Copyright
© 2001, 2002 Deborah Natsios and John Young
Deborah
Natsios and John Young. "Jerusalem SKY." in
The Next Jerusalem
: Sharing the Divided City, Ed. Michael
Sorkin.
New York: Monacelli Press, 2002. pp 152-169.
JerusalemSKY
Bird's-eye-view
perspectives of Jerusalem construct the city along the pilgrim's
spiritual horizon, a vertical axis whose vanishing points converge
into sanctified sky -- the allegorical airspace of Jesus' and Muhammad's
respective ascensions. The ancestral soffit absorbs the city's ecstasy
and agitation, a vanishing sky-dome camouflaged by atmospheric
boundaries that evaporate and recondense by the hour, product of
capricious windspeeds and turbulence that whip layers of cumulus,
altostratus, and cirrus into impermanent cosmology and fleeting
projections of earthly desire. Such is the point of view, for instance,
of the Lucas Brandis map of Palestine (Lubeck, 1475), as the
cartographer -- circumscribed by depictions of the blowing winds --
overflies the holy city seen far below, embedded in undulating, verdant
topography.
Jerusalem's
migratory birds
are pilgrims of the
upper sanctuary. They soar on thermal currents high above escarpments
of the rift valley, plying transcontinental flyways that link northerly
breeding sites with southerly wintering grounds. Aerodynamic
itineraries have bridged the land-masses of Europe, Asia and Africa for
countless millennia, confirming Jerusalem's ecological centricity
within a triadic balance of continental powers, a balance which
coincides, as it happens, with the emblematic claims of Heinrich
Buenting's trefoil of 1581, or the tripartite structure of such T-O mappaemundi
as the Augsburg of 1472 -- the medieval schema that
represented the world as a disc with Jerusalem at its center, separated
from Asia, Africa, Europe by waterways configured in a "T".
Each
spring and autumn, a
half-billion migrant
birds navigate the skies above Jerusalem by their own ancient
compasses, tracking magnetic fields, star rotation, and the Sun,
escaping terrestrial confinement just as in the Bible and Qur'an, where
birds are associated with transcendent themes of purification,
absolution, and sacrifice. The man-made city remains inexorably linked
to the avian nomads that populate its canopy, notwithstanding the
transcendent altitudes of their empyrean habitat. When diasporic birds
like the sparrow, eagle, santa colomba,
and quail descend to roost or feed on flat roofs below, they leave
faint vapor trails that link their skyborne infrastructures to the
stone city's upturned ribs and bones. All across Jerusalem, rooftop
refuges receive vagile birds intertwined in vaporous rays of first
light, sundown, and penumbra.
In the
past half-century,
new surveillance and
imaging technologies have superseded birds-eye views of the city, at
the very same time that avian migrants suffer the increasing violence
of birdstrikes -- catastrophic collisions between species -- white
pelicans, griffon vultures, black kites -- and the mechanized high-tech
birds that are recent colonists of both low and high altitude migration
routes. Aviation casualties resulting from birdstrikes have far
exceeded those of modern military campaigns. The unforgiving physics of
high velocity impacts amplifies the body mass of projectile birds,
converting supple wingbeats into a destructive force measured in tons,
forging a debris alloy of crushed beaks, scapular feathers and aluminum
shards.
Violence is a meticulously
engineered byproduct of
airborne visualization technologies that support the ongoing
surveillance of the city. Reconnaissance aircraft, unmanned drones,
profiling radars and surveillance satellites corroborate military
doctrines of command, control and communication with new remote sensing
and imaging products, culling data from systematic regional coverages
to plot a totalizing, expropriating transparency: the scientific
cartography of an asymmetric balance of power and the policing of the
man-made city's disputed borders. Infra-red radar channels offer night
visibility; panchromatic systems cue colors of the visible spectrum;
and ultraviolet spectrometers, microwave radiometers, hyper-spectral
instruments and image-enhancement techniques provide diagnostic tools
for imagery analysts versed in the phenomenology of observables, who
will identify the exploitable contours of contested urban topography.
Migrant
birds populate a
secular sky reinvented by
meteorology and climatology through military hardwares and softwares
that encode real-time data -- millibar and isobar in thrall to national
security priorities that supplant prophecy with "forecasts" and vision
with "visibility," eschewing the airborne pilgrim's progress. This is
the sky of contemporary battlespace and triumphalist war games, where
artificial intelligence intercedes with simulation scenarios and new
algorithms for dies
irae under the rubric of "total air supremacy."
Strict
regulatory mechanisms
limiting the
dissemination of high-resolution satellite imagery emerged in the
1960s, a regime of restrictions that underscored geospatial imaging's
military role in maintaining crucial information dominance through
reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, strategic planning, and
precision targeting. Jerusalem's public record, its civic mirror, was
rendered opaque as contemporary aerial views were suppressed by
redactions and inscrutable encryptions -- imagery intelligence (IMINT)
degraded by international covenant, shutter controls, blackouts, data
quality reduction, and time-delayed transmissions.
