Topographic Landform Interpretation Experiment

Topographic Landform Interpretation Experiment
A geo-referenced walking work at Racetrack Playa
Death Valley National Park
May 15th 2K4
Brett Stalbaum
(Text with complete illustations:
http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html)

Navigational inquiry++

The history of navigation is addressed across many disciplines.
Interestingly, the history of land navigation is barely existent in
almost any literature, no doubt because it represents a fundamental
pre-historic aspect of nominal hominid experience; predating the
particular hominid Homo sapiens. Although there are many resources on
orienteering and land navigation ("how to"), very few of these engage in
historical, genealogical, or cognitive analysis. The history of
navigation as a technology generally seems to 'begin' in the literature
with the citation of celestial navigation techniques (and the
development of related technologies, often in reference to sea
navigation), which were developed over time to traverse larger distances
than the domains typically wandered by small scale, non-industrial
(hunter-gatherer), pedestrian cultures; although there is, quite
interestingly, no shortage of literature on small scale, non-industrial
seagoing cultures. The history of navigation somehow connotes voyages of
exploration, dislocation, or endeavors involving significant distance;
not quotidian walks to the water hole or shorter overland journeys
between patches of resource in the landscape.

Navigation over smaller distances, the matter of how humans navigate in
the landscape using tactical landmarks and other opportunistic features
for orientation (foliage change, animal trails, geology, human markings
such as cairns, shelters, rock art, etc.) via the use of concepts such
as mental maps or "cognitive maps"[1], has been a matter of research
explored a to a great degree in archeology, anthropology, cognitive
science, and psychology. Presently, navigation is mediated by maps as
well as wireless technology such as GPS, location aware mobile phones,
and wireless networks that deliver traditional internet connections.
Somewhere in the interstice between innate navigation, the history and
techniques of applied land navigation, the history of navigation
technology utilized for long distance travel, and contemporary networked
navigation should lie a theory that somehow encompasses both voyages of
exploration requiring well developed cultural technologies for
wayfinding over long distances (long paths) and the types of cognitive
and cultural processes that let one move in a motivated manner toward a
food cache when hungry, or in a more contemporary sense, toward an
entertainment station when bored, or through the lobby, up the correct
escalator, and down the correct corridor for the next meeting (short
paths).

Terminology and background

In an attempt to lay some groundwork for some such theory, I speculate
that there is something to be learned from the study landform
interpretation, which I view as the analysis of the meaning of land
formations relative to human bipedal navigation, because it collapses
all of the above concerns (from bio-innate navigation to wireless) into
a single, potentially comprehensive unit of study. I propose that this
is a more expansive notion than "terrain association"[2] as a component
of orienteering practice, because it is free to draw from numerous
interdisciplinary approaches, while maintaining an analysis that unites
what C5 has recently identified theoretically as the coextensive nature
of the long path and the short path.[3] This leaves space for the
proposition that there exist other ways of interpreting landforms
(particularly computationally mediated methods) that are perhaps even
visible and learnable by soldiers or hikers. It supposes not only an
experimental field comparing database techniques for landform
interpretation against typical landform interpretation utilized in
terrain association and land navigation, but more generally a potential
framework in which to test some more abstract theoretical constructs
related to the interoperation of people and computation (via
communications networks) in the landscape.

"Landform Interpretation" was also chosen as the term for this
experiment because it is the closest match to the specifics of the
experimental interdisciplinary domain which simultaneously allows for
the scope of the inquiry to expand in the direction of our primary
discipline area: art. Another possibility was "Landscape
characterization" which refers to a sub discipline of environmental
science relating to monitoring conditions and documenting landscape
dynamics, utilizing remote sensing and pursuing identification and
quantification of ecosystem stressors through the use of geographic
information systems and statistical analysis. Yet another, "Landform
characterization" is closely related to "Landscape characterization",
yet it is specific to geology. Both "landscape characterization" and
"landform characterization" are bounded somewhat narrowly by well
developed scientific disciplines. "Landscape interpretation" by contrast
often implies historical and cultural analysis in the framing of, or
scholarship regarding, the meaning of place. "Landform interpretation"
is somewhat more satisfactory than the previous, because it is
specifically drawn from the science of geography, which has always been
a discipline with broad interdisciplinary applications and influences.
Thus this particular experiment as a walking artwork infused by
interdisciplinary influences is best characterized as landform
interpretation as I have defined it. Landform interpretation as an area
of study also has more freedom to draw eclectically from an
interdisciplinary pool of research including
quotidian/pedestrian/urban/suburban navigation as well as sport/trekking
land navigation in non-urban, non-suburban, non-developed 'natural' or
'wild' environments. General disciplines which seem to contribute well
developed research into related questions of human bi-pedal navigation
in culturally mediated and/or 'wild' environments are psychology,
geography (particularly GIS), archeology, architecture, military
studies, and art. As an art experiment, this project is particularly
interested in the potential overlap between eclectic, interdisciplinary
sources and the tradition of walking works as practiced by artists such
as Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, Dominique Mazeaud, and Teri Rueb.

