minutes to transmit messages from Holyhead to Liverpool.

Our project “the messengers” is about the intelligence that arrives imperceptibly on every tide. People living on the edge of land and sea, world-wide, will be the first to adjust to sea level changes.

Here in Liverpool The Proudman Oceanic Laboratory is a world class research centre looking at; how climate models of sea level changes agree with actual measurements; how climate change will affect extremes in sea level and waves on time-scales from hours to centuries; and how natural events and man-made changes affect our coastal waters. POL also conducts oceanography from space, making use of state-of-the-art satellite technology. POL has also developed a 12km grid model of the coast of Europe that predicts storm surges and subsequent coastal flooding, and the Multi Year Return Tidal Equipment is a 5 year mission to send back sea level and temperature information from the deep oceans. 

Using a data driven website, video-streaming, blogs and webcams, etc to make explicit visual connections between people working in these places, relating to these places, visiting these places, we can make an art which is about becoming part of a network where the impetus is knowledge transfer.

Activated by a programme of events, and supported by our on-line resources, interactivity is vital to this process, and because we are committed to “notions of performativity which fosters the new”, we are developing a whole series of techniques for “refiguring times and spaces”, and in contexts “where the witness must become an observant participant rather than a participant observer”.
The visual and performative elements will include working with webcams to create new types of experience of space, and using the anachronistic visual signalling techniques of flags and semaphore, workstation to workstation, screen to screen through video streaming interactive events.

We will use the visual time signal of the time-ball as a device that pre-dated the 1 ‘o clock gun signal fired by telegraph signal from the Observatory (this happened daily at Morpeth Dock in Birkenhead, until it was fired for the last time on July 18th 1969). 

We all know that the speed of light and electricity is quicker than sound, and melting ice, flowing as water into river or ocean, is slower still, but its impact on sea levels is nevertheless actual and measurable.

Anything we do here has an impact elsewhere, and the consequences will return on the tide. Water is the great leveller, and each ripple and wave is a messenger!

We aim to create some visual height-gauges as physical structures (like inverted depth gauges) and projection works on existing urban fabric, in Liverpool, Stavanger, Bremen, Gdansk and Shanghai (the impact of possible sea level rises will have dramatic effects on the entire low lying coastal region around Liverpool’s sister city Shanghai). All these gauges will be visible via webcams in real time on our website indicating where current and changing projections of future sea level rises may occur.

Our first “messenger performance” connects with inaugurating ’08, using a webcam image of a time-ball marking GMT 00.00h GMT 2008, and then firing a gun 12 minutes later, when Liverpool’s lost local time actually begins the year.

Our audience of already interested groups, primed in our lead-in programme, will focus on the Bidston Hill site, Morpeth Dock in Birkenhead, and in Liverpool on the Waterloo Dock.

The data driven website then promotes the beginning of a process of knowledge transfer.

The second event will take place around the equinox in March, developing the links to the Museums and POL, and making a connection to Gdansk and Shanghai.

Event 3. will take place at the summer solstice, and connect to gauges in Stavanger and Bremen.

Event 4 at the autumn equinox brings people from all five cities together in a video-streaming live link exploring the varying environmental impact scenarios.

Event 5, culminating at the winter solstice, will be a forum of ideas and issues debated on live video links and archived on the data driven website. All the information and archive material will be downloadable as podcasts.