Report from the Hawk-Eye Camera

Some months ago, it was suggested by the Corporation of London that the best way of dealing with the pigeons fouling the high-rise on the twelth floor of which the International Necronautical Society has its HQ was to drape netting over the whole building, cap-a-pied. Having spent a year researching the history of cartography with a view to mapping death - researching this history in all its details, from the variations between Mercator, Petersen and Polar Gnomonic map projections to the question of graticule to instances of blank and one-to-one scale maps (Lewis Carrol’s oeuvre is awash with these) - INS staff were intrigued by the prospect of having a grid square superimposed over their splendid view of the world’s greatest city. They were, however, even more appalled by the thought of working in what would effectively become a cage, and lobbied the Corporation to opt for an alternative method of pigeon control.

The INS has agents everywhere, and always gets its way. Arms were twisted, favours were called in, and as a result the building now enjoys twice-weekly visits from two hawks. Arriving in a Van Vynck van and launched from the leather-gloved forearms of their keepers, these austere birds patrol the skies above Golden Lane Estate, strangely anachronistic among the modernist fibre-glass and concrete as they sweep and turn in arcs and semi-circles, Yeatsian gyres. Perhaps they’re copying the markings on the tennis courts, across whose surface netball game-space codes are also taped, the overlay producing endless tangents, radii and incomplete circumferences, as on the taxi-ways of airports. The students on the four floors of the Italia Conti Dance school directly opposite HQ (an INS staff job has its perks) seem to be copying the hawks as they spin and pirouette. So, too, do the small aeroplanes that bank above Golden Lane to begin their descent into City Airport. Occasionally the hawks will break their pattern to plummet, thunderbolt-like, on a flock of pigeons, one of whom they’ll off pour encourager les autres. It is an awesome spectacle.

No sooner had the INS installed its hawks than parliament followed suit. Since January Van Vynck birds have been keeping the exterior of the debating chambers and Big Ben pigeon dirt-free. During much of this period hawks have been outgunning doves inside the building also as the government prepared the approach-route to war against Iraq. Parliament is clearly visible from INS HQ, its left tower cut into tangents by the giant British Airways wheel known as The London Eye. The whole city is visible from INS HQ. During the huge anti-war demonstration in February it was suggested that the INS track and document the movement of police and news helicopters over London’s airspace, but this proved impracticable as our own machinations had deprived us of a window grid-square within which to do so. Nonetheless, matching helicopters visible to the naked eye’s horizontal plane with the overhead images that alternated with the worm’s-eye ones on the tv set installed below the racked INS files turned out to be interesting.

When the war proper started, the stunning visuals transmitted to the same set by cameras attached to bombs inspired us to start lobbying the Corporation once again. This time we were demanding hawk-cams on the birds, with images relayed via a server to the laptop screens of subscribers in Golden Lane Estate - or, for that matter, worldwide. Nature documentaries provide this facility already: viewers can experience vicariously the pleasure of an Andean eagle’s swoop and snatching of a rabbit or an African lion’s rush and savaging of a gazelle. What neither nature documentaries nor CNN war footage yet provide is the reverse-angle shot, the victim’s point of view - but this is perfectly feasible. Nick a gazelle’s thigh muscle or slightly dope a rabbit so as to render it odds-on to fall prey to its pursuer, strap a small Sony to its flank and - hey-presto! - gazelle-cam. Give a spy coordinates for your next target and you could recoup expenditure on bombs by selling bunker or hosp-cam pics to the world’s media. We wanted pig-cam: hawk-cam, pig-cam, and the ability to switch between the two at will. Our moles within the Corporation tell us that the proposition is unlikely to succeed so we are currently approaching the Arts Council of Great Britain, who tend to go more for this kind of thing.