Landform abstractions utilized in land navigation

Perhaps the most basic of contemporary resources on land navigation that
imply both strategic (long) and tactical (short) modes of pedestrian
land navigation combined with a coextensive set of abstractions and
techniques for applying those abstractions to orienteering practice are
to be found in military training documentation. Two typical documents
that present interpretive abstractions of landforms for use in land
navigation are the U.S. Navy's Seabee Combat Handbook Volume 1 (chapter
5 - Land Navigation)[5] and the U.S. Department of the Army's, Map
Reading and Land Navigation[6] manual. The schema for landform
recognition I utilized in the walking experiment at Racetrack Playa is
taken from the latter. Interestingly, this training text encourages
trainees to think of the landforms in terms of very general statistical
characterizations. For example, "A hill is an area of high ground… the
ground slopes down in all directions", while "A ridge is a sloping line
of high ground… you will normally have low ground in three directions
and high ground in one direction…" This implies that landforms are
recognized based in part on simple conceptual relations of high to low
ground. Refer to Table 1 for the complete list of landform abstractions
and a breakdown their high ground to low ground characteristics.

Table 1 - Landform abstractions useful in land navigation, utilized by
the U.S. Army in training recruits.
(Text with complete illustations:
http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html)

Hill, 0/4
"A hill is an area of high ground. From a hilltop, the ground slopes
down in all directions."

Ridge, 1/3
"A ridge is a sloping line of high ground. If you are standing on the
centerline of a ridge, you will normally have low ground in three
directions and high ground in one direction…"

Spur, 1/3
"A spur is a short, continuous sloping line of higher ground, normally
jutting out from the side of a ridge. A spur is often formed by two
rough parallel streams, which cut draws down the side of a ridge. The
ground sloped down in three directions and up in one direction."

Cliff, 1/3
"A cliff is a vertical or near vertical feature; it is an abrupt change
of the land. When a slope is so steep that the contour lines converge
into one 'carrying' contour of contours, this last contour line has tick
marks pointing toward low ground."

Saddle, 2/2
"A saddle is a dip or low point between two areas of higher ground. A
saddle is not necessarily the lower ground between two hilltops; it may
be simply a dip or break along a level ridge crest. If you are in a
saddle, there is high ground in two opposite directions and lower ground
in the other two directions."

Draw, 3/1
"A draw is a less developed stream course than a valley. In a draw,
there is essentially no level ground and, therefore, little or no
maneuver room within its confines. If you are standing in a draw, the
ground slopes upward in three directions and downward in the other
direction. A draw could be considered as the initial formation of a
valley."

Valley, 3/1
"A valley is a stretched-out groove in the land, usually formed by
streams or rivers. A valley begins with high ground on three sides, and
usually has a course of running water through it. If standing in a
valley, three directions offer high ground, while the fourth direction
offers low ground."

Depression, 4/0
"A depression is a low point in the ground or a sinkhole. It could be
described as an area of low ground surrounded by higher ground in all
directions, or simply a hole in the ground."

These abstractions, which are used in combination with navigation
techniques and technologies such as the magnetic compass, topographic
maps (which are forms of analog computers)[7], and the more recently the
global positioning system (GPS), have presumably emerged through some
genealogical development process in the spaces between practical
experience with effective military land navigation (throughout a long
history), and the need to introduce new recruits to effective land
navigation skills on an ongoing basis. Interestingly, the abstractions
(not limited to but including cartography) and techniques (methods for
bringing such abstractions into coordination with practical and
effective motion in the landscape), serve not only military strategic
planning and tactical implementation, but are also widely employed in
military logistics. Logistics are arguably the most important,
influential, yet least romantic area of endeavor in contemporary
military science. Much as database is the foundation of new media,
feeding its every pixel, logistics are the foundation of military
effectiveness, literally feeding its troops and machinery. Nevertheless,
war narratives have tended toward and tend to the tactical and strategic
situations and implications, just as much of new media has focused on
user interface and the societal implications of new technology. Database
and supply-chain management simply are not as sexy as interfaces where
one might witness motion, sound, and action. But they the positions from
which the formal aspects of both multimedia and the war machine are
projected.

