The art of Dr Space Junk #1: the Cosmic Sieve

Years ago, I was a young archaeologist-about-town in Sydney, working mainly in Indigenous heritage management, but sometime historical stuff too (eg First Government House). I also held various positions on the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists, such as NSW State Representative and Newsletter Editor. It was while doing the latter that I made a number of illustrations to accompany particular stories or to fill in empty space. These were all drawn by hand in pen and india ink; there were no scanners or illustrating programs in those days.

I found this one in a portfolio of other archaeological illustrations, section drawings, lithics, site plans, etc. When excavating, all the deposit must be put through sieves, usually nested, to separate all the artefactual or cultural material from the soil for bagging and later analysis. We did an awful lot of dry and wet sieving in those days. A day on the sieves could be truly tedious if you weren't finding much.

This is the idea behind this picture, done in 1992.  This was long before I had any inkling that I would end up as a space archaeologist, so I think it's a bit prophetic. (And thank god I spelt "sieve" right in it!).

The wages of procrastination: a Skylab word cloud

The patron saint of astronauts - the surprising story of the "Flying Friar"

This is how it happened. Dr Mick "Cheekbones" Morrison, the President of the International Year of Having Fun 2012 Kitty Sutcliffe, Dr Junk herself, Darlene McNaughton, and me, Dr Space Junk, are sitting around the kitchen table with perhaps a modicum of red wine already consumed, and fullish glasses in front of us. (You didn't know there was also a Dr Junk, did you?). Somehow, the conversation turns to saints, and one of us (maybe me, but not necessarily) wonders who the patron saint of aerospace, or spaceflight, or astronauts, is.

This is a problem quickly solved in this day and age. The iPhone of Dr Cheekbones invokes Wikipedia and we have our answer: it is a clerical dude called Joseph of Cupertino, who has this honour because he was a bit of a levitator.  Which makes perfect sense.

He was a bit of a few other things too, as I found when I consulted my trusty Oxford Dictionary of Saints back at home. (The reason I own such a book is because I once studied icon painting - not because of any religious convictions, being an atheist, but basically because I'm easily distracted by shiny things and a sucker for gold and gilt [without the "u", note].  My icon painting teacher, Michael Galovic, was very well known, and I loved the discipline of the art form, and the precision and uncertainty of mixing colours, and many other things. But that was another lifetime ago, when I lived in Sydney and was basically an itinerant digger and lithic analyst).

Anyway. Getting distracted already. It has to be said, upon reading the entry for St Joseph of Cupertino (or Copertino), that aspects of his life and character do not always reflect well on the astronaut class. I shall summarise.

In 1603, near Brindisi in Italy, Joseph was born in a garden shed because his father had to sell the house to pay debts. As a young boy, his nickname was 'The Gaper' because he would wander around open-mouthed.  He was also very religious, but did not make a good impression on the orders he tried to join: 

... after eight months with the Capuchins [MONKS not monkeys] when he forgot to do what he was told, dropped piles of plates and dishes on the floor, and neglected to tend the all-important kitchen fire, he was dismissed (Farmer 1992: 270).

But his growing devotion and spirituality paid off and in 1625 the Franciscans allowed him to join as a novice.  

Although very backward in his studies his extreme good luck in examinations enabled him to be ordained priest in 1628. His life thenceforward was distinguished by extreme austerity, many ecstasies [religious transportations NOT drugs] and apparently supernatural healings. ... Perhaps the most famous are his repeated levitations ... of which seventy instances were recorded during his seventeen years at Grotella.  The most spectacular were his flying to images placed high above the altars and helping workmen to erect a Calvary Cross thirty-six feet high by lifting it into place in mid-air 'as if it were straw'. Ten men had previously failed to lift it.  Such feats earned him the nickname 'the Flying Friar' (Farmer 1992:270-271).

Sabina Mac Mahon, “The Levitation of St. Joseph of Cupertino” (2010).  She says: "My current practice involves the reinterpretation of the lives of the saints through the creation of fictional narratives that are presented as factual documents through a combination of photography, video, found objects and installations. I am interested in how saints are depicted in both fine art and votive images, the use of attributes in traditional hagiographical iconography and how these relate to biographical accounts of the lives of the saints, many of which exist somewhere between factual historical accounts and legendary fictions" (http://www.mart.ie/artists/s-z/sabina-macmahon)

He had a rather difficult career, running afoul of church authorities but also gathering a popular following. He died in 1663, and his feast is celebrated on the 18th September. He wasn't sanctified for the levitation thing: it was actually for 'extreme patience and humility' (Farmer 1992:271).

A life of extremes, it seems.

I'm struck by a few things here.  Firstly, what exactly constitutes this "extreme good luck" in examinations?  The answer lies in this rather gorgeous little prayer, reflecting a combination of desperation, naivete and outrageous cheekiness:

O Great St. Joseph of Cupertino who while on earth did obtain from God the grace to be asked at your examination only the questions you knew, obtain for me a like favour in the examinations for which I am now preparing. In return I promise to make you known and cause you to be invoked.

Secondly, the plate-dropping episodes, not to mention the cross-lifting, sound to me like he was half in and half out of terrestrial gravity. I'm not quite sure how to describe it. When he drops the plates, it's like the experience recounted by numerous astronauts on returning to Earth after stints in space: they become so used to the absence of gravity, that when they have finished using a tool or toothbrush or whatever, they simply let go of it, knowing it will stay where it is. In lifting the heavy cross, it's like he is in microgravity when everyone else is still in normal gravity: he's in some kind of tiny wormhole, lifting the cross as if it were in orbit where it would be weightless, rather than on Earth. It seems to me that these aspects of the story are more significant in the space sense than the actual levitation, which is a common enough thing among saints, mystics and shamans. (And dreams. Don't flying dreams just break your heart?).

