LwM Digital Residency: 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, book or attractive fellow passenger 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
and 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 points 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.