Since
the 1990s, global
market forces and
democratizing principles called for new information transparency
through "open skies" policies, "open source" acquisitions, and
"dual-use" applications. These initiatives introduce beneficial
civilian applications for technologies originating in national security
contexts. High-resolution satellite imagery -- real-time digital data
with resolutions of less than one meter -- is being declassified.
Commercial "birds" are being granted licenses making their imagery
increasingly available on the open market, with potential benefits to
environmental studies, agriculture, urban planning, seismic monitoring,
storm and flood control research, natural disaster mitigation and
large-scale humanitarian relief efforts.
Jerusalem
SKY
is a web-based project being developed by Natsios Young Architects that
supports migratory bird conservation efforts by extending the
transparency of "open skies" initiatives to the project's own
information architecture. The digital image-maps presented below are
proposed new birds-eye views of Jerusalem -- in the form of graphical
user interfaces that are orientation maps for SKY's open architecture.
The synthetic image-maps are hypermedia portals accessible to the
growing online public worldwide -- the student, amateur, refugee,
scientist, detainee or citizen with access to the world wide web. Icons
embedded within SKY's digital image-map narratives are hyperlinked to
allow connective access to myriad online knowledge systems relating to
bird migration, geospatial imaging, and conflict resolution --
including databases, metadata, multimedia presentations of sound video,
and image.
SKY's
hypermedial transparency expands the narrow scope of formalist
visualizations of the city -- those photogenic consumer products of the
tourism and nostalgia industries. SKY views probe the more complex
imagery spectrum captured by multilayered sensor technologies and
information systems, including those scanning beyond the range of the
human eye -- the multispectral, hyperspectral and ultraspectral.
Most
important, the SKY project will function as an 'augmented reality'
system by directly linking its web-base architecture to actual sites in
the built city -- specifically, Jerusalem's expansive landscape of flat
rooftops. It is proposed that the city's flat roofs be adapted as
seasonal bird ringing (banding) stations, equipped with mistnets,
calipers, scales and other instruments of the banding process, in which
birds are tagged using small leg-bands -- part of a data-collection
technique crucial to the study of migratory movements, routes,
behaviors and survival.
Jerusalem's
network of rooftop landscape fragments will be transformed into a
working laboratory as well as seasonal urban staging post, where birds
pause to feed and roost before continuing intercontinental journeys.
The rooftop system is to be manned by a diversity of building residents
and community volunteers throughout mixed quarters of the city, who
will use wireless cellphones to uplink survey data to shared online
databases. The urban model of scattered rooftop collection sites
parallels the world wide web's distributed connectivity. It encourages
a more broadly inclusive network for participatory data sampling than
is currently available at the Jerusalem Bird Observatory ringing
facility, narrowly sited on one acre of parkland in an exclusive,
politically-compromised zone located between Israel's Knesset and its
Supreme Court.
Jerusalem SKY's new
birds-eye views of the city have emerged out of regional
conflict-resolution initiatives precipitated by birdstrike hazards.
Catastrophic birdstrikes -- symptom of unresolved spatial conflict
between militarized airspace and transboundary avian flyways -- are
being mitigated through innovative remediation that relies in part on
national security technologies. Today, migration conservationists are
tracking and mapping their mobile subjects using what was once the
exclusive paraphernalia of war -- real-time surveillance radar warning
systems, satellites, unmanned military drones, motorized gliders, and
satellite intercept radio-transmitters.
The
appropriation for civilian use of technologies developed in the context
of geopolitical surveillance and political control has compelling
implications. Those are explored through SKY's key links to Cryptome.org
and Cartome.org, Natsios Young's online archive of
documents relating to the apparatuses of surveillance and political
control -- including hardwares and softwares that enable encryption,
steganography and geolocation -- their uses, their exploitable
vulnerabilities, their implications for civil liberties and the space
of a new public domain.
In
appropriating dual-use
technologies for
migratory bird conservation practices, Jerusalem
SKY subordinates pernicious surveillance to the
knowledge-based act of seeing Jerusalem anew. Viewed from an aerial
habitat constructed out of the recurring rhythms of transboundary
migration flows, the specular city mirrors back the knowledge of
emancipated pilgrims. Deborah Natsios
CRYPTOME
New York, NY Copyright
© 2001, 2002 Deborah Natsios and John Young
Deborah
Natsios and John Young. "Jerusalem SKY." in
The Next Jerusalem
: Sharing the Divided City, Ed. Michael
Sorkin.
New York: Monacelli Press, 2002. pp 152-169. 
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