And look - an actual icon of St Joseph of Cupertino! Perhaps I shall come out of retirement as a painter. This comes from http://www.patriotic-jewelry.com/st-joseph-of-cupertino-medal.htm.

I also like that this saint is no genius. He's a bit of a klutz, he's not that bright, he just fails to impress all round except when he's floating about in the air or having an eccie.  So, sans floating, he's more like you and me than the heroic, brilliant, manly astronaut of popular culture. The take-home message: believe you can do it.

Well there you go.  Instead of doing all my urgent tasks this morning, marking assignments, writing two conference papers, etc, I've spent a couple of hours mucking about with a bloody saint. Make of that what you will.  I blame the company I keep.

References

Farmer, David Hugh 1992  The Oxford Dictionary of Saints.  Third Edition.  Oxford: Oxford University Press

Prayer to St. Joseph of Cupertino for success in Examinations: http://www.dcruz.in/prayers/prayer-to-st-joseph-of-cupertino/ [Viewed 11 March 2012)

Adelaide bids to host the 2014 International Astronautical Congress

Earlier this month, Australia submitted its bid to host the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, 2014.  The bid documents were hand-delivered to Paris by Michael Brett (until recently Chair of the Space Generation Advisory Council, and currently working for Aerospace Concepts in Canberra).  

As a resident of Adelaide, I'm naturally very excited by this prospect. Here are more details from the Space Policy Unit:

Each year since 1950, an International Astronautical Congress (IAC) is hosted by an International Astronautial Federation (IAF) member nation.  Facilitated by the IAF, the International Academy of Astronautics, and the International Institute of Space Law, each IAC brings together space industry professionals, policy makers, students and researchers from around the world.  This provides opportunities to discuss space-related issues, learn from each other, celebrate success and form links for international collaboration.

Adelaide’s bid to host the 65^th IAC gives Australia an opportunity to showcase its developing space policy, highlight the achievements of the Australian Space Research Program and form new international partnerships.  The Space Policy Unit is a key part of the CSIRO-led bid. 

Adelaide is an Australian hub for large engineering and defence projects.  The University of South Australia is also home to numerous Australian Space Research Program projects, including the Southern Hemisphere Summer Space Program, the space-based national wireless sensor network project, and it is working with the University of Queensland and other consortium members to research new hypersonic scramjet technology.

A summary of Adelaide’s bid to host the 65th IAC, including details of the city of Adelaide and introductory videos, are available at the bid website. 

If you're a member of the IAF, and haven't yet seen the newsletter about Adelaide's bid, please contact the chair of the IAC for Australia Bid Committee, Brett Biddington, at bbidding@tpg.com.au.

The art of the cable tie

OK, I've already admitted I'm obsessed. But I really can't resist sharing these wonderfully creative uses of the cable tie. A few weeks ago, I bought a book on the basis that it had instructions on how to make one of those cafe-style fly curtains out of cable ties (I'm not actually going to do it, I just like the idea).  Here is what some other people have done with them.

Mia Mulvey, an artist based in Denver, Colorado, has made ceramic sculptures incorporating cable ties. She says she is influenced by "the intersection between art and science, its history, advancements and tools".  In the work you see below, she has tethered flying things like birds and butterflies to a tree with cable ties.

Heather Skowood is a contemporary jeweller and designer. Here are a couple of things she has made with cable ties.  You can read her blog to find out more about her philosophy.

Finally, even the cable tie itself can be designed so that it is both beautiful and functional (WHY can't they make watches and diaries like that. They are always one or the other but never both). My friend the Mess Goddess has sourced these gorgeous Italian cable ties with a leaf on the end. She loves cable ties as much as I do, but for different reasons.

I'm sure there are many more examples of exceptional cable tie creativity out there. Let me know if you find any.

How telecommunications technology affects our conceptions of space

I often think about how our conceptions of space have changed as we look deeper into the far reaches of the universe, and as satellite navigation technologies influence the way we move on the surface of the Earth.

Oliver Sacks once wrote an article about how a man blind since early childhood fared when he recovered his sight. Vision created such a profoundly different way to apprehend the world than touch and hearing alone. As Sacks explained it, when we look at a cat, we see all its constituent parts at once: the head, ears, tail, legs, torso, fur, whiskers. We see that the right kinds of bits are there in the right kind of relationship to each other and in the right proportion. It is a simultaneous way of knowing. If you had to identify what kind of animal it was by touch alone, though, how would you do it? His patient would touch each part separately, and would only know if it was a cat if, after feeling enough of them, this was the most logical conclusion. So this is a chronological way of knowing.I found this a very compelling description.

I think something similar has happened to people who now rely on navigation devices in their car, like taxi drivers. Whereas once you might have had some kind of map projection in your head, where in your mind's eye you could visualise your destination and then think of a way to get there, now it seems that you listen to the instruction and then follow it, bit by bit, just like the Sacks' patient. "In 500 metres, turn right". It's more like touching than seeing. So it produces a different conception of space: in fact a more closed-in one, where you are only aware of your immediate environment.

Perhaps this works for the much-speculated-about ability of Aboriginal people to paint or represent country from an aerial view, when they haven't seen it from the air.  It's hard for us to comprehend this because even before GPS, our way of interpreting spatial relations was based on maps with Cartesian coordinates.

