Part One: The Glacier as Image Maker

I’m going to write over the next few months about the ways that glaciers operate as image makers, but also as object makers, and also as place makers.

This first installment considers some of the image making performed by glaciers and how our attempts to model glaciers utilize functionally-identical processes to produce imagery.

I’m using “image-making” here to mean the practice where something or someone takes an object and produces some sort of mark with that object.

In the case of a glacier that mark is a line scribed in stone.

In the case of an engraving, it is a line cut into a printmaking plate with a graver.

The engraving becomes an image when that printmaking plate is inked and a print is pulled off of that plate with a piece of paper. Sometimes glaciers and engravings overlap—take this scan of an engraving printed in a book from 1888 that depicts the lines cut by a glacier into a piece of limestone:

So many overlaps exist between glacial processes and the craft practices of printmaking. I have not seen this formalized in an analytical treatment elsewhere, but I first noticed an abundance of craft language in the observational texts of early North American glacial studies during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914). Observational science is descriptive and empirical, but it precedes the formalization required for experimental science. Theory can emerge as descriptions accumulate, but it is messy and slow.

Reading older texts from this period of observation is a mixed bag, sometimes you read about obsolete ideas, other times you read about ideas that formed the bedrock of contemporary theory. Either way, the accumulation of observations creates the conditions necessary for recognizing patterns that support or detract from the development of a theory. Sorting out the good from the bad in this overload of information is part of the fun of tracing the development of a theory, and I think it has to do with the perspective of the original authors. It was new to them, so the writing feels fresh and vital.

These authors were coming to terms with the abundance of observations that suggested the North American landscape was shaped by a continent-sized glacier that they had never seen, something that resonates with my own interests as I document my attempt to understand a glacier without ever having seen one. In other words, I recognize their fervor because it maps to my own experience.

I had to laugh to myself when I noticed this hedging line about the density of the subject matter in the first paragraph of one of the primary texts from this period:

“Even within the bounds of a circumscribed subject the phenomena are so rich in variety that some restraint must be laid upon analytical treatment, lest it become wearisome through the very fertility of its distinctions.” Chamberlin (1888)

I am going to exhaust this overlap in content in a very long post that I promise will reward you for reading closely to the end.

What I am going to show here is how a simple decision in the construction of an image can make the difference between that image being seen as merely an illustration of a scene or as embodying substantive data about that scene.

I’ll do this while demonstrating a formal comparison between glacial process and engraving practices that contributed to the slow advance toward new theories (for the late 1800s) about the last ice age, and I’ll also test out the theory in a couple of printmaking experiments along the way in my studio.

This case is going to build slowly: accumulating details, pushing them forward, dropping some of them along the way only to pick them up again later, covering my tracks, finally receding away to expose lingering traces of a thought process that feels as slow and unknowable as a glacier itself.

What this study demonstrates:

The value of an image changes based on how well it satisfies a range of constraints.

This is shown through a series of comparisons of source photos and output engravings in government publications from the late 1800s during a time when new theories depended on quality data.

• The analysis evaluates compositional strategies in representational images portraying real life surface detail on stone and the way that tool paths impact fidelity of those details in the process of engraving the printing plate used to print the image.

• Engraving conventions are show to introduce systematic directional distortions.

• These distortions violate cognitive continuity between geological process and representation.

• These violations change the meaning of the images.

• Instead of producing data-quality images for building theory, images with specific violations become less authoritative visuals functioning as illustrations rather than as evidence.

• This matters for artists and scientists alike.

Part Two: How craft practices reshaped geological evidence

I picked up a couple original copies of Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin’s chapter “The Rock-Scorings of the Great Ice Invasions” which makes a systematic study of North American glacial striations as a chapter in the Seventh Annual report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior, 1885-1886 (1888), and I was struck by the engravings Chamberlin used to depict the glacial striae at landscape-scale, at object-scale, and at the level of surface texture. It seems that some of the images of glacial pavements were meant to set the scene impressionistically, while others functioned as actual geologic data for a readership who might otherwise not see these sites and specimens first hand.

The fact that glacial striations are depicted by engravings is significant. Engraving is functionally similar to glacial striation, so in some ways it is an optimal medium for representing the content it depicts, at least in terms of a coupling of form and function. But it is also prone to error, so in some ways it is not optimal at all. Either way, engraving was the only option available at the time because of the limited state of capability in off-set printing at the end of the nineteenth century. We’re left with a trove of examples of technical decisions made by craftspeople which tells a story about how new theories in glacial science were developing hand-in-hand with advances in our capacity to describe the data visually.

I find myself continually circling a small set of seemingly simple questions: What is an image? What am I looking at? How does this function as data? How were these images initially received? What does this tell me about glaciers? What does this tell me about the craft of composition?

Engraving procedures themselves, like any expert practice of techniques, encode the epistemology of their practice. By looking at the product of a practice you learn something about what that practice knows and how they reason about the world as they see it through their particular lens, conditioned by their specific discipline.

Chamberlin’s use of engravings to illustrate his reports to the United States Geological Survey in the late 1800s presents a mixed bag of imagery that fills many functions, ranging from establishing visual context to operating as stand-ins for actual data. One image in particular establishes the backbone of this theory; an engraving produced from an original print of a photograph that I happen to own, and when I saw the engraving of this image for the first time, I immediately knew something was wrong about the engraving.

When I looked broadly at the engravings in Chamberlin’s texts across the decade of 1880, I sensed that he had intended some images to count as data but they failed to function as data because of the technical structure and strategy employed by the unnamed engravers producing these engravings.

I’m going to show that these failures of compositional strategy prevented some images from standing in as data when they could have, because they violated several principles across multiple domains from visual theory to psychology to glaciology, among others. I’m also going to look at what this means for illustration as a practice, and I’ll be testing my hand at producing engravings in line with the theme of glacial striation, while making this analysis in my on-going project An Attempt to Understand a Glacier Without Ever Having Seen One, which is archived at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

The key problem is the orientation of lines used by the engravers to create texture, because those lines depict the lines that glaciers scratched into stone and the engraver’s lines contradict nature’s lines.

In other words, the tool paths did not match the glacial paths.

Had the engravings been produced with tool paths that matched the path of glacial force, they could have stood in as data instead of merely performing as scenery-establishing imagery.

What emerges from this analysis is the confirmation of the communication failures between two systems of codified professional vision (the idioms and techniques of Engraving as a practice, and the formulation of imagery and diagrams to illustrate Geologic reasoning as a practice).

The core claim I will make here is that glacially-carved grooves have a dominant vector field in the fact that abrasion occurs along a continuous direction of motion. The engravings illustrating Chamberlin’s 1888 report construct the grooves using mark making that is largely perpendicular to that inferred glacial motion. This means that the engraver’s motor action does not align with the geological force trajectory, and this isn’t merely illustration, it produces an inadequate representation that breaks perceptual continuity, resulting in an image that communicates scenery rather than operating as an image that presents data about process.

I believe the representation failed because the medium’s operational strategy contradicted the geologic dynamics being depicted.

This is a shame because the process of engraving is functionally mimetic of the process of glacial striation. The fact that striations in bedrock are depicted by engraving in this 1888 text is significant and it opens a path of inquiry that offers insight into several domains simultaneously: visual cognition, media theory, historical scientific illustration, art history, knowledge transmission, phenomenological experience, and the psychological ontology of landscape.

Anyway, Chamberlin uses 50 illustrations in his 1888 text, and all but three of them are engravings based on photographs of sites that illustrate the theory his text produces. Some of the engravings stand as data while the remainder serve to illustrate.

I think it helps to see the variety of images from this text, and to get a sense of how they vary from each other categorically and individually, so I took a quick pass at categorizing them into groups. Here are nine basic categories (each in dashed circles with labels), clustered into three main groupings of type (Substrates, Incisions, and Objects) denoted by shaded amorphic forms, and two higher-order groupings (Data Stand-Ins, and Contour Structures) collected inside unshaded lines:

Part Three: Testing the image

Chamberlin was writing at a time when geology in America was trying to process all of the observational data that seemed to point to a new theory of continental glaciation. This moment in time preceded experimental empiricism; it was observational science, but it was still empirical in an interpretive sense. Saving a biography of Chamberlin for a later date, I’ll focus here on the way he used engravings to stand in for data for a community that was synthesizing the evidence for a vast continental-sized ice sheet as the agent involved in carving up the landscape of the northern United States.

One thing I will stress here is that he was writing at a time when science was still deciding how these landforms came to exist. It was Chamberlin’s tightening of standards in field-empiricism that enabled comparative observational data to become meaningful enough that quantitative modeling could become the next logical step.

