An Etiquette For Minor Time Travel
We’ve all experienced that moment on a train journey — perhaps hundred of such moments — when we look up from our phone, laptop, or book, and catch a glimpse of something outside the window: two motorists maybe fighting or embracing at a junction; a terraced back garden filled with American car parts; a cloud of purple smoke curling around the tower of a village church.
They can’t quite be called stories in their own right, so brief, fleeting, and amputated from any context, but they beg the question that all stories beg — what’s happening here? — before they are shuttled off, tugged offstage as the train chutters onward.
I sometimes call myself a storyteller, but really I’m an artist who is interested in stories: particularly stories told using modern digital technology. For some time I’ve wanted to make something that explored these frustrating, half-glimpsed vignettes. Living With Machines, and the StopsGB dataset — a georeferenced and metadata-filled chronicle of every UK passenger station — gave me an excuse to do so, alongside a fascinating historical context.
If train journeys feel addictively voyeuristic today, imagine how they must have felt during the Victorian ‘railway mania‘ of 1840–1880, when many of the stations in the StopsGB dataset were built. The railways represented nothing less than an entirely new relationship with the time and
space of English life. Whole topographies were levelled, and new vistas and views opened up. Towns and villages were cut in two, and a local, specific and slower scale of living was sutured with something more national, more universal and much more rapid.
The railways bored their way through the heart of previously self-contained, private places and contexts, with their insular, local stories; allowing the idling passenger to peruse landscapes and lives without
committing to any one of them, dismissing them with only a blink.
Of course, the network was not a passive witness of the communities it passed by: it sowed the land beside the tracks with new infrastructure, drifts of invasive plants carried on the turbulence, and new, prescriptive realities. The standardised ‘railway time’, pegged to the Greenwich Meridian, swiftly came to replace the ‘local time’ of each station stop, for thousands of years tied to the particular passage of the sun across that particular parcel of sky.
Out of this mix of inspirations, and the funding for a digital residency with the Alan Turing Institute, came a project that tries to reveal the train window as an early, peculiar form of mass media: to create something story-like from an experience, and from data, that often resist any
narrative coherence.
From the Stops GB dataset I extracted the data for the stations on the original Great Western Railway, and used this as a backbone for a ten-hour, real-time recreation of an 1850 journey along this line: a visual, kinetic poem running from Penzance in Cornwall to the terminus at London Paddington.
From inside a 3D recreation of a train carriage, the audience watches the landscape slip by: not as 3D graphics, but as layers of text, scraps of poetry that each stands as a self-contained vision, but slide past each other to form temporary, haiku-like stanzas.
These lines of poetry -describing far-off weatherfronts, oddly-intimate views into the back rooms of trackside homes, people engaged in mysterious activities in fields, churches, barns — slip past in parallax, replicating the foregrounds and backgrounds of a landscape moving past at speed.
These lines are not entirely pre-written, but generated using the JavaScript library Tracery; which allows the automatic creation of text passages using lists of vocabulary placed into syntactic rulesets called ‘grammars’. Each layer of poetry is generated from one of these grammars, generalised structures that can produce fleeting micro-narratives and glimpsed
scenes from lists of celestial bodies, ingredients, materials, objects, types of room, types of building and the locations of massacres by British troops.
Despite all my efforts to curate the generation of these stories and scenes, for most of the journey they fly past the audience’s viewpoint at a rate that defies reading, let alone contemplation. There are moments in the journey, however, when things slow down enough to really dwell on the words. Each section between stations has a semi-randomised chance for a delay — a passing train, a broken signal, an accident caused at a level crossing by somebody local losing track of the national timetable — in which the scene slows to a stop. The moving lines of poetry slow and stop with them, the constantly-shifting elements of the landscape fixed in place, framed by the veneer of the window, in an entirely random composition.
The project as it now exists (available on Github) is a prototype. There is still work to do with the Tracery grammars before it is fit for a full release. However, the complete ten-hour journey was not designed as a linear chronicle for one audience member to consume. Even if I release it as an
app, or display it in a public place (beside the men’s toilets on Platform 6 at Exeter St. David’s station, for example), the best and most appropriate end I can hope for is that it functions just like a train window: a tool for occasional contemplation, and for reflecting one’s boredom, for fleeting double-takes, before the specifics of one’s own life, one’s own stories — this side of the glass — begin to intrude once again.