The performance

The walk was performed on an expedition with my students to Racetrack
Playa, an alluvial clay filled depression measuring some 5 Kilometers
south to north and over 2 Kilometers west to east in places. The notion
behind the larger performance was to develop a distributed
interpretation of place through the lens of contemporary art practice,
and informed by ideas about socially distributed computation and
cognition.[8] My interpretive experiment was to utilize GPS and a
magnetic compass to identify landforms in centrifugal orientation to the
playa, in order to experience the landforms personally, identify more
complex configurations of landform, and to characterize and process the
data collected into images utilizing the C5 Landscape database. This
later activity was intended to further software development by adding
useful features to the software, and to test some assumptions regarding
a certain attribute (more on this later) generated and stored in the
database. The process was as follows: As I circumnavigated the edges of
the playa, I looked for good examples of the landforms identified in Map
Reading and Land Navigation, also occasionally noting landforms that did
not easily fit the model. When I had identified a landform, I would
perform the following:

1. Take a photograph with the landform roughly centered in the picture
2. Take a GPS waypoint[9]
3. Record the azimuth to the landform from the waypoint using a magnetic
compass
4. Take various notes about the site, including image number, waypoint
number, landform, etc. (See Figure 2)

Upon my return, (utilizing the C5 Landscape Database and the GD library,
and some custom code for this project to overlay track log and waypoint
data, and to project lines of direction), I processed the data collected
and produced the following image (Figure 1) which superimposes the GPS
track log of my walk, (yellow), the waypoints (red) and the azimuths
(projected in green) from each waypoint in the direction of the
landform. Because I followed botanical edge of the racetrack, note that
my track is circumscribed by the actual edge of playa (where the
elevation changes.) The remaining figures in the paper are the
photographs showing the visible landscape in the direction of the
azimuth readings taken at the various waypoints. The figure captions
show the waypoint number, UTM coordinates of the waypoint from where the
photo was taken, the azimuth reading, the landform, and a brief notes
taken on site.

http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret/racetrack.png
(Text with complete illustations:
http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html)

As an Art Experiment

As mentioned earlier, I see this work as operative in the general
category of walking art works. Much as artists such as Long and Fulton
take pictures on their journeys, so have I, including one produced from
a database and software that I have been developing for C5. This image,
(Figure 1), characterizes the entire performance and provides an object
of comparison between the photographs. An important difference from the
work of Long and Fulton is of course is that these photos and the image
produced are geo referenced. But I draw much inspiration from these
artists, particularly the work of Long, who has this to say about his
practice:

"My art isn't about urban culture… in a way I didn't give these issues
any thought. You know, it seemed a right and natural thing to do,
particularly to go to places like Exmoor and Dartmoor, which are really
abstract, empty. The fact that they're just rolling moorland, that
they're almost plateau-like, was very useful, especially for the early
works. I was very conscious, then, that it gave me the opportunity to
make a type of art by walking in a completely new and original way,
particularly those early, formal, ritualized walks: walking in straight
lines or perfect circles, measuring time."[10]

Though I draw inspiration from this, I want to point out that the formal
and ritualized aspect of my walk is different; focused purely on data
collection, and the analysis of landforms. I also draw inspiration from
other walking traditions. Teri Rueb's work was among the first work I
became aware of to utilize dynamic geo referencing in her practice; I
believe the work "Trace" (1997) to be an important early GPS work in the
walking art mode. And for Dominique Mazeaud, I picked up two items of
trash to dispose of that I discovered along my trek, one of them a
ribbon tied to an escaped party balloon that eventually fell to Earth on
the eastern side of the Racetrack.

While on the issue of art, I'd like to take a moment to comment on the
recent development of the meme "locative media" that has become popular
in the new media art critical context over the course of 2003 and 2004.
While it is nice to see a number of developments over the past 10 years
(GPS art, PDA art, software art, mobile art, wireless art, net art)
converge somewhat into a single meme that in some way encapsulates the
trajectory (in computing arts) from screen to hand to body to bodies
situated geographically, the meme (just as any) also presents the
simultaneous and unavoidable narrowing of the range of practice. As I
mentioned earlier, geography is one of the most naturally
interdisciplinary of scientific endeavors; just as what is nominally
called art practice (especially in the computing in the arts discipline
area) is also massively interdisciplinary. It would be a shame to see a
term like "locative media" cause practice to devolve critically into a
narrow range of practice, especially before Geographic Information
System (GIS) art is taken up and explored more thoroughly. Another point
worth making is that the history of navigation has spawned numerous
technologies that which deserve analysis alongside the new meme. Are
inventions like Mercator projections, the astrolabe, quadrant, sextant
and magnetic compass "locative media"? It may be complained that these
technologies do not report the location of the back to a panoptic
surveillance context or distributed, collaborative network, but actually
they were almost always implemented alongside systems of logging and
position fixing (though most rigorously in military contexts of course),
that enforced exactly such a regulatory gaze. Certainly truckers in the
United States who are required to log the number of miles and hours they
have driven will understand clearly that a roadmap and a paper log can
function as locative media.