As I outlined in this post, printing in the late 1800s was not yet able to reproduce photographs through off-set printing, which made engraving a niche industry in illustrating books. Most engraving firms produced contract work for publishers, and when it came to scientific illustration, firms that illustrated catalogs and children’s books would find themselves illustrating technical images beyond their expertise.

Also, as I mentioned in that post, I think some of the engravers rendered the long linear lines of glacial striations in more cognitively compelling ways than others, and I’m going to get into that in significant detail in this post, starting from a view of the engravings, moving into some theory, and finally—since I can’t judge these engravers without judging my own work—I will share the process and feeble outcomes of some practical experiments in glacial engraving that I undertook in my studio as I attempt to draw formal comparisons between printmaking and glacial processes in my quest to understand the continental ice sheet that shaped where I live.

Chamberlin’s engravings deal with linear forms carved in stone, and in a search for comparative engravings featuring strong fidelity to the actual lines of nature, I came across a significant contrastive example in botany, where linear forms define the vein structures of leaves and blades of grass. Bear with me for this brief digression so that I can make the case for why I think fidelity between real-world data and the decisions made during the process of engraving matter for the rendering of representational data. It’s interesting.

In Chamberlin’s reports we know that Dalziel Brothers and Hart & Von Arx produced many of the engravings from photographs taken by Chamberlin, A.C. Platt, and others. The key point here is that the engravings were not produced in-house, they were contract labor produced in engraving shops outside of the institutional locus of the research itself, which I think matters significantly in the type of quality we see displayed in the variety of images Chamberlin published.

Occasionally, authors of government reports and scientific research would produce the engravings themselves, or at least in close collaboration with a specific engraver. For example, a decade after Chamberlin’s texts were published, F. Lamson-Scribner’s comprehensive works on American Grasses printed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1897-1900) were careful to control the engraving process, realizing the engravings were a kind of identification data for the differentiation of species:

“The drawings are all from carefully selected specimens, the habit sketches being made by Mr. A.H. Baldwin. The enlarged details were drawn by myself, with the exception of a few which were made by Miss M.D. Baker. The engraving is the work of Mr. L.S. Williams and Mr. George P. Bartle. The work has all been done in the office of the Division, with the exception of that performed by Mr. Bartle.” - Lamson-Scribner, January 22, 1897

I point this out because the specificity of identifying the chain of custody of image production in a scientific text like this signals that the imagery is important. It is important; it functioned as data. The botanical details used to identify grass species feature long linear patterns whose directionality are important in differentiating one species from the next. Graver lines are contrastive data across images.

Back to Chamberlin’s text. Throughout his report he describes the engravings in both the captions and the narrative, and occasionally he vocalizes his opinion of the quality of the engraving, which I think is important to note since it makes the case that Chamberlin believed these engravings were standing in for data for readers who would not otherwise see these landforms in person. If nothing else, Chamberlin’s commentary on the engravings offers a window into the publication timelines and the lag between commissioning the engraving, receiving it back, and the deadline that made it impractical to request a revision of the engraving.

When I first opened his text, I came across an image I already knew intimately, since I own the original photograph Chamberlin’s engraving was based upon. This photo is of a long view down the “Great Central Groove” on Kelleys Island captured by A.C. Platt. I had looked at this photograph for a long time before seeing the engraving created to represent it, so I know I’m slightly biased, but I hate the translation. Here is the pair (image on left, engraving on right). I’ll be referring to this as Pair 4 throughout the text. Here it is:

As I’ll show later in this post, the engraving violates psychological principles that are present in the photograph. That violation flattens the image from a high-fidelity photograph that encodes the directional motion data preserved in a geologic scene and turns it into an image that counters the direction of glacial motion. The engraving contradicts the glacial motion by attempting to represent it with the use of graver tool-path trajectories (shown below in red for a selection of lines) that move perpendicularly to the actual path pf motion of the ice (shown with blue arrows) that carved the groove trough.

I’m sensitive to this starting to get tedious, so I’m not going to spend a long time on this image just yet, I want to get through several more images to build the case before I dive in deep on thoroughly analyzing any particular engraving.

Because so many of these engravings were based on photographs, I wrote to the USGS archivist to see how many I could track down. The archivist was able to send me several of the source photographs taken by Chamberlin that were used to produce the engravings. They didn’t have all of the images, but they sent enough to build a case. I was able to get high resolution scans (1600dpi) and I scanned all of the engravings at 1600dpi as well. This gave me a small dataset that I could use to run some comparative statistics, and I spent two weeks in February looking at these image pairs from both quantitative and qualitative angles, and analyzed them vis-a-vis contemporary visual theories from cognitive science to see what I could learn. This all ended up pushing me into experimenting with my own hands in my studio producing new printmaking methods, so I think it’s useful to share here as context.

I want to concentrate on four photo-engraving pairs today (the photographs (left) and the engravings (right) are both registered in size and layout for analysis, some of the photos are cropped from their source to match the size of the published engravings. Here are the four pairs:

The USGS sent me more photos than these four, but these were the only ones that were actually published in Chamberlin’s 1888 report. Regrettably, none of the highly-detailed data-quality detail images were included in this set, but my 1600dpi scans of those engravings give enough detail to reconstruct the glacial motion force path and determine the fidelity of their graver paths to the striations.

For speed, let’s move on to image pair one. While that first image (now called Pair 4 Photo) is of a landscape and features in situ, this second image (now called Pair 1 Photo) is of an object removed from the landscape. It is an image of two blocks of grooved limestone laying in the grass. Here is the photo, followed by the engraving (note the gray borders around both images, they are registered for optimal overlap so that I could run statistical processing):

The geologic structure of these objects are functional traces of the actual motion that produced the structure, so in some ways, it makes sense to expect that the engraver would produce strokes that align with the geologic motion present in the stone. I know there are some differences in 2D representation, and even the selection of an approach to printmaking changes this, but for engraving I think it’s safe to expect the major trajectories of these traces in stone to determine the strategy of manipulating the major trajectories of the graver as it cuts into the printing plate to render those traces in the engraving.

When I compared the source photo to the engraving output, I was able to evaluate the fidelity between the graver tool path and the glacial abrasion path—to see how closely the engraver followed the geologic structure—and I was able to quantify the alignment at a high level. The faint green line in the center of the image indicates the average axis of the abrasion path marks on the stone, and the crossing navy blue line indicates the average axis of the engraver’s tool path across the image to produce the representation. They are roughly perpendicular.

Clearly this engraving expertly uses shadow and idiom to produce the composition so that the object can be read dimensionally. I’m not arguing that it is a bad image as a visual object. I am arguing that it is a bad image as a piece of geologic data, because the object itself (the stone) was produced with motion directionality that is the data about the glacier that carved it, and this directional trace should be fully evident in the engraving if the engraving is to stand in as data.

This next image is a scaled view of the engraving which shows that the secondary cross-hatching to achieve toning in the highlighted faces of the stone (annotated in navy blue) violates the trajectory of the glacial abrasion path (annotated in green). Stock removal on the engraving plate goes against the orientation trace of stock removal on the glacially striated stone.

So far the two examples we’ve seen are functioning less like data, and more like evidence impressionistically establishing the scene and depicting groove contours at an order of magnitude that don’t necessarily need high fidelity between the engraving and the photo, so long as the impression of the direction of ice abrasion is evident in the quick glance at the composition of the engraving. But Chamberlin presents several more nuanced engravings in his text that are meant to do more than build the scene, they are meant to stand in for data.

Consider this engraving (Chamberlin’s figure 35):

Unfortunately, the USGS library was unable to locate the source photograph for this engraving, so I was unable to analyze it statistically, but the detail of this tight view of striae, the crescentic marks, and the crossing gouge marks are legible as data to anyone with an understanding of layering in composition. By necessity there is crossing that must happen compositionally in sequence to depict the actual crossing gouges of later glacial striae crossing earlier glacial striae, so resorting to an idiomatic engraving process like cross-hatching functionally violates the compositional goal and prevents a close reading of this image for what it must communicate. In the physical specimen, this crossing depicts the time stamps of the original marks laid down by the glacier, and preserving that information successfully depends upon its legibility in the engraving as a sequenced event. The goal of the image is to show the overlap and crossing of glacial striae, so any overlap and crossing must serve that goal as if it were a tracing.

