http://isgreaterthan.net/2008/09/walter-benjamins-archive/ http://isgreaterthan.net/2008/09/walter-benjamins-archive/#comments Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:15:13 +0000 Greg J. Smith http://isgreaterthan.net/?p=1251
[gisèle freund / walter benjamin in the bibliothèque national / 1939]

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of stumbling across Walter Benjamin’s Archive, a book published by Verso earlier this year. The text consolidates material pertaining to a fall 2006 exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin which cataloged a variety of Benjamin related ephemera for public display. This material included notebooks, postcards, drafts and scribbles, project outlines and photography. Given Benjamin’s obsession with the analysis of historical waste, it follows that his legacy would inspire a rigorous archival project. This gorgeously designed text provides a side-door into his life and work enables a proximity that is both fascinating and somewhat melancholic.

[benjamin’s paris address book]

The text is organized into thirteen short chapters which cover a diverse range of topics including collecting, traveling, graphic forms, puzzles and Benjamin’s time in Paris researching the Arcades Project. Each of these sections is comprised of a selection of documents, many of which are extensively annotated and a few of which are translated. The chapters are also accompanied by introductory texts by Ursula Marx, Erdmut Wizisla and Michael and Gudrun Schwarz which frame specific interests, obsessions and spans of time in Benjamin’s life. There is some great material pertaining to his interest in toys, his linguistic adventures in parenthood and several plans and outlines analyzing the life and work of Franz Kafka.

What is so interesting about this project, is rather than approach Benjamin as the subject for a standard biographical profile, this text employs his research and writing methodology to dissect and taxonomize his interests. In many ways, working through this text felt like a continuation of a reading of the Arcades Project as all the content is fleeting, self-contained and schematic. Despite the fragmentary nature of this collection, the whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts and a very vital, humane impression of Benjamin shines through this (curated) marginalia. Beyond the content of the text, Benjamin was a steady-handed craftsman when it came to writing – his research, documents and notebooks are meticulous constructions with the potential to inspire both scholars and designers.

The following two images and related excerpts made quite an impression on me, perhaps you’ll find them of interest. The first, annotated by Ursula Marx, deals with Benjamin’s editing process. The second is a trademark Benjamin observation, dealing with one of his favourite topics — the intangible nature of memory.

“Alongside this work on the sheet Benjamin also used a very different technique: work with the sheet. He cut it crosswise into units which each represent one motif or building block of the text. In the case of the Kafka material [examples shown above] this resulted in about eighty manuscript strips in total. The complexity of Benjamin’s editing procedures is revealed in this process: presumably, as a consequence of previous collations and groups of ideas, individual motifs are formulated and written out randomly on a sheet of paper. Using coloured symbols on the clear edge of the sheet, these are then pooled into units, which are placed in a sequence indicated by the number of the signs. After this—if necessary—the sheets are cut up in order to make the placing of the units in the planned order physically possible.”

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“What lends an incomparable tone to the very first view of a village or a town in the landscape is the fact that in one’s image of it distance resonates just as importantly as nearness. This latter still has not yet gained preponderance through the constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way around the place, the earliest picture can never be restored.”

This post originally appeared on Greg J. Smith’s blog, Serial Consign

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One of the most famous images associated with Charles Minard is his temporal map (pictured above) which details the ill-fated march of Napoleon into Russia in 1812-1813. It is no accident that one of the first complex information graphics schematized a military campaign, considering the longstanding tradition of technological and informational innovation being spurned by the gears of war. This particular cartographic enterprise has become of of the signature images of information visualization and can often be found within the first several slides of any introductory presentation on the topic. However, instead of submerging into a detailed analysis of the techniques and methodology of Minard in this visualization, a more fruitful discussion would be to instead dwell on the fact that this image was produced to document and represent a military campaign. Given that technological innovation is implicit in warfare, it only follows that the military is a key area of interest to any historical analysis of information visualization.

Of the many battles that took place between the United Kingdom and Germany during WWII, the Battle of the Beams was one of the most decisive. This conflict pitted nascent British and German radar technology against one another with aerial dominance of the skies over England hanging in the balance.

Radar was first developed by the German inventor Christian Huelsmeyer for the purpose of collision avoidance in nautical navigation. Huelsmeyer publicly demonstrated his system in 1904 and it operated by firing radio waves at targets and detecting their reflections. Over the next two decades, European and North American scientists would further develop this research and the range of radar systems extended from several to 25 miles. By the onset of the war, radar was emerging as a viable tactical tool. The crux of British-German radar warfare emerged from the German air force’s utilization of the Knickebein and X-Gerät signal transmission systems to enable nighttime bombing runs over Britain. The Luftwaffe bombing raids were executed with surgical precision and this presented a sea change in aerial warfare to which the British military had to respond. Fortunately for Britain, a rudimentary radar network had been implemented before the onset of the war and it was able to serve as the cornerstone in a comprehensive British defense strategy that would ultimately “out-visualize” their German opponents.

In 1937, a prototype radar network was set up along the perimeters of Great Britain. Dubbed Chain Home, the system consisted of a line of transmitter stations positioned at 50 mile intervals around the perimeter of the United Kingdom. Led by scientist Robert Watson-Watt the British military capitalized on this system to develop state-of-the-art methods for enemy detection and fire control. This advanced mapping of the airspace over the United Kingdom acted as a force-multiplier allowing the British defenses to concentrate the aircraft where they were needed most and coordinate supporting anti-aircraft fire. Chain Home was monitored by oscilloscope display units and the operation of this system is described in wikipedia as follows:

When a pulse was sent out into the broadcast towers, the scope was triggered to start its beam moving horizontally across the screen very rapidly. The output from the receiver was amplified and fed into the vertical axis of the scope, so a return from an aircraft would deflect the beam upward. This formed a spike on the display, and the distance from the left side—measured with a small scale on the bottom of the screen—would give the distance to the target. By rotating the receiver goniometer [a tool for measuring angles] connected to the antennas to make the display disappear, the operator could determine the direction to the target… while the size of the vertical displacement indicated something of the number of aircraft involved. By comparing the strengths returned from the various antennas up the tower, the altitude could be determined.

This imaging technology provided the British forces with an early warning system by generating realtime data tracking German aerial activity over, or approaching, the United Kingdom. These types of radar-based defense networks have been described as “electromagnetic curtains”, an upgrade to the medieval notion of fortification in which brick and mortar are bolstered and extended by telecommunication infrastructure (see Manuel de Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines for an excellent critical reading of the history of the technology).

Parallel to the development of radar, British military engineers also implemented identification, friend or foe (IFF), which utilized an early version of RFID technology to distinguish friendly from "other" aircraft on a radar display. This kind of "tagging" and related RFID technology (along with the ubiquitous database) is now a driving force of contemporary inventory management.

The technological developments outlined above provided Britain with the strategic edge it required to turn the tide in the air war against Germany. Oscilloscope based radar system would eventually give way to the Plan Position Indicator (PPI) display (pictured above in a contemporary meteorological context), which is now universally associated with radar technology.

This post originally appeared on Serial Consign. View it here.