So you can imagine I was very interested to see this Scandinavian project looking at the way the telegraph changed people's conceptions of space in the late 1800s. This is how they describe it:

Distant news and local opinion: How the Telegraph Affected Spatial and Temporal Horizons in Northern Scandinavia, 1850-1880

Image courtesy of CMYBacon

The electric telegraph lines constructed across Europe starting in the late 1840's profoundly changed conditions for long-distance communication in the region. This project analyses the effects of the electric telegraph on northern Scandinavia.

Focus is on the relationship between time and space in 7 newspapers from Norway, Sweden and Finland. By investigating 1) the motives behind extending telegraph lines to these regions, 2) the ideals associated with the technology itself, 3) the representation of time and space in the news and 4) the spatial and temporal references of the concept “public opinion”, the study gives a new perspective on the development of communications in this area. Using the spread of technology as a lens through which we may observe societal change, this work will produce a transnational history relating the idiosyncrasies of northern Scandinavia to the common developments affecting Europe during the second half of the 19th century.

I think this is really interesting stuff. I don't know if I would have chosen newspapers as the primary source to address the spatial/temporal - but the point about newspapers is that they will, presumably reflect public sensibilities, and the news reported will change radically as events further away become reported more quickly. So what people read will shape the boundaries of their conceptual world. Herodotos for the 19th C, and perhaps with as many marvels.

The modern ruin: trace fossils of high technology

As I've mentioned before, science fiction writers seem to be particularly good at grasping the heritage issues of the present and future.  Frequently in these stories, the decay of high technology is used as a metaphor for a postmodernish dissolution of identity. (One of my favourites in this regard is J.G. Ballard's Terminal Beach. I still have trouble seeing him as anything other than a science fiction writer).

The following comes from the short story Open Veins by British writer Simon Ings. It is an uncannily accurate description of a number of former military or space sites that I've been fortunate enough to visit.

The site bore little mark of its military past.  The hardened bunkers, the offices and barracks, had been ripped out years ago.  The radar arrays and satellite dishes had all been dismantled, leaving large, low concrete platforms, their smooth grey surfaces punctuated by rusted spars, irregular brick walls, depressions and score-marks: the tracks and spoor and burrow-mounds of artificial life. The single concrete runway was crazed and weed-lined and there were shreds of cable rotting in the verges. (Ings 1997, reprinted in Dozois (ed) 1998 p 546)

Cables or worms? Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station, ACT. Author's image.

(What's that, I hear you ask? Does he mention cable ties? Well no, but I'm sure he was thinking about them).

He could easily be describing the former Orroral Valley NASA tracking station here, a site characterised by the concrete footprints of long-gone satellite dishes and interferometry arrays, which appear smooth and featureless until you start to examine them closely. Then you see the grooves left by blades on earth-moving machinery; holes where pipes, cables and wires vanish under the floor, weathered ledges and grooves where walls once were. Ings likens these to the phenomenon known as the trace fossil: the preserved remains, not of some ancient creature, but of the impressions its activities leave in the deposit that becomes transformed into stone. They're signs, not the thing itself.  It's an appealing metaphor, to imagine the cables as polychaete worms burrowing into ground, the bolts left on the antenna footings as anchors for some floating jellyfish in its sessile phase, the hardened bunkers as coral polyps.

This flourishing fauna has come to a sudden end, ripped out and dismantled.  It's not just abandoned but actively flattened down to ground level. This level of destruction is frequently the fate of modern industrial sites, a major contrast to ancient ones which are more likely to be just abandoned. Or at least, this is argued to be one of the things that makes the archaeology of the contemporary past different. On the other hand, it's the same middle-range theory, the same taphonomy, that all archaeologists grapple with. While Ings says that his fictive site bears little mark of its military past, the signs should be there for those who know how to read them.

References
Ings, Simon 1998  Open Veins. In Gardner Dozois (ed) The Mammoth Book of New SF 11.  London: Robinson pp 544-558

Surviving space junk re-entry: a beginner's guide

Given how frequently space junk re-enters the atmosphere, it's surprising that there is not more information about what to do in this event. So I am putting together here a small guide just in case you happen to be in this situation.

1. Don't panic: it is highly unlikely to actually fall on YOU.

You'll have heard all the commentators saying this, but it really is true: the odds of it being YOU that is the site of impact really are extraordinarily low. In the entire history of human space exploration, there is only one recorded instance of someone being hit by space junk. According to the Centre for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) this was Lottie Williams of Oklahoma, who was hit by a piece of a Delta II rocket as she was taking a walk one day in 1996. She was unharmed. When Skylab re-entered over Western Australia in 1979, there were no claims for property damage made and no-one was hurt. There's just so much ocean, desert and ice - and this is usually where stuff lands.  There has never been a recorded re-entry over a city or town.  

The problem is, of course, that it is very difficult to predict re-entry points as there are so many variables to take into account. So it's not easy to be prepared.

But let's just say you are likely to be in the debris footprint area. Here's what you can do.

2.  Secure your pets or animals

It's just like fireworks: animals don't like it very much. The fragments may be traveling at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour as they come screaming into the upper atmosphere (which then slows them down until they fall vertically). The pieces are compressing the air into pressure waves and the energy builds up until it creates an exploding sound or sonic boom. The sonic booms can be frightening for humans too. Take the same precautions for household pets that you might on New Year's Eve. Keep them inside if possible, and remain calm around them. Don't use a chain or slip collar to restrain them. Some recommend playing them classical music (or something else soothing) as a distraction. There are many websites where you can find out more about this.