Parliament sits to the left side of INS HQ’s ungridded window. To the right is Lord’s Cricket Ground. I mention this fact not because during the five-day long Test Matches played there you can also match blimps and helicopters with the tv images they transmit (which you can), but rather because media coverage of cricket is one step ahead of everything else. While Formula One racing has embedded cameras in drivers’ helmets, cricket’s tech-boys have managed to worm these into the very stumps at which the bowler aims. It’s hard to avoid flinching when, each time a batsman is clean-bowled, the tragedy is replayed through the stump-cam. Stump-cams have been in operation ever since Channel Four took over television coverage of cricket from the more sedate BBC. Along with these came the snickometer, a device which uses a visually-rendered sound-line to determine whether or not a passing ball has touched the bat before being caught by the wicket-keeper (if it has the batsman’s out). Best of all cricket’s new visual plug-ins, though, is the system known as ‘hawk-eye’. Available both on tv and over the internet either in real-time or as an archive, hawk-eye allows you to sort deliveries by pitch, speed, movement off the ground and consequence, and to view results in a variety of display modes, from ‘normalised past stumps’ to ‘wagon-wheel’. Hanging beside this data on the web-page, as beside parliament, is the station’s logo: a large eye made of spokes. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Channel Four also hosts Big Brother.

Cartographers of event-space tend to be continental thinkers: Virilio, Lyotard, Blanchot, Badiou - essentially sub-Heideggerian phenomenologists. It never ceases to amaze me that these people (not being British Commonwealth subjects) have never been exposed to cricket. The game is the most precise mise-en-scène their thought could ever hope for. It’s about repetition, information, geometry, history, stylised violence. How can Badiou understand Beckett without realising how indebted the latter’s plays and novels are to cricket, from the stones that Molloy circulates between his pockets (the trick umpires use to keep track of the number of balls bowled in an over) to Hamm’s insistence that he be placed in exactly the right position, shifting first a little right and then a little left (the scene is modelled on a batsman taking his mark) to Clov’s slow intuition that, even though not much action ever seems to happen, nonetheless ’something is taking its course’? On the top of Lords, ninety degrees round from the new media stand, is a weathercock depicting Father Time, a crook-backed old man with a scythe. It gently turns beneath the curved vapour trails that light up when the sun descends towards the horizontal axis as each day progresses, reminding the more astute spectators what the philosophers already know: that all space-based events (and what other type is there?) play themselves out beneath the sign of death.

Two summers ago I was sitting in HQ transcribing for the INS archive an interview with the post-Situationist artist Stewart Home about the nature of the spectacle while simultaneously watching the Test Match on tv and glancing out of my window to see if any rain clouds were nearing the stadium. From behind the London Eye, two massive brown Chinook helicopters rose and started heading north. George Bush was visiting the Queen that day. ‘It’s him,’ I thought. I tracked them as they swept hawk-like above the city - then, when they passed the blimp above Lords, looked back at the tv. There they were on the screen, being tracked from the ground camera. ‘President George Bush,’ the scrolling text announced. Moments later, a rain cloud loomed above the stadium and play stopped. To fill the air-time, Channel Four showed a previous match - one I myself had attended.

I’d started out in the cheap seats but had eventually managed to make phone contact with an INS associate who I knew was being entertained by the Lords Treasurer. The associate invited me to join him in the Treasurer’s box, where liveried watiers served cucumber sandwiches, cakes and champagne. Towards the end of play a Pakistani batsman hooked a rising ball that started heading straight for our box. It continued rising, hitting the apex of its curve as it passed high above the boundary rope - and as it did I realised that it was heading not only straight towards the box but, more precisely, directly for me. I stood up to catch it. Now, back in HQ, as Home repeated electronically the phrase ‘the spectacle is the order of power’, I watched on the tv what I had already experienced from the reverse angle: myself flinching and closing my eyes and the ball kinking at the final instant, missing me and smashing into the neatly-ordered trays and glasses, cakes and sandwiches. Collateral damage, I suppose. While well-groomed ladies and gentlemen all dived for cover, cream came showering down onto their upturned legs, like so much pigeon crap.

Tom McCarthy 2003

Originally published in the Rubber Band Gazette, New York