Experimental Objective

The Landform Interpretation Experiment at Racetrack Playa was also
intended to collect data and perform analysis in order to test some
suppositions regarding the utility of "topographic_descriptor" attribute
of the UTM_POINT_STATS table, which is part of the C5 Landscape
database. Specifically the experiment tests how the C5 Landscape
Database functions as an alternative to models commonly utilized for
landform recognition common in orienteering and wayfinding, particularly
as utilized by the military. The attribute is a TINYINT (a byte) where
the bits represent the elevation trend in the cardinal and primary
intercardinal directions. (See table 2.) It is intended to be useful in
landform interpretation for the purposes of land navigation, and also in
pattern matching algorithms intended to determine landscape similarity
across wide expanses. This test goes exclusively to the former, however.
The individual bits taken as a whole represent the center point of a one
kilometer square area. Based on that point, the bits are set to one if
the elevation in the direction represented by the bit is higher than the
point represented by the record, and zero if is less than or equal to
the point represented by the record. This provides a simple, storage
efficient characterization of the surrounding landscape. One of the main
suppositions regarding this element is that it would bear some
relationship to topographic landform characterizations utilized in way
finding, though it is unclear whether it does so by itself, or in some
combination with other attributes (such as percentile, standard
deviation, or contiguous modality percentage), or at all. The experiment
is a way of exploring what correlations may exist between these and
traditional landform characterizations.

Figure 20 - SQL for UTM_POINT_STATS table
(Text with complete illustations:
http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html)

The topographic descriptor for the area surrounding each point is
presented is presented in Table 2 below. The sample size is not however
sufficient to answer the above questions, but notably even for a small
sample, it does not indicate any strong correlations even after rotating
the bits in an attempt to match terrains. This does not indicate likely
usefulness in landform interpretation unless perhaps used in conjunction
with other metrics. While the assumptions regarding the utility of the
topographic descriptor in the above SQL are likely incorrect, its
utility as a pattern match for similar general topography (regardless of
the landform abstractions specified in Map Reading and Land Navigation)
requires further experimentation in the form of further walking work.

Table 2 - Data collected during walking work, racetrack playa, May 15th
2K4.
(Text with complete illustations:
http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html)

Notes:

[1] Kaplan, Steven, "Cognitive Maps in Perception and Thought",
published in Image and Environment, cognitive mapping and spatial
behavior, Roger M. Downs and David Stea, editors, Aldine Publishing
Company, Chicago IL, 1973, ISBN 0-202-10058-8

[2] U.S. Department of the Army, MAP READING AND LAND NAVIGATION, FM
3-25.26 (FM 21-26)
http://155.217.58.58/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/fm/3-25.26/cover.pdf
Chapter 11, Terrain Association:
http://155.217.58.58/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/fm/3-25.26/ch11.pdf

[3] These notions are theory-in-progress, at this time still internal to
C5.

[4] I am involved with C5 (www.c5corp.com) as collaborator on GIS,
database and large scale installation and walking works, as well as
theory. I also work with Paula Poole in conceptually related but really
quite different works that produce conceptual paintings and digital
prints. (www.paintersflat.com).

[5] U.S. Navy, SEABEE COMBAT HANDBOOK, VOLUME 01, NAVEDTRA No: 14234
CENTRAL EDITION 1993
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/nrtc/14234_fm
.pdf
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/nrtc/14234_ch
5.pdf

[6] ibid.

Chapter 10, Elevation and Relief:
http://155.217.58.58/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/fm/3-25.26/ch10.pdf

[7] Hutchins, Edwin, Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press, Cambridge MA,
1995. ISBN: 0262082314. "[o]n some types of nautical charts it is easy
to measure the direction (course) and the distance between any two
locations represented on the chart." (54) See also pages 61-62.

[8] Please refer to http://www.racetrackplaya.net for more information
on the class project.

[9] Waypoint 001 in my Garmin Vista GPS was already used, so the auto
numbering started from 002.

[10] Interview with Richard Long, from Artists, Land Nature, Mel Gooding
and William Furlong, 2002 Cameron Books, Harry N. Abrams Inc., NY. NY.