3.  Do not touch fragments of re-entered spacecraft.

In its journey through the atmosphere, the spacecraft ,or the pieces of it, are subject to extreme heating caused the friction of the atmosphere, through which it may be travelling at hypervelocity. Depending on the materials, some may still be burning when they land. Even when cool, there may be jagged and sharp edges that easily cut you.

Moreover, there are many toxic or radioactive elements that may be part of the fuel, the structures, or the experiments flown on board the spacecraft. If you handle them without knowing what you are doing, they may poison you. These include the fuel hydrazine and the metal beryllium. Let the authorities deal with it.

You're probably pretty safe with a titanium or steel pressure spheres, the most common spacecraft part to survive re-entry. However, despite titanium's traditional reputation as an inert metal, there is some recent evidence that the corrosion products of titanium may be harmful.  Don't take unnecessary risks.

4.  Be ready for fire

If burning fragments are falling all around you, it's not impossible that one may land on your house or the building you're in and set it alight. And when you go outside, there may be more. Do what you would normally expect to do in such an emergency: call 000 (or the fire department in your country); make sure you know where everyone is; evacuate the building (it will be safer outside) and do not go back inside. If you have a fire plan, put it into effect. This may if course involve removing animals or releasing them.

5. Notify the relevant authorities

There's a few people who need to know. Your local, regional or state government may have to play a role in coordinating relief, or recovery of debris, so let them know. It's also a matter of international relations. The country it lands in will have to notify and communicate with the launching state about recovering fragments (these are used to analyse what happened) and perhaps to talk about compensation. If your country has a space agency, they also need to know.

Debris is often found months or years later; and when it's not a high profile re-entry like Skylab, UARS or Phobos Grunt, it may not be obvious which re-entry it came from or who owned it. It's up to the government to find out. (Dr Space Junk has provided this service on occasion).

6. Assist in the scientific analysis

Your experience can be very useful. The colour of fragments falling through the sky tells us something about their temperature and sometimes what they are made of; the number and timing of falls helps map the debris footprint; the size and nature of the fragments may indicate what part of the spacecraft they came from and how it broke apart. While you most certainly shouldn't touch recently fallen material, or move it, you can take photographs and GPS coordinates, and estimate the dimensions of the pieces. What you see and experience can have some value when put together with information gathered from other sources.

7.  Be aware of the legal situation

There are two international conventions that you should be aware of.  One is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which imposes liability for damage caused by space junk on the launching state, and the other is the Space Liability Treaty 1972, which requires that the launching state pay compensation for any damage caused.  I don't know, however, if that includes emotional damage - there is some latitude for interpretation. Keeping in mind safety considerations, if you or your property have been harmed by falling space debris, document it as you would for insurance purposes.

The other critical part of the Outer Space Treaty is that the re-entered material is still the property of the launching state, so you cannot sell it on eBay. In the ideal situation, the launching state will try to recover material for analysis. Be co-operative and don't try to pass fakes off as real space junk - they'll know the difference!

OK. This is very rough and ready, but it's a start. One of the sources for these recommendations is the experience of Western Australians when Skylab re-entered in 1979. It was inspired by my series of #Reentrytips on Twitter.

Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen at ACMI. Review by guest blogger Dan North

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s exhibition Star Voyager: Exploring Space On Screen is a celebration of the historical and future relationship of space exploration and the moving image. Compiling a vast collection of film and archives from the late 1800s until present day, the otherworldly exhibition tells the tale of art informing science and in turn, science informing art.

Descending the stairs into darkness, one arrives amid the moving pictures and parlour tricks of the early 20^th century. It is a world of fantasy and magic where voyagers to Georges Méliès' moon bring their top hats and umbrellas to be shot from a canon into space. Mars is host to an array of space operas, involving benevolent giants, and is home to the elaborate constructivist metropolis of the mysterious and beautiful Queen Aelita. 

Alongside these fantastic voyages and tricks of the eye are the writings of rocket pioneers Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, documenting the early beginnings of real space travel.

With the first occurrence of a countdown to zero before launch, the startlingly accurate 1929 film Frau im Mond by Fritz Lang is considered the first serious portrayal of space exploration. Lang employed rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth as technical advisor to provide an authentic as possible illustration of multi-stage rocket travel. A scene depicting the crew staring back at earth evokes a similar reaction the Apollo 8 astronauts would have had almost 40 years later as they saw their first earthrise. Despite scientific inaccuracies (such as the moon having a perfectly breathable atmosphere) the film was considered so accurate that the Nazi government confiscated Lang’s research and model rockets. A young Wernher von Braun was to be so inspired by Frau im Mond that he painted the film’s logo on early V-2s.

Moving on through other films and artifacts, a Russian film from the 1950s depicts what life on a soviet space station would be like. It’s a strange mash-up of antiquated phone exchange and a submarine - however space is not without it’s creature comforts -  everyone has an apartment with a view of the earth. Even your pet-comrade cat sits oddly purring at the window as the stars drift past. The film is presented as a sober documentary - this was to be the future for the USSR. This fictional Russian space station with its rotating wheel design was to be influential on Stanley Kubrick when thinking of his space hotel seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The exhibition design by Minifie van Schaik Architects makes strong reference to the visual vocabulary of real spacecraft. In orbit around walls of gold mylar you’ll find satellite-like pods displaying rare footage of cosmonauts and astronauts, John F Kennedy’s ‘We choose to the go the moon!’ speech at Rice University, unedited footage of Neil Armstrong climbing tentatively down the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module (you’ve likely seen it a thousand times before, but unedited and without soundtrack or sentimental narrative, the raw video of that boot planting on the lunar soil is still quite awe-inspiring). There’s newsreel footage of astronaut poster-boy John Glenn and various depictions of the space race in film - Apollo 13, The Right Stuff and Space Cowboys. 