And here is an even tighter view of a portion of that image:

Notice how the highlighting is achieved not through additional long stock-removal for secondary toning (as if to increase line weight), but the engraver uses short scooping punctum. Yes, they still run perpendicular to the main gouges, but only locally, not globally as they do in earlier images. There is restraint in using marks that might otherwise violate the clarity of the trajectory of the striae. Compare the short point-like gouges (royal blue) to the long linear gouges (green) in this detail of Chamberlin’s figure 35:

And now compare that figure to Pair 1 (Chamberlin’s figure 28) below where we see the green establishing the primary gouge direction (which also matches the glacial abrasion path), crossed over by the royal blue secondary gouges placed down globally across the section to establish toning for that region of the image:

There are no records of the names of the engravers of these two figures, but based on the recurrence of the techniques across the full set of Chamberlin’s images, and the function those images, the grouping of images employing the global cross-hatch vs the grouping of images employing the shorter point-like hatching, I feel confident they were created by different hands. I’m further convinced because they are compositional strategies that are applied indiscriminately across a variety of images rather than operating as compositional strategies employed judiciously within the same engravings when the need for each technique arises in the depiction of the content.

Other images in Chamberlin, 1888 do show the names of the engraving firm in the bottom of the engraving, or they note in the caption the source of the image. Notably, both figure 35 and figure 28, and others in those styles, lack an indication of the house that produced the engravings, but in the case of figure 35 they do indicate they are based on photographs from the “educational series of the Survey” so the engraving depicts a textural feature that some of the scenery engravings cannot faithfully depict in a meaningful way. No matter what, it is clear these engravings in the style of figure 35 operate as data.

Here are two other engravings that approach data-quality, all from the educational series:

And here is an engraving that Chamberlin provides additional commentary about the production of the engraving, indicating he was aware of the communication value of every mark on an engraving—he identifies the white flecks as snow that had fallen on the stone which showed up in the photograph, and which was ultimately rendered by the engraver despite it being meaningless for scale or other function in the engraved image. Chamberlin writes: “The granular appearance of the surface is due to snow falling at the time the photograph was taken.”

But if we zoom in on this image, we can see this image is not like the data-quality images. The engraver attempts to indicate direction of travel by toning, and achieves this tone by laying down perpendicular lines as the first layer (suggested by the light blue), followed by repeated short secondary toning gouges that move parallel to the direction of travel (depicted by short green arrows). The gouges which faithfully trace the direction of travel are the secondary marks in this image, they finish off the engraver’s rendering instead of establishing the gesture of the groove as they do in contrasting images. If gestural fidelity is a concern, secondary marks should only be used to establish tone, but I believe this engraver was concerned with compositional fidelity (further evidenced by depicting scattered snowflakes from the photo). Chamberlin uses this figure in a section about jagged grooves produced in coarse stone, this figure depicts striated sandstone.

At this point I think it is safe to say that the engravers were general illustrators who were producing what they felt was visually convincing, they were not scientists focused on how the image would be read as data. That surprises me considering the context of where the images appear (inside an official report of the US Geological Survey), where I would expect the images to be faithful representations at a more granular level. This was the primary research publication at the time, and it was the closest thing to data that readers across the country would cite in their subsequent works that eventually coalesced into the accepted theory. If, as with F. Lamson-Scribner’s American Grasses engravings, there had been only one or two engravers and they worked in closer conversation with Chamberlin, we might have better data.

As I’ve alluded to elsewhere, I bet the engravers had never seen in person the subjects they were depicting. They were working from photographs, and the report itself was developing the science around the interpretation of the marks in stone, so you can’t blame them for not doing a better job. Most of the readers of the report didn’t even know how to interpret the marks at this point in time; a significant focus of the report was to help readers recognize and understand the marks. I can’t blame the engravers, but I do wish Chamberlin would have exercised a little more quality control. It would have strengthened the rhetorical value of his argument and tightened his claims at a discourse level. But it’s fair to say there was no first-hand exposure on the part of the engravers, which always comes through one way or another in 2D work rendered from photographs.

Why does this matter?

Part Four: Professional Vision & Particular Ways of Seeing

Engraving is a particular profession, and shops were particular communities. They knew things about the tools and techniques that non-specialists did not know, did not need to know, or didn’t care to know.

Looking at these different engravings with Charles Goodwin’s model of Professional Vision (nb: this is a 2009 reprint of the 1994 original), we can see Chamberlin practicing the three disciplines of a professional. In Goodwin’s terms we can say that Chamberlin was coding the range of glacial striation, while highlighting key details about particular specimens and sites, and producing and articulating material representations of that through the use of engravings. Similarly, the engraving shops were coding what they saw in the imagery as they planned their compositions, while handling some compositional problems with strategies that highlighted what they understood the image to be speaking, while making judgement calls in the act of producing and articulating material representations with every single graver stroke and gouge and scratch they made on the printing plates. What happened here was a misalignment of competing systems of professional vision in the design brief exchanged between Chamberlin and the various engraving shops in his commissions.

I think about this when I read Chamberlin’s works because he often asserts in the text whether an image does a good job or a poor job of explaining the image. He highlights what should stands as evidence, and he laments inadequacy of some images to explain. I believe that Chamberlin would agree with an embodied cognitive theoretical assertion that using the trajectory of the glacial movement as the trajectory of the graver tool path is a better way to depict the data in an engraving.

There is a lot more to say on professional vision and these engravings, but I’ll save it for a future article on glaciers as object makers where we’ll look at how Chamberlin relied on craft and tool metaphors to describe the glacial structures depicted in the engravings, and how that might have contributed to advancement in geologic reasoning about continental glaciation in America. There is strong overlap between Chamberlin’s metaphors and the actual practice of engraving, so much that I wonder if Chamberlin was influenced by engraving as he made sense of the marks he was interpreting.

I don’t have complete timelines on which engraving firm produced which images first, but six years earlier, Chamberlin published “Preliminary Paper on the Terminal Moraine of the Second Glacial Epoch“ which appeared in the 1882 Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, and each of the exquisite engravings in that 1882 report were produced by J Dalziel of Dalziel Brothers. Here is one of my favories:

Note that the linear path of the tortuous grooves are traced along the path of glacial erosion by way of graver tool paths that run fully parallel to that tortuous channel. No oppositional toning was needed in this rendering of the groove structure, so clearly a well-executed rendering of the glacial grooves and striae do not need to rely on secondary visual idioms to produce the correct gesture with the correct naive physics.

While he does not explicitly state that using the trajectory of the glacial movement as the trajectory of the graver is a better way, Chamberlin (and his contemporaries) often described glaciers as producing (“graving”) lines with gravers held tightly.

“…the symmetry, continuity, and peculiar form of some of which are only intelligible on the supposition that they were cut by a single graving tool, held with sufficient tenacity by the ice to excavate by a single movement a deep, sharply defined groove…”

When I read that I can see it suggested by the structural decisions in the Dalziel Brothers image above. Just a note for thoroughness, Dalziel Brothers were noted for carving their printing plates into the end grain of a boxwood blank, while Hart & Von Arx produced dry point etchings on metal plates. I mention this because I’m trained in wood and metal, and knowing what I know about metal, the sweep of a graver moving through material vs the sweep of a gouge through end grain of a hardwood like boxwood, I would expect the metal engravings to have more fluidity to the prints, but it is the wood plates carved by Dalziel Brothers that convey to me the most immersive and compelling treatment of the grooves. They had it harder but their images were more elegant while being faithful to the details of the subject matter.

Now let’s look back at this engraving from the 1888 report:

The real-life structure of this glacial groove is like a riverbed which invites the gaze along the deepest part of the river because the perceptual system expects directional reinforcement. So orientation cues should be stabilizing eye movement along the dominant vector when looking at the image. But in the engraving, the marks run orthogonal to motion and each stroke acts as a termination of directional flow so that the viewer has to reconstruct the length of the groove through serial inference instead of through direct perceptual continuation. It’s a series of blocks that resist the eye to the point that continuity in this engraving is something we are forced to infer instead of something we perceive.

Sometimes horizontal lines receding into a vanishing point help establish a sense of depth. Take for instance a railroad track seen from an oblique angle. The two rails form strong visual priming for linear leading lines, but it’s the crossing railroad ties that I’m interested in here since they run perpendicular to perspectival trajectory. The distance between each railroad tie is constant, but they will appear to be spaced farther apart in the foreground than they do as they vanish into the distance. This engraving is not like that—all of the crossing lines are spaced evenly as they move from foreground to mid-ground, so the engraver’s evenly spaced lines aren’t contributing to depth perception the way we would expect from what we know about our encounters with railroads in the real world.

I wonder if this might also be connected to the Ponzo Illusion, which shows how our vision is actively rescaled by depth cues, where two equal-length horizontal lines cross vertically-converging lines in perspective and create a situation where the horizontal line that is nearer in overlapped perspective appears shorter than the horizontal line that is further from view in the overlapped perspective.