The space race was also the era of the vinyl record. Curators Emma McRae and Sarah Tutton appear to have collected every space related album cover imaginable from Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet to the soundtrack of Plan Nine From Outer Space.

Unique to the exhibition is the short film On Mars 3D. It is too short. You want to see more. The Martian valleys and mountains look incredible and a little unbelievable. Is this really what the surface of Mars looks like? It makes Tatooine look boring. Planetary astronomy was never so cool.

Down a corridor reminiscent of the Discovery set from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (there’s a suspended model of the Discovery in there) you’ll find costumes, props and models from Forbidden Planet, Star Trek, Total Recall and Moon amongst others. Contrasting with their real-life, used-in-actual-space counterparts, you get a sense of how science has influenced film and vice versa. It’s definitely a reciprocal relationship.

Amongst all the relatively familiar imagery, one exhibit is particularly fascinating for it’s unusual visceral qualities; presenting the smell and the sound of our own star, the sun. Eerie and absolutely alien, artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines have simulated what we could never possibly experience- a solar scratch and sniff.

The overall effect is a montage of original artifacts, props, film, and photographs- an artistic and scientific orgy of everything that is great about imagining or actually going into outer space. Highly recommended.

Star Voyager is on at ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne, until January 29.

Dan North is a Sydney-based architect. He is also an amateur astronomer with a life long interest in the history of space exploration and set and prop design for science fiction films.

Cable ties, the taphonomy of plastics, and the modern world

Truly I need a new life. I'm starting to notice cable ties everywhere. I was waiting at a bus stop last week when I spotted a broken cable tie in the dirt, my eye now being attuned to the characteristic L-shape. I picked it up and took it home (unlike other kinds of artefact, those of the contemporary past are usually 'rubbish'. There is no law against souveniring them). I think there may have been a construction site nearby, but my memory is a little hazy on this point.

Image courtesy of 4Cabling

Examining this orphan cable tie was interesting. The un-cut-off end suggested that it was a very long one indeed, but part of it was missing, as the stub was neither long enough or flexible enough to curve around to meet the opposing break. However, on the remaining length, there is no sign of a manufacturer's label or a patent number. This suggests that it belongs to a later period where cable ties are a generic technology, rather than proprietary.

The wear on the cable tie suggested that it had been lying around for some time; they are pretty robust little beasties, after all. I might interpret it as trampling wear, and abrasion from the stony/gravelly surfaces of the dirt and road where I found it. The flat surfaces are scratched and the smooth edges are roughened and squashed a little.  I don't recollect noticing this on the Orroral Valley cable ties, which were located in lovely soft sandy silt. Clearly this is another feature that needs recording in future fieldwork. This makes me think that it might be useful to examine a bit more closely the ways in which plastics deform and deteriorate. A taphonomy of plastics.

There's very little literature specifically about cable ties that I have been able to track down as yet, although I have no doubt that I shall find more once I get deeper into the technical journals. However, this is for me exactly the justification for taking an archaeological approach: the documents that tell the story of how they became such a ubiquitous feature of everyday life do not exist. No-one is, for example, going on a hiking trip, or building a house, and choosing to focus on the role of cable ties in what they write or photograph about their activities.

They're not just a useful string or wire substitute though - artists and crafters are using cable ties to make all sorts of fabulous things. That might have to be the subject of a separate post.

I'll be talking about cable ties at the workshop 'That was then, this is now' in Sydney on the 16th-17th February. How they'll thank me!

Valley of the Cable Ties: the material culture of the contemporary past

Back in November, me and my intrepid group of graduate students paid a visit to the former Orroral Valley Tracking Station in the ACT.

In the 1990s, what remained of the above-ground structures was demolished, leaving only the concrete footings of numerous buildings and antennas. Near the entrance to the facility, now used by tourists, hikers and other visitors, the grass is cut and the gardens sort of maintained. Deeper into the site, tall weeds and grasses are more prevalent and are invading the antenna footprints. 

In general, surface visibility is on the low side, and as you walk about, there's not much evidence of past human activities apart from the big stuff. No obvious artefact scatters; no personal objects; no bits of antenna support lying discarded.  Occasionally there's a bit of recent rubbish near the picnic/parking area. The Maralinga nuclear test sites are littered with lovely radioactive garbage, despite three remediation campaigns; by comparison, Orroral has been cleaned up and maintained in a well-ordered fashion.

But I wasn't so sure this tidy surface would yield nothing to the eagle eye of the archaeologist. On my last visit, we found an old scrubbing brush lying outside the canteen building, the sturdy bristly kind with a wooden back, as used in a million domestic and industrial kitchens across the land.  I was very keen to do a pedestrian transect survey of the entire site to see what else we could find relating to the tracking station period, and what its spatial distribution might tell us. I imagined we might be able to knock the whole site over in a day with 10 people.

You'll already have guessed that my expectations were confounded.

We started at what I thought would be the easiest part of the site, below the main 26 m antenna, which is fairly thickly grassed with few weeds. This was possibly the narrowest section of the main site, defined by fences, and with no buildings to confuse things. I really didn't think there would be much there; I thought it would be a nice, quick demonstration of the principles of surface survey.

The team walked 5 m apart, slowly observing the ground within their swath of vision, and placed a pin flag at every location where they saw human material or animal scratchings/burrows. The latter was so that I could get an idea of how disturbed the surface was. We had 100 pin flags (these are spikes of metal with a coloured plastic tag on top) and I thought these would last us a good while.  The line would move from one boundary fence to the next in formation, flagging everything of interest, and then we would look back and see how material was distributed by the density of the flags. Then, in small groups, the team would fully record each artefact or trace, including its coordinates, material, dimensions, shape, colour, likely function if known, etc etc, removing the flag as each location was completed (and leaving the artefact in situ). We'd then move on to the next 50 m traverse.

From L to R: Joan, Rob and Susan in their 5 m transects. (Author's photograph)

Well. Once you start looking ...... the 100 pin flags were running dangerously low before we had even reached the opposite fence. There was stuff everywhere, despite the low visibility as you see in the image above. I was amazed, and so were the students. There were bits of concrete, star pickets, bricks, lead, tin cans, insulation, wire, nails, leather, cable trenches (some of the rabbit scratches turned out not to be, once you examined them closely), metal steps, pipes, and much more. When we made a list of all the observed artefact materials or types, there were over 30. 

Southwest from the antenna footing, showing the location of pin flags. (Author's photograph)

This was all great, obviously, although now it was clear that we would be lucky to get through half of this small area in a day, let alone the whole site. But the best was yet to come. 

In the picture below, you see an erosion scar with a high density of artefacts, as evidenced by the density of pin flags.

Artefact density in the erosion scar (with Lance, Tom and Steve). (Author's photograph)

Obviously visibility was highest in this exposed area, and so we would expect a higher density of artefacts than the surrounding grassed areas. Some, at least, were being washed down or out of the slope; the presence of a small culvert under a path nearby attested to the movement of water through this area. But it was the content of this artefact scatter which was the biggest eye-opener.

Pretty soon, as the teams moved systematically through recording the artefacts, we became aware that there were quite a few cable ties present; so many that some people suggested that there was no need to individually photograph and measure every one. Tempting though that thought was .... I stuck to my guns. This was the methodology and we were going to follow it to the letter.! There was a little grumbling. Why record the same features on so many of them, when they were all identical? What would we learn?

Again, once you start looking...... the first thing to note was that these were used cable ties, not new ones. They had been removed from something. One team observed a tie that had been torn apart, as the edges were jagged. I then instructed everyone to pay attention to the ends and record their state. Three variations then became evident: some had been torn, some cut, and some melted. This tiny observation on a discarded piece of plastic translated into a decision and an action taken by a real person in carrying out a task.

From this starting point, as we compared the cable ties that occurred across the erosion scar, other variations emerged. There were different colours: black, white, translucent. There were different lengths and different widths, from the very skinny and short to the very long and thick. The length, and thickness could be an indication of the diameter and load that the tie was used for. Some had had the loose ends trimmed off. Some had patent numbers on them, or manufacturer's labels. Some were lying flat on the surface; others were actively eroding out, standing upright in a layer of silt.

I was delighted. This ubiquitous, seemingly simple object was raising all kinds of questions about how and why the cable ties had been used. How did they get there? Were they associated with the tracking station? What date were they? When, exactly, had cable ties been invented? None of us knew. We all knew what they were, but we knew absolutely nothing else about this very modern artefact type.

By this time someone had decided to start substituting cable ties in film names - such a shame that we had no mobile coverage or there would have been a great Twitter hashtag in it - #cabletiemovies - such gems as The Texas Cable Tie Massacre (Jonathan) and The Valley of the Cable Ties (Susan) raised much hilarity. (My own effort:  The Cable Tie, being a film starring Jim Carrey). But I could tell that despite their ostensible skepticism, everyone was getting caught up in the cable tie story.  I decided to have a brainstorm session.

First we considered when cable ties were invented. (We couldn't just look this up; out here our phones didn't have reception. The whole point of locating a satellite tracking station in this valley was its radio quietness). Like many things that people assume are very modern, I thought perhaps cable ties were quite old, 1850s or something like that. Others thought they might be 1950s or 1960s. Rob pointed out that an omega-shaped clip used to be used to secure pipes and cables to structures. Another question was mass production. While the technology may be old, their accessibility may be recent. Early cable ties, he proposed, may have been expensive, and those at Orroral may have all been imported from the US.  Perhaps they were not throw-away technology in the early days.

What were so many cable ties doing near the main antenna? Were they associated with the dismantling of the antenna? Steve imagined a bunch of blokes climbing all over the structure cutting the ties off, as they took it apart to be transported to Tasmania (where it became part of the Mt Pleasant Observatory). The prevailing wind over the last couple of days had been from the north east; if it had been so in the 1980s, then perhaps the cable ties were just whisked off to the ground, scattering over the grass to the south west of the antenna. It was a plausible theory.

Joan, however, drew our attention to the huge numbers of kangaroos throughout the area (they were all over the site - and of course Canberra is renowned for being the one city in Australia where you can actually see a mob of roos hopping through the streets!). What if the national park had culling programs? The cable ties might be used to tie the feet of the corpse together so it could be transported. (Sorry to raise this gruesome topic).

It was Tom who had first noticed the melted ends of some cable ties, and he told us that cable ties were commonly used by hikers and backpackers to secure their baggage.  They would then burn them off with cigarette lighters. Just to the right of us was a path that already we had seen several groups of outward bounders travel down to the other end of the valley. These groups of high school students were camping up near the old canteen, and every day two different groups would walk right past our erosion site. However, as someone else pointed out, they were just walking through: you would expect to see old cable ties more at camping locations.