In Yildiz et al. (2019), a stimulus that was structurally similar to this glacial groove structure was presented to subjects in a variety of configurations and textures. The goal was to look at the way that linear perspective cues and texture gradients influenced depth perception, and both were seen to influence size in depth, but this study confirmed that linear cues had a stronger, more dominate effect experimentally among this subject pool.

Here is the original stimulus set from the Yildiz et al. study:

Note that the gradient texture in the “A” stimulus was more of a cobblestone texture than the consistent perpendicular-to-motion cross-linear tool paths in our glacial groove engraving, so it’s not a one-for-one comparison, but it does establish the way that linearity enhances rescaling in scenes structurally similar to this rendering of the grooves, so it’s worth mentioning here because rescaling is an active processing of visual information and Yildiz et al. shows that linear perspective doesn’t tax cognition down the field of view in the composition (in my reading). It is also worth noting that linear perspective is still reinforced through the recursion of the texture, so take the comparison with a grain of salt.

Since I mentioned the spacing between the orthogonal lines remaining constant, I should also mention that I also initially analyzed the tensor structure of this engraving, but I quickly realized that was the wrong approach because my focus is not on the gradient of light, it’s the directionality of the tool path with respect to ice flow trajectories, and the tensor maps do not address that in a meaningful way for this situation. This will come out in Model A in the statistics section.

At this point I want to jump back to the photo-engraving pairings that I’ve been able to dig up in my research on this report from Chamberlin, and look at some of the things I found while computing the statistical fidelity between the engraving and the photo. We’ve already looked at Pair 1 depicting bedrock stone as an object, a large chunky block laying in the grass. We discovered the engraving strategy was treating this more like an illustration and less like a piece of data. Another pair inside the report involves a hand-specimen of stone that has been striated, it’s scaled down significantly from the bedrock block in 35. Take a look at this engraving from Pair 3:

…and here is the photo that Chamberlin took that became the source for the engraving (nb: I cropped and registered it into alignment with the copy of the engraving that I ran through processing):

The engraving clearly used perpendicular cross-hatching to create highlights and groove depth in the tone in the main bands. Here’s an image modified to bring those crosses into focus:

What the engraving gets right about glacial motion is the global orientation of the bands of the striae in general which are laid out with primary tool paths moving across the image, but the engraver then obliterated that primary trajectory path by highlighting with graver tool paths that run perpendicular to actual motion on this piece.

Now quickly on to Pair 2:

Like Pair 1, this Pair 2 engraving uses a primary stroke orientation that aligns with the path of glacial motion, but the engraver went back over the work with a perpendicular tool path for the secondary strokes in order to create toning on the washed-out portion of the stone as depicted in the source photograph. It seems that the engraver was aiming for visual fidelity to contrast between the rendered engraving and the photograph, but not really understanding fidelity between graver tool paths and the trace of the glacier on the stone as an object.

When I first saw this engraving, and then later the photo, I felt like it was familiar to me. But it wasn’t until I paired it with this image that I made the connection:

The photo above is an actual column of glacially fluted stone laying in situ in the north quarry on Kelleys Island. I believe this is the section that the specimen block in Pair 2 was cut from, but it is important to note that the groove contours are natural. I point this out because I’ve discussed this image in the past with people who had the first impression that the fluting was carved by a sculptor or mason. This fluting is the natural work of glacial agency. This photograph appears in many texts, but my scan here is from G. Frederick Wright’s (1889) The Ice Age in North America. Wright was a contemporary of Chamberlin, although in some respects, not an equal peer. Wright’s background, reputation, affiliation, and relationship to Chamberlin are interesting, but not important here. However, I mention Wright because I believe he was responsible for the acquisition of the Oberlin College specimen pictured below as it lay today on the campus. The contour profiles of this partially buried stone match up with some of the contours in both the Pair 1 and Pair 2 source photos, although the Oberlin specimen has additional mass that the Pair 2 source photo lacks, but the match up is significantly close to say with certainty that they came from the same linear section of the grooves.

Specimens were cut from the Kelleys Island grooves and distributed across the country as curiosities. The bedrock has become an object, and the object has traveled far, just like the hard rock bedrock of the Canadian Shield that fragmented into objects that traveled south to carve the bedrock limestone from which these specimens were cut. More on this in a future post about glaciers as object makers and their relationship to sculpture, but now I want to refocus on print making.

Part Five: Print Making & Glaciers: A Formal Comparison

Even in basic language about glacial movement, printing is present. For instance, the glaciological term “overprinting” refers to the process where a glacier covers its earlier tracks with new ones that obliterate (or at least superimpose themselves over) the earlier ones.

Dry-point etchings and intaglio printing are apt metaphors for imagining the massive etching that glacial scratches could produce. Yes, a glacial pavement has an engraved surface, but the stones that did the engraving also show a variety of scratches and scouring marks.

These glacially-transported stones operated as the graver to cut the lines in bedrock, held, as Chamberlin puts it, with “sufficient tenacity by the ice” to engrave the grooves. But the action of carving bedrock wears down these stone tools in a variety of ways.

The rate of decay in a stone tool relates differentially to the composition and hardness of the stone tool, the abrasive force of the glacier, the resistance faced by the stone as it grinds into bedrock, among other factors. Some stones wear away faster than others.

Some fine igneous stones—like quartz—wear away smoothly and evenly, producing smooth bedrock grooves, whereas coarser igneous stones—like granite—consisting of many types of crystals of different sizes, shapes, and hardness, differentially wears away through the grinding process to produce a textured bedrock surface. In both cases, the stone the glacier uses to make the mark itself will deform to receive a texture that evolves through mutual abrasion. All other things being equal, tight grained stones wear away smoothly, coarse-grained stones maybe less so. I’ll get into this more when I make the case of the glacier being an object maker, and we’ll explore why granite behaves the way it does (I have many examples produced both naturally and through empirical experimental tests). But since we’re focused on glaciers as image-makers in this post, I want to return to the idea of a glacially-transported stone operating as an engraving tool.

Take this 1919 glass magic lantern slide from my collection which depicts a pebble from Kansan drift in Nebraska. This pebble was held by ice as it was being transported, the pebble was the tool, and it shows deformation from abrasion that happened at the interface of the tool and the bedrock surface it was abrading:

It’s covered in micro-striae.

It almost looks like a printer’s plate itself.

This image is smooth, it is a photo developed on the surface of the glass, so I can’t print it as is, but I decided to create a dry-point etching replica of the image on an acrylic plate which I inked in cerulean blue hue. How professional engravers produced images with the degree of feature fidelity that the Chamberlin engravings show is beyond my ability to comprehend or to replicate. I’m not interested in becoming a print maker, but I feel like I can’t understand the challenges of the process without trying it out myself, so I did my best.

And I pulled a series of prints of this etching to see if I could get the image of the stone to behave like a real printing plate.

But why stop at an etching? If the stones themselves look like printer’s plates, why not pull a print from the stone itself?

So I dug through my collection of glacial stones and printed a handful that had flat bottoms covered in scratches. Here are some of the first rough attempts from that process. These are specimens as much as they are artworks.

By rendering the glacially-transported stones as printing plates, I translate their utility away from data and into image. It is less a representation than it is an imprint.

Are the images produced by these stone printing plates better called lithographs? Obviously not in the Art Historical use of the term, but perhaps they are a kind of functional lithography in a compounding of the Greek lĭ́thos (λῐ́θος, lithos, or stone), and grăphĭ́ā (γρᾰφῐ́ᾱ, -graphy, or writing/drawing). Perhaps a sort of crudo or brut lithography. Perhaps more deserving of being called lithographs than images drawn onto a slab of limestone. I won’t say more; I am not really a printmaker.

But glaciers draw images all the time; glaciers scribe lines in big slabs of bedrock by using tiny rocks as drawing implements.

The fidelity of my etching to the engraving from the source image, or the striations and crescentic marks, or the long linearity of the lines on bedrock, or even the prints of striation marks on the glacial erratics are all only approximations. But some can be more approximate than others, and motor correspondence between the depiction and the phenomenon being depicted turns what would otherwise only be an illustration into an actual trace of a trace, which is one step closer to becoming data.

The glacier inscribed with directional energy to produce the texture in situ. The engraving is a physical inscription by another moving agent (but with self-reflective agency), and fidelity between the two requires homology between the inscription processes. If the engraver understood the source photo for what it was, and used the graver to follow the groove axis, the engraver’s gesture would re-enact the glacial motion (as best as could be done), and the image would contain procedural information in addition to appearing similar to the site at surface texture level (like how that earlier Dalziel print of the tortuous groove focused on the texture by only using lines that traced the actual groove texture).