So we had some reasonable hypotheses here, and would need to do some research to discriminate between them. It was no good making assumptions that antenna cables = cable ties. We had also to consider that many may have washed down from further upslope, and may not have blown down from the main antenna at all. A key piece of evidence was clearly going to be the distribution of cable ties over the whole site. What features were they most associated with?

We didn't get a chance to do any more transects, but we did investigate the 9 m antenna footing with a group of home school children who came out to visit us. Around the footing, we found a sparse scatter of cable ties. So clearly they were present elsewhere at the site, although the association with the actual antennas was not certain since we had only looked at two of them.

Later, we had a wonderful morning out at the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex with Glen Nagle. Towards the end of his talk to us, he asked if anyone had any questions. I saw a few significant glances exchanged between the students. Hello, I thought. I was pretty sure they wanted someone to ask about cable ties - but no-one wanted to be the patsy! Joan, though, was made of sterner stuff. The glances coalesced into consensus and Joan gave a wry smile before asking Glen how common cable ties were in the construction and operation of the antennas at Tidbinbilla.

Glen Nagle tells us about the history of the Tidbinbilla tracking station. (Author's photograph)

Now, I thought, my moment of vindication. I was a little disconcerted when Glen roared with laughter! But when he recovered, he had some interesting insights. On the main 70 m dish at Tid, he said, there would be 1000s of cable ties. They were in fact an OH & S issue, and one of their engineers was meticulous about enforcing this - if the ends are not cut off, then they can easily take an eye out, as had happened to one unfortunate employee. So we had another factor to consider in our assessment of the cable ties from Orroral. Then he sent his off-sider to the office to get us all a genuine Tidbinbilla cable tie! I was in seventh heaven.

It wasn't until Susan got to the airport and logged in that we found out when the plastic mass-produced cable tie was invented - 1958, as it happens, by the US company Thomas & Betts, to use for securing wire harnesses in aircraft.

Of all the things I expected to get out of using a very 'traditional' archaeological technique on a space site, the discovery of cable ties was certainly not amongst them. My initial field seasons to Orroral had led to me realise the importance of cables, as opposed to the fancy, obvious stuff like antennas (and don't get me wrong, I'm still completely in love with antennas), but it took the application of the archaeological eye and a systematic approach to recording to tease out the implications. It's so obvious when you think about it. Glen, once he had recovered from his hilarity, agreed: there is another story to be told about technology through cable ties, and part of that story is their dissemination throughout contemporary culture, their adaptation to all kinds of uses, leading to their virtual invisibility.

As far as I'm concerned, cable ties are the quintessential artefact representing the potential of the archaeology of the contemporary past.

I will make them visible again.


Postscript
A few weeks later, I'm having dinner with the president of the Australian Archaeological Association, my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis, in a regional Queensland town on a Sunday night. There's not many places open and we have to settle for a cafe which is also hosting a Christian a capella group.  'Lynley', I say, 'I have to tell you about my recent discovery concerning cable ties!'  'Keep your voice down', she replies.  'There's a lot of elderly Christians about who may not be comfortable overhearing such a conversation'. I'm nonplussed. Why would anyone care?  Then I realise: she assumes I am about to impart some revelation concerning kinky sex. And this, sadly, is the immediate association that many people have with cable ties:  restraint, whether in the boudoir, down at the police station, or in a hostage situation.

Happy Christmas from Dr Space Junk

I'm organised this year!  This collage is from my Facebook status updates, those (mostly) with a space theme, of course.

 

If the text is too small to read click on the picture to get a larger version.  That's if you really want to know my innermost thoughts.

Communicating the archaeology of the contemporary past: an experiment in methodology

Recently, I took some graduate students out to one of my favourite places, the former Orroral Valley Tracking Station in Namadgi National Park, Australian Capital Territory. We did some normal archaeological things (pedestrian transect survey, mapping with DGPS, RTK-DPGS and baseline-offset), but I also wanted to do something different, to see if methodologies touted as being distinctive to the contemporary past had anything to offer us as archaeologists.

This is what I asked the students to do:

All that remains of a once vibrant facility, where over 100 people worked in shifts around the clock, is now concrete footings: the spikes and sky-gazing arcs of numerous antennas are represented by flat surfaces over which a person can walk without really registering what they are - as we observed with numerous Outward Bound hikers, who filed over the main antenna footing as if it were only a changing texture underfoot.  They seem to barely notice the interpretive signs. There are two generations of interpretive signs at Orroral; most people agree that the older ones are not very effective, but the more recent ones, which are far more informative, are only present at a few places near the most accessible parts of the site.  There's a lot of scope to do more, and this was also something I wanted the students to think about too.

So what happened?  Was this experiment worth it?  Most definitely, but not necessarily in the ways I was expecting.  And I wasn't really sure what I was expecting!

A few students took a little while to feel comfortable with the fact that it was THEIR instincts that were important here, and what appeared to be stupid to them was really exactly what I was looking for. Some were initially cautious, but no-one refused to do it or made too much of a fuss about it, despite the fact that it wasn't being assessed.

The first result was that approaching the site in this way caused the students to be very observant, paying attention to the meaning of ephemeral traces and relationships between structures.  They saw things that I had never paid any particular attention to, even though I was far more familiar with the site than they. Helen wrote an evocative piece about the fading white paint outlining parking places outside buildings such as the Minitrack Operations Building, a presence implying the absence of cars and workers. She noted that while these lines were "Ephemera appearing on no plan or map or survey, they have yet outlasted the buildings and hardware and people". Tom used photographs, from the interpretation panels, of the tracking station in operation and located the same perspectives now, juxtaposing the vibrancy of the peopled landscape with the silence of the concrete footings, and the decades of tree growth since the original photographs were taken. Steve put the people back in: on the flat floors without walls, he posed his fellow students carrying out activities that would once have happened in that building:  serving food in the canteen, sitting on a toilet, processing data in the operations building while looking at the view out to the 26 m antenna, sweeping the concrete curtain around the dish's base.

Cultural significance is not just about historic events and people; it's also about the senses, or what the Burra Charter (1999) defines as aesthetic significance (NOT to be confused with aesthetics).  Some students chose to engage senses other than sight, using both the real and imagined sounds of the site to evoke Orroral as it was in the past and in the present. Joan put a schematic engineering drawing of the 26 m antenna together with a broadcast from space: the voices of the astronauts communicating with ground control as the dish provided comms for a space shuttle mission, thus giving life and rapid movement to this monolithic structure. Jon showed a picture of the almost desolate, windswept northern end of the site, the valley enclosed by a bowl of alpine ranges that isolate it from radio interference, and played a recording of the wind and solitary bird calls: the loneliness of the abandoned tracking station that once spoke to the stars.

Poetry featured too. Lance asked us to close our eyes while he recited his words, removing us from the large common room and into his private vision; Susan used a whiteboard to draw the features of the site as she wove the outline of a yet-to-be-written poem together from fragments of the past and the present, a work in progress.

Susan, Liam and the poem taking shape on the whiteboard

John, our intrepid technical officer, emerged in his fluoro vest, set up the dumpy level tripod, tipped a bag of rubbish on to the floor, and lay down with his hat over his face: the postprandial nap amidst the wreckage of lunch. The rubbish had been collected from the site: he had very carefully picked up drink and food containers on which the use-by date was after 2011, reasoning that they were actually rubbish and not artefacts as they half-existed in the future. In this careful act he has captured all the paradoxes of the archaeology of the contemporary past, and I think he was a little taken aback when I insisted that we keep his collection for analysis .......

John naps amidst the artefacts of the future

Another principle of contemporary archaeology is 'making the familiar unfamiliar'. When you're looking at recent material culture, we are so used to it that we don't necessarily perceive its role in our lives. But, as Colleen Beck has pointed out, much of the technology of the recent past is anything but familiar. We all know of nuclear testing and the terrible deployments of these weapons, but could any of us identify the components of a test site and figure out what went on there? We all use satellite technology, but could we identify Orroral Valley as a tracking station by the layout and antenna footings alone? These kinds of places, which define the global technologies of the recent past, are frequently inaccessible and mysterious. They need interpreting; they're places that help us make sense of the world we live in.

Jonathan showed a photo of the 9 m antenna footing: much more intimate in scale than the big dish. He talked about popular quizzes where people have to guess what an object is. Asking us to place ourselves in the role of a 'lay' listener/viewer, he asked 'What is it?'.  Indeed. What, actually, is this circle of concrete with a sloped half-amphitheatrical wall behind it? How do we describe this structure?

The students connected a place, trace or structure with imagined human actions - and hence stories - creating new avenues for approaching the interpretation of the site and making it real. But the most stunning outcome was when the students presented their pieces before the small audience of ourselves and four visitors, Johnn, Geoff, Adam and Liam, who had joined us for dinner that night. I wasn't sure if our guests would want to stay for this part of the evening, but they were riveted. Afterwards, Johnn said 'You should do this for the ABC'. He made an interesting argument: because there were nine small snapshots of the site, all highlighting completely different things in different ways, there was something to appeal to the most diverse of audiences. If one approach didn't do it for you, then one of the others was bound to. So in terms of communicating with non-archaeologists, he saw this as a way of engaging the public effectively. The very personal choices the students made about what appealed to them, what caught their attention and how they expressed it, mirrored the diversity of the broader community, creating points of entree into what otherwise might be opaque technology. I was very struck by this insight, that reaffirmed a position outlined in Harrison and Schofield's recent textbook on the archaeology of the contemporary past: that we are the best authorities on the archaeology of us; that the process of autoanthropology or autoethnography is revealing of our own approaches to the material world.

And of course the question you're all asking - was there an interpretive dance?  Yes there was, but Chantal was too shy to perform it!

That was then, this is now: contemporary archaeology in Australia

In this workshop, we're going to explore what makes the practice of contemporary archaeology in Australia distinctive.  Naturally, I'll be doing the space thing.  If you'd like to be in my session, give me a hoy and we can have a chat about it!

CALL FOR PAPERS:

That was then, This is now: Contemporary Archaeology in Australia

February 16-17, 2012   University of Sydney

This two-day workshop explores the role of contemporary archaeology and the state of research in Australia. It is aimed at exploring the methods, theories and subjects currently informing this nascent field of study. What role might Australian scholars play in advancing this area of research?

This workshop is intended to be a platform for open conversation and discussion of ideas. Students, scholars and professionals are welcome to offer presentations of 15 or 30 minutes.

Topics may include but are not limited to: auto-ethnography, late twentieth and twenty-first century technologies, space archaeology, contemporary graffiti, urban landscapes, mobilities, new methods of archaeological practice (social media, art, performance, re-enactment), the post-human, archaeologies of protest, anarchy, internment, migration and the cold war, the body, affect and the narrative turn, the materialities of contemporary life.

Please send 100 word abstracts to the convenors. Deadline: 31 January, 2012.

Convenors:

Ursula.Frederick@anu.edu.au

Annie.Clarke@sydney.edu.au