The engraving could have become a trace of a trace, with every print becoming a retelling of the original scouring.

Back to the full set of the Chamberlin-commissioned engravings, the strategies of depiction vary considerably. Determining the statistical deviation between source image and engraved representation is possible in some cases, but only for engravings where the source image is available to analyze. The photos that I have in possession were sources for the engravings depicting the scenery, not the close ups of the scored rocks in situ. The USGS library was only able to send a handful of source photos, many of the images in 1888 don’t have a source that is traceable. The other way I could analyze the statistical deviation between engravings as scientific evidence and the source would be to view the rocks themselves directly. However, none of the details in Chamberlin 1888 give exact coordinates to the striations on the tight views, and for the ones on Kelleys Island, where I could have spent the time scouting for small scratches, all of those depicted stretches of rock were already quarried away.

The glacial grooves that remain on the island are covered in overburden, except for a ~400’ length that was uncovered in 1972, nearly a hundred years after Chamberlin’s survey. Here’s a detail of a silver gelatin photo from my collection that shows the edge of this groove structure in 1890. You can see the depth of the overburden and the striation of till, quarry debris, and more in the exposed section.

There is this engraving in Chamberlin, 1888 that looks at this precise location head-on produced before the main channel had been relieved of the overburden:

And here is another view that could easily be a similar site nearby:

Obviously these aren’t very useful for tight views of comparing the engraver’s hand to the photograph, especially the second one; the lines deceive—the flat field in the lower center is the surface of a pool of water, a vernal puddle, not the striated floor of a groove. But they give an impression of the material that filled the grooves after the glacier receded, and they help give context to the matrix of till.

Up until this point, engraving has been reserved for a human-produced 2D rendering of an image, but there are human-produced engravings in the rocks on Kelleys Island. They are pictorial and orthographic, but I’ll mention them here since it is an overlap of the practice of engraving in situated substrates. From headstones in the cemetery to messages scratched into the bedrock of the grooves themselves, to Inscription Rock on the south shore, and the lost north shore inscription rock, these stones bear the imprint of intentional engraving practices. But there are still other types worth mentioning, like the marks made unintentionally by boat trailers cutting furrows into the curb along the boat launch, or the voids of the quarry itself—an industrial-scale engraving of sorts.

While I was in Oberlin, I stopped at an art supply store near the site of the grooves specimen at Oberlin College and I came across another anthropogenically-formed groove structure, this time it was a linoleum printmaking test block:

Customers could test out carving blades, gouges and liners on this mounted block to see what kinds of cuts the blades would make. When I saw this block, I immediately wanted it so that I could print it. This is a crowd-sourced linoleum block, cut by countless individuals, each with their own logic in placing blade to block. This is not unlike the how bottoms of rocks ground into the bedrock with countless pieces of sediment, sand, pebbles, and other abrasives between the rock and the floor. So I share it as an illustration. Fortunately, the shop owner agreed to sell it to me, so now my question is:

Should I print it?

Part Six: Statistical (In)Fidelity and (In)Adequacy

When I started running the statistical analyses on the image pairs, I wasn’t sure which method was actually going to be useful to me, but I learned a couple of things about what not to do.

The core question I was trying to answer was Does the engraving preserve the dominant directional structure of the actual substrate? Because I’ve seen many of these sites in person, when I look at the source photos, I can see the directional structure faithfully translated from 3D to 2D form, so I feel confident accepting the photos as a valid stand-in for the real sites during the engraving process. The photos reflect the phenomenon Chamberlin was attempting to have the engravers render in their engravings.

One thing I need to clarify here is my core question does not address whether or not the engraving itself succeeds at representing the subject matter of the image. I am not evaluating the quality of the engraving using the standards of that discipline. This is a post-disciplinary effects-based inquiry that evaluates whether or not the engraving is an adequate image to allow a scientist to theorize by way of the translation of data through a representational flattening of the real world.

Several of the sites depicted in these engravings are gone now, having been quarried away a century ago. Many of Chamberlin’s images were produced from photos taken by A.C. Platt, who documented the Kelleys Island groove structures as they were being quarried away before the science that could describe them had a chance to comprehend them at the scale necessary to develop the theory of continental glaciation that might have spurred on their preservation at a larger scale. Chamberlin was searching for adequate imagery, representations capable of orienting viewers to the details that would help them answer in their own minds the rhetorical question Only a glacier could have carved this, right?

The viewer could have reached this conclusion by visiting the sites, reading the descriptive accounts of field-based empiricism conveyed as observational fact, corroborating the data over many sources, and following along with Chamberlin’s train of thought. But sometimes complex thinking needs a clear image to crystalize from the chaos, and how much better is it when the visual makes it crystal clear.

Chamberlin needed high-fidelity correspondence between the illustration and the actual subject depicted.

In a previous post I mentioned how travel writers describe the Kelleys Island Glacial Grooves with the same trite expressions about these grooves being the largest grooves in the world. It sounds nice, but it’s false, but I can’t help thinking about Werner Herzog’s condemnation of inadequate imagery when I read this kind of writing. Take these lines from Herzog in Paul Cronin’s 2002 Herzog on Herzog:

“I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here…What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.” (Herzog in Cronin, page 66).

The theory of continental glaciation did develop despite the scarcity of adequate imagery, and despite the increasing scarcity at the time of examples of glacial striae in the landscape being removed through quarrying of exemplar sites of striation. And the Kelleys Island Glacial Grooves are paraded around now as the most exemplary site because many of the other sites around the northern states and southern Canada are no longer with us. But I have to wonder if we’d have more groove sites around today if there had been better images.

Here’s an overlay image I produced of the remaining exposed grooves on Kelleys Island from another project. The yellow area was once full of grooves that have been since quarried away (nb: the overlay text relates to the other project, not this one)—it’s helpful to see the scale of the Kelleys Island site for context:

When I look at the engraving, what stands out most to me is the series of repeated lines drawn inside the groove channel between me and the mid-ground, they create a kind of cartoon barricade, visual obstacles to a flow of attention along the interior of the channel. Instead of pulling my gaze into the image, the horizontal lines continually interrupt my visual field and pull me to the right, and then up the right side of the groove channel, emphasizing through my scanning gaze the cross-section contour of one of the many increments down the groove demarcated by the cross-section horizonal line.

These tool path lines horizontally inked across this engraving stand in contrast to the trend of the inferred motion path in the photo, marked below in green for the average motion path bearing both in the photo and in the real live site, crossed by red derived from the average tool path/graver lines of ink in the engraving.

In the practice of the discipline of Architecture the floor is a primitive element of spatial structure.

Why do floors matter for the analysis of engravings of glacial striation? It has to do with psychological effect of the directionality of floorboards.

The bottom of the groove channel in this image is structurally similar to the floor of a hallway: narrow width, long length. We can call this a functional floor.

Imagine trying to lay wooden floorboards in this image. If your primary goal was to create visual depth that pulls people through the space with the leading lines of perspective you would lay them lengthwise running from the foreground to the background. This aligns with the Gestalt principle of Continuity and it creates an openness to the space that cognitively encourages engagement with the space. The naive physics of a visual application of the semantic category of embodied cognition called Force Dynamics (Talmy, 2000) would say that running the floorboards in alignment with the path of motion (running them the long way) is correct because it removes the barrier to motion that would result from having the floorboards cross the path of motion (i.e., running them the short way).

Maybe “correct” is the wrong word, maybe it would be better to say that if you did align the floorboards with the intended direction of travel, you would encourage movement through the space. Likewise, if you did not align the floorboards with the intended direction of travel, you would discourage movement through the space. So correctness depends upon your goal.

A.C. Platt’s goal in his original photograph was to show motion along the central corridor of the groove in which he is standing inside of as he takes the picture. We know this because the composition structures the groove so that the visual path recedes into the distance in perspective, and we see that he gives us additional clues in the photograph about scale (which stand in for distance here). Platt would frequently create and use shadows to illustrate real-world information about the site that functioned as a deictic indexical reference scale (something I may address in the future), and this image has his shadow in the foreground as he stands with his camera. Down the length of the groove channel he is photographing his traveling party of six whose diminished scale helps the viewer of the photograph construct depth. The viewer’s gaze is oriented along the channel. And importantly, the group of people at the end of the channel prevent the cross-section of this channel from becoming the focal characteristic of the content of this image. This is not an image describing the cross-section of the groove.

The primary content here is a view along a channel from the immersive participant viewpoint of standing inside that channel, establishing the spectator viewpoint of completing the view at the six people standing in the midground as the secondary content. Also, by looking at Platt’s shadow, his height, and the height of the camera in the shadow, we can estimate the eye level of the camera vis-a-vis the location of the party in the distance. Combined with the leading lines that crest and fall at the start of mid-ground, and knowing their height at their distance the viewer of this image palpably senses the hump inside the groove.

Chamberlin’s goal in using this photograph from Platt was to describe vertically arched striae on vertical plane surfaces, the arch is up and over this hump. We know this because Chamberlin describes the various horizontal arches in the right foreground of the photo:

“The significance which attaches to curved striae lying in an oblique plane is accentuated in some respects, though not in all, by striation on vertically arched surfaces and by vertically arched striae on vertical plane surfaces, both of which are well illustrated in the accompanying figure, likewise from the great central groove of Kelley’s (sic) island, in which there are at the same time less notable exhibitions of horizontally curved grooves in the right foreground (Fig. 14).” Chamberlin, 1888, pp177-178

We also know that Chamberlin thought the image was adequate, as he mentions his point was “well illustrated” by the figure. This confuses me because my initial reaction to the engraving of this image was revulsion.

As I mentioned, I own an original print that Platt made of his photograph, and before I had even seen the engraving I had closely studied the photo and looked at it more times than I can count, so I came in with a deep familiarity with what is happening in the image. Furthermore, I have actually been inside the remaining glacial grooves on Kelleys Island and I know the logic of the space, the scale, and how it presents as a structure in real life and in photographic documentation. Chamberlin had the benefit of both of these experiences, too, but the engraver only had the experience of working from the photograph, which I believe makes a difference.

My initial (and lingering) revulsion came from the fact that the graver tool path discourages visual movement through the space because the graver tool path described motion that ran perpendicular to the movement of the ice through the geologic scene. The engraver ran the floorboards the short way through the hallway instead of running them lengthwise, and so the most important thing Platt was trying to capture in his image was lost in Chamberlin’s engraver’s rendition of the photo.

While the engraver did use voids and negative space to communicate forward motion down the channel of the groove from foreground to midground, the tool path moved from right to left, which in my reading accentuates what Chamberlin described as “less notable exhibitions of horizontally curved grooves in the right foreground.”

This engraving better described the horizontal curvature of the scene (the cross section) which was secondary to Chamberlin’s goal, and the engraver defined the vertically arched surface through negative space instead of positive space, which would have better emphasized the veridical directionality of the original agent that formed the landscape itself, namely, the Glacier. As it stands, the engraving violates Talmy’s notion of barrier removal to the visual field, which unfolds into a host of ways this engraving violates embodied experience of a space resulting in what I would consider an inadequate image for representing the real world as data and as scene-setting.

The published engraving employs many techniques in establishing depth, primarily the build up of the long leading lines by removing material from the printing plate to subtract the ink.

The long leading lines in the engraving are produced by removing material on the printing plate so that it does not carry ink in the spot where the line is supposed to emerge. The result is the areas of the image that lack the marks of ink form the suggested leading lines (achieved by way of the Gestalt principle of Completion or Closure, which then results in activation of the principle of Emergence).

This use of suggested leading lines produced through voided areas is similar to the way that highlighting and toning were achieved in image pairs 1 and 2.

As I mentioned earlier, this image violates the Gestalt principle of Continuity through the infidelity between the tool path of the graver and the abrasion path of the glacier, considering the engravers produced lines that are perpendicular to the actual path of motion. Yes, they produced suggested lines through the build up of negative space (highlighted in yellow in the image above), but the linear channel of the groove was suggested through a stack of cross-sections that move from foreground to midground in the image (shown in red lines crossing the horizontal plane), instead of relying on graver tool paths that could have been used to cut lines that co-extend along the thalweg of the channel of the groove (as seen with blue arrows).

The comparison here is between the marriage of form and function, and had the engraver made the engraving tool path actually co-extend along with the glacial path, then in my discourse reading of the set of images as images that stand in for data vs images that illustrate and establish scenery, the idea of the medium being the message could have enhanced the value of the image by turning it into a data-bearing image instead of merely performing as a rendering of scenery.

But as it is, with the tool path being perpendicular to the glacial motion path (red lines), the medium introduces the psychological message of a linear barrier to motion, limiting visual access by a stacked series of blocking lines (as opposed to leading lines). These horizontal lines that run perpendicular to past glacial motion now hinder the saccade of the eye along the actual path of motion.

The viewer is compelled to process the cross-sections building up the length of the channel, rather than having the length of the channel be reinforced through the use of graver tool path cuts that accord with the trajectory of motion, thus being more psychologically valid (based on Gestalt Continuity).

While not in the range of this present study, if my thesis is correct, then creating a new version of this engraving where the tool lines faithfully trace the glacial motion would provide a better stimulus for evoking descriptions of the scene that use Fictive Motion (the use of motion verb to describe a static scene, by some accounts revealing the motion of attention as the viewer processes the visual scene), than would the original engraving which blocks visual motion with the horizontal lines that run perpendicular to motion.

Regarding a reading of the medium being the message here, it would be easy to assume that the medium is the imprint of the engraving, or the medium being the illustration as a communication object, or the medium being the etching plate that was used to produce the image, but it is not any of those in general. The medium in a scientific illustration like this is the directional grammar imposed by the engraving technique. It’s meant to depict that directional grammar, so it might as well produce that depiction by embodying that same directional grammar. I have a feeling Chamberlin would agree on this point.

Because the engraver relies on cross-hatching to model relief, texture substitutes for vector here, disqualifying this image from communicating directional data. Volume replaces dynamics because the use of orthogonal lines places the focus on cross-sectioning the channel rather than leading the eye along the path of motion. Surface replaces process because the perpendicular lines define the surface texture at the expense of emphasizing the glacial motion. These decisions comprise the medium making this engraving translation of a photograph into a mere illustration of the scene rather than what Platt intended his image to be which was a vector to be visually followed to the horizon line to understand the scale.

The engraver’s psychological ontology categorizes this landscape as a static scene. And frankly, at that point in time, with the fact that the theory of continental glaciation had not yet animated this landscape for a popular audience, there is no reason the engraver should have perceived it as a dynamic scene. It is rock, it is solid ground. Contract shop engravers were not geologists, they were not specialists in the domains they depicted. But this default to the static scene ontological category here also reflects the state of knowledge at the time. It is also possible that Chamberlin himself at the time might not have comprehended the elegance of aligning tool path to force path in the imagery, but because of his Dalziel images from the early 1880s, I think it is unlikely.

Chamberlin worked during a transition period when geology was observational, descriptive, and when geography was still partly inherited from picturesque landscape traditions (the engravers most certainly felt that lineage), and scientific illustration conventions were focused on legibility in print reproduction, tonal modeling, and familiar artistic conventions (along with a dose of narrative drama). You could say the engraver was just operating according to the contemporary visual grammar, but I don’t think that is the case, especially since this is one of the only images (out of 50) in Chamberlin’s 1888 report that displays this level of infidelity. That feels like greater than chance. I’m not sure. But where this engraving succeeds is within the scenic-topographic-landscape tradition, and it fails in the process-dynamic understanding of continental glacial dynamics that were still formulating within specialist geology circles. This image was produced by a specialist engraver without specialist glacial or geological awareness, so it’s not a geological-data-grade-specialized image.

Part Six Continued: Directional Analysis of Pair 4

Pair 4 was selected as the sole statistical case study because it isolates primary stroke orientation without interference from the kind of secondary engraving tool path passes used to create toning in Pairs 1-3. This allows directional relationships between the photograph-derived perceptual field and engraving behavior to be evaluated without conflating visual depth cues with process geometry.

I applied two complementary models here:

• Model A tests whether the engraver preserved the observed channel direction.

• Model B tests whether engraving strokes align with glacial motion itself.

Together, these models distinguish perceptual understanding from execution strategy.

Model A: Channel Direction Preservation Test

In this context, the photograph is treated as a depth-encoded perceptual field in which channel orientation emerges from the interaction of geomorphic gradients and shadow-driven depth cues at multiple spatial scales. The statistical and computational methods used in Model A were Structure Tensor Orientation Analysis with Circular Angular Difference Measurement. Structure tensor analysis estimates the dominant orientation of gradient fields in both the photograph and the engraving. Agreement between dominant orientations was evaluated using circular angular difference (Δθ).

Model A Results

Interpretation

An angular deviation of 3.10° indicates extremely strong directional agreement. Within circular statistics, deviations below ~5° represent near-axis preservation at image scale.

The coherence values reveal the mechanism of translation:

• The photograph exhibits low coherence (0.097), reflecting natural abrasion variability, tonal gradients, and multi-directional micro-texture.

• The engraving exhibits high coherence (0.683), indicating an imposed and internally consistent stroke field.

The engraving therefore preserves orientation while increasing anisotropy, transforming a noisy natural surface into a clarified directional system.

Model A conclusion:
The engraver accurately preserved the dominant orientation extracted from the photograph’s depth-encoded perceptual field.

Model A operates entirely within a shared perceptual field derived from the photographic representation, whereas Model B evaluates the engraving against an externalized physical process axis reconstructed from known glacial motion.

Model B: Glacial Flow Alignment Benchmark

Model B takes the raw photo (annotated to indicate the trajectory of glacial motion) and the engraving and tests the physical process alignment. The statistical and computational methods used in Model B were Circular Orientation Benchmarking against reconstructed glacial flow axis, with Perpendicular Deviation Analysis and Circular Dispersion estimation. A fixed glacial abrasion axis was used as an external reference frame.

Model B Results

Interpretation

If engraving strokes followed glacial motion, the angular difference would approach 0°, but the actual measured difference of 80.8° places the stroke system close to perpendicular to ice flow. The high engraving coherence (0.7998) demonstrates that this transverse orientation is not incidental noise but a statistically stable directional regime across more than 1.5 million pixels (why I used high DPI source images).

Model B conclusion:
The engraving intentionally organizes strokes across the channel rather than along glacial motion.

A/B Comparative Interpretation

The two models address different hypotheses:

Taken together, the results strongly reduce the likelihood of simple perceptual misalignment within the shared visual field as an explanation.

Model A demonstrates accurate recognition of the groove’s longitudinal structure.

Model B demonstrates a deliberate decision to employ a transverse stroke strategy.

Because Pair 4 contains only primary stroke orientations, this relationship cannot be attributed to secondary engraving passes, stylistic correction, or compositional overworking.

Statistical Synthesis

The engraving reconfigures directional structure across two distinct but coupled representational layers. At the level of image-derived geometry (Model A), structure tensor analysis indicates near-axis preservation of the dominant channel orientation, with a mean angular deviation of approximately 3.1°, demonstrating that the engraver accurately extracted the primary spatial axis embedded within the photograph’s depth-encoded perceptual field, including both geomorphic gradients and shadow-driven depth cues.

At the level of process alignment (Model B), circular orientation benchmarking against reconstructed glacial flow reveals a mean angular separation of approximately 80.8°, indicating a systematic orthogonality between engraving stroke orientation and ice-flow direction.

Under the operational definition adopted here, in which “data-quality representation” is defined as alignment between graver tool-path direction and reconstructed glacial abrasion direction, the engraving does not satisfy this criterion, as reflected in this angular separation.

This divergence is accompanied by a marked increase in directional coherence within the engraving field, reflecting a transformation from a low-coherence natural abrasion structure into a high-coherence, single-axis stroke system. Interpreted through Talmy’s force-dynamic framework, this pattern does not describe a disruption of attentional processes, but rather a reconfiguration of directional constraints governing perceptual traversal: structural “force relations” are redirected from longitudinal continuity along the channel to transverse articulation across it.

The result is a shift in representational emphasis from co-extensive within-channel, or along-channel motion to cross-sectional organization, in which the groove is stabilized as a field of constrained directional opposition (when it should have been a trajectory of attentional flow in the composition). This reorientation structures viewer interpretation in both Chamberlin’s 1888 context and contemporary readings, in that it redirects interpretive attention away from longitudinal flow—the primary explanatory variable in Chamberlin’s geomorphic description—toward cross-sectional structure, which is critically not motivated in Chamberlin’s description that the image is intended to represent.

Statistical Conclusion

Pair 4 provides convergent quantitative evidence that the engraving is neither a mechanical copy nor a misreading of glacial movement. The engraver demonstrably understood the direction of the channel yet intentionally organized marks perpendicular to ice flow, emphasizing cross-sectional form rather than longitudinal motion. The statistical agreement between Models A and B supports interpretation of the engraving as an informed and deliberate translation of geomorphic structure into engraving practice.

The A/B comparison suggests an additional interpretive possibility. Model A demonstrates that the engraver accurately recognized the longitudinal geometry of the groove, preserving its dominant axis within approximately 3°. Model B, however, shows that the engraving strokes are organized nearly perpendicular to reconstructed ice-flow direction. Taken together, these results imply that while the engraver perceived the channel’s structural alignment, the dynamics responsible for its formation may have been interpreted differently, if at all.

In other words, rather than reading the groove as evidence of motion through the channel, the engraving treats it as a form to be articulated across (which I think reflects the engraver’s interpretation of the scene organized around cross-sectional rather than longitudinal structure).

In this sense, the work records accurate spatial observation coupled with an alternative kinematic understanding: the surface is rendered as a transverse structure to be crossed, sectioned, or stabilized, rather than as a path of longitudinal movement. The statistical evidence therefore supports a distinction between recognition of morphological structure and alignment with the underlying process geometry.

I see one generosity I want to recognize here: It might e that the typical experience of geologic stratigraphy typically presents horizons in cross-section, so representing this surface structure groove in cross-section tool-paths might have seemed to a geology-literate engraver as the right path to take, but these grooves occur as the top blanket in the stack of horizons and the surface structure that was important here was transverse along the trough of the groove, so cross-section is still wrong, but I am willing to say it could have been an innocent mistake.

Part 7: The Artist’s Reading

Geological Consequences

If this argument holds, then some historical glacial imagery may need to be reread less as neutral illustrations and more as active mediation, especially around moments of transition between descriptive and experimental approaches. I focused on Chamberlin in this study because he was leading the transition in North America, but many other geologists played a part in contributing evidence.

Many of the engravings from this time period are extraordinarily skilled images, so I’m less concerned about whether or not they are accurate in terms of visual aesthetics. My focus is on whether or not the compositional strategies used in the production of the engravings preserves the directional structure of the glacial process that formed the landscapes being depicted.

Glacial striae are more than textures. Reading the striae recounts the directional records of force, pressure, duration, movement, from which other data can be extrapolated about the unseen ice sheet like size and thickness. But they can also help shape hypotheses about approximations of basal conditions such as whether the debris was frozen solid or moving freely in a socket of meltwater. It’s safe to say that striae encode motion. Since engravings are formed through motion, when they replace directional continuity with conventions optimized for tonal modeling or scenic readability, they partially sever the image from faithfully representing the process that produced the landform.

This matters because nineteenth century glacial geology was still consolidating its evidentiary standards (and Chamberlin’s 1888 text is a significant step toward that formalization). These images circulated as stand-ins for direct observation during the exact historical moment when continental glaciation was becoming legible as a scientific theory, and its credibility was figuratively—but also very much literally—on the rocks. That’s why Chamberlin early in his text enumerates the number of striations recorded across North America so explicitly (2,474) and with what feels like overkill by naming each of the individuals who contribute the records.

The engravings depicting those striae were part of the evidentiary substrate that allowed the science to move forward.

I think this suggests that the history of glacial geology might also contain a history of representational compromise coming from outside of the discipline through the printing conventions that interrupted the geologic continuity. Obviously not enough to invalidate the science, but enough to matter.

Epistemological Consequences

This also reveals something broader about scientific imagery, as I hoped my discussion of adequate imagery hinted at: scientific images re-organize perception through conventions that are influenced by something outside of science.

Every representational system carries operational assumptions inside it. Engraving shops possessed their own professional vision, their own habits of emphasis, ways of handling tricky images, shortcuts to stay profitable, techniques to improve legibility, shading, composition. Those conventions solved problems the engraver and the engraving shop faced, internally. They were not necessarily oriented toward solving perceptual content problems of the glacial evidence they were commissioned to communicate.

Because some engravings fully qualify as data-quality according to the parameters defined in this study, it’s clear these mismatches from source to output were not limitations of capability. Far from it. What is more likely is this was a failure of capacity (under deadline and economic constraints).

At a certain point, any image stops depicting a process and begins depicting the conventions used to render that process in the traces of the hand that produced it.

That substitution is easy to miss because conventions become naturalized through repetition. Then they become codified institutionally. Then they become recognized and expected (objectively trusted) and preferred (aesthetically—similar to the way Instagram has famously changed interior design conventions).

Craft decisions slowly change data into illustration, which is why the distinction matters in my opinion, because sometimes the illustration says something that isn’t fully accurate. To stay in the theme of glaciers, take for instance the trope of a glacier calving becoming shorthand for climate change while ignoring the naturalness of the act of glacial calving occurring even during times of climate stability. The trope ascribes causation indiscriminately and the viewers form the association that the trope is explained by the asserted cause implied by the association. It’s a useful trope, but it stretches the truth a little. That might be reasonable in marketing, but it’s not reasonable in the formalization of theory.

Data-quality imagery preserves operational relationships. Illustration can disrupt those relationships (or abandon them altogether) while still appearing convincing to the eye. One is coherent in corroborated evidence, while the other is a perspective on that evidence without regard to how all of the exigencies formulate the corroborative context so coherence is allowed to slip.

Bottom line, I believe the engravings that succeed in Chamberlin’s report succeed because they preserve process continuity between glacier, stone, photographer, graver, plate, print, and viewer; they reward fidelity between tool and force by embodying accuracy. On the other hand, the failures occur where that continuity is interrupted by inherited pictorial conventions which work in most contexts, but not in the development of scientific reasoning.

Artistic Consequences

This is also why an artist had to do this work. I’m talking about me.

A disciplinary reading of these images would likely separate geology, printmaking, visual cognition, media history, phenomenology, and studio practice into distinct categories of expertise. But the images themselves overlap those domain boundaries, so any singular disciplinary reading is going to overly simplify the problem presented in the imagery.

Artists routinely work across domains because studio practice depends on sensitivity to discontinuity. Artists are adept at identifying moments where material behavior, perception, process, and representation fail to align cleanly with one another.

Specialists often normalize the conventions internal to their own fields (artists included), because those conventions enable work to proceed efficiently (or legibly to their community of peers). But artists can break the rules and get away with it. For instance, for as long as I have been an artist the conventional wisdom for artists was to avoid writing too much about their work. That would never work for me because I use writing as part of the process of opening up the thing I am trying to understand. By writing about it, I slow down my perception to a speed that allows me to notice where the systems break coherence.

That’s what happened here.

This investigation did not emerge from geology alone, or printmaking alone, or image theory alone. It emerged from my curiosity about why I hated an image in a book I read, because that image contradicted what I’ve come to learn from spending years thinking about marks, surfaces, mark making practices, force trajectories, reproduction systems, and the relationship between physical process and visual representation in the formulation of theory about the natural world.

It also emerged from a larger ongoing effort to understand glaciers without ever having seen one firsthand (which has been difficult by the way; I’ve intentionally avoided them during a residency in the Swiss Alps, and during a stint working at a mountain camp in the Rockies). Much of my work over the last several years has indirectly circled that condition of not having seen a glacier: trying to reconstruct the reality of continental ice through traces, archives, photographs, engravings, models, specimens, and the landscapes altered by glacial movement (and the abundance of materials left behind) long after the ice itself had disappeared. That ongoing body of work, An Attempt to Understand a Glacier Without Ever Having Seen One, forms and is forming my archive through the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

In that sense, this entire investigation began with a simple studio question:

What kind of mark does a glacier make?

And what happens when another marking system attempts to describe it?

RYAN DEWEY

Note: I’ll return to this line of inquiry to investigate the material and process overlaps between glaciers and the plastic arts in a treatment on how glaciers make objects.

Acknowledgments: Portions of this research were conducted during the author’s appointment as a Visiting Scholar in Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University.

Funding: This research and all associated studio experimentation were independently conducted and self-funded by the author.

Research Provenance: Earlier stages of this investigation informed the research proposal When Craft Shapes Thought: Visual & Textual Comparisons in 19th-Century Geology (2025), archived as part of the author’s ongoing research record.

References

Chamberlin, T. C. (1882). The terminal moraine of the second glacial epoch. U.S. Geological Survey.

Chamberlin, T. C. (1888). Rock scorings of the great ice invasion. In Seventh annual report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior, 1885–1886 (pp. 147–248). Government Printing Office.

Chamberlin, T. C. (1888). Glacial fluting. From North Quarry, Kelleys Island. Specimen now in the National Museum; donated by Mrs. E. K. Huntington. It illustrates both simple and compound grooves [Figure 28]. In Annual report of the United States Geological Survey, No. 7, 1885–1886. U.S. Geological Survey.

Chamberlin, T. C. (1888). Grooved block, Kelleys Island, Lake Erie, showing compound action at least in the completion of the large grooves [Figure 29]. In Annual report of the United States Geological Survey, No. 7, 1885–1886. U.S. Geological Survey.

Chamberlin, T. C. (1888). Glacial knobs and trails. The knobs consist of chert inserted in limestone. From the vicinity of Darlington, Indiana [Figure 48]. In Annual report of the United States Geological Survey, No. 7, 1885–1886. U.S. Geological Survey.

Cronin, P. (Ed.). (2002). Herzog on Herzog. Faber and Faber.

Dalziel, J. (1882). Tortuous glacial grooving, Kelley’s Island, Lake Erie [Plate XXXII; engraving from photograph]. In T. C. Chamberlin, The terminal moraine of the second glacial epoch. Personal collection.

Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100

Lamson-Scribner, F. (1897). American grasses I. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Agrostology.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.

Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics (Vol. 1). MIT Press.

Wright, G. F. (1889). The Ice Age in North America and its bearings upon the antiquity of man. D. Appleton and Company.

Yildiz, G. Y., Sperandio, I., Kettle, C., & Chouinard, P. A. (2019). The contribution of linear perspective cues and texture gradients in the perceptual rescaling of stimuli inside a Ponzo illusion corridor. PloS one, 14(10), e0223583. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223583

A Craft Theory of Glacial Perception — Installment 1: The Glacier and the Graver: Scientific Illustration and the Loss of Directional Force
Origin: STUDIO (Practice / Research Program)
Post Type: Weekend Read / Theoretical Essay
Circulation: Substack (Public)
Date of Publication: 2026-05-07
Related Divisions: STUDIO, FIELD OFFICE, GEOCOG
Series Position: Installment 1 — Foundational Case Study (Engraving, Directionality, and Scientific Vision)
Purpose: Establish the first analytical case within a broader “Craft Theory of Glacial Perception” by examining nineteenth-century geological engravings as sites where glacial process is translated into representational convention. The post argues that engraving practices did not merely illustrate glacial science but actively reorganized the perception of directional force, substituting pictorial legibility for process fidelity. This installment frames scientific illustration as a mediating craft system that both enabled and constrained early continental glacial theory, setting the groundwork for subsequent investigations into glaciers as sculptural agents, landscape-making systems, and metaphor-generating structures in geological reasoning.
Author: RYAN DEWEY

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Below is MONU’s thematic introduction to the issue on Geographical Urbanism:

MONU #20 - Geographical Urbanism: The meaning of physical geography is changing dramatically. Contemporary urbanisation shapes our planet’s surface while we work to correct and improve natural landscapes, proving to what extremes geographies can be manufactured. The phenomenon creates hybrid places in which cities and geographies converge in a multiplicity of narratives, identities and values. Through case studies, essays, photography and more, plus key interviews with Bart Lootsma and Bernardo Secchi, the theme takes centre stage in this issue. With contributions by Nikos Katsikis, Jessica Bridger, Roger Hubeli, Edward Burtynsky, Ryan Dewey, Roger Hubeli, Neyran Turan and more. - MONU Magazine

Some of you may have encountered this article previously, while for others it will be new. In either case, it has become relevant to my current line of work, so I am recirculating it here. With gratitude to MONU for permission, the article is reprinted in full. (Back copies are available through the MONU website.)

AGENCY & THE MULTIFACETED STORIES OF HYBRID PLACES

RYAN DEWEY

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ABSTRACT:

Cities and landscapes tell a multifaceted story that invites us to participate and observe - a story of relationship and a story of agency, where mountains and valleys and rivers act like characters in the same way that buildings and streets and neighborhoods have a life of their own. Both cities and the geographies that support them converge in a story of identity and imageability, making geographical-urbanism a sort of autobiographical tale of this hybrid place.

Consider the type of language we use to describe landforms and urban forms, it is a dynamic language giving mountains and Main Street the muscles to move. Landforms can do all sorts of things: run, rise, plunge, extend, descend, meet, leap, twist, turn, spring, jut, meander, wind, or zigzag. Consider “The ravine runs along the edge of the city” or “Corcovado rises above Rio De Janeiro and looks down onto Sugar Loaf Mountain” or “The peninsula springs out into the ocean nearly a mile before coming to an abrupt stop”. Architecture and the built environment also come alive in order to: overlook, tower, to line up, to face each other, to cluster together; cities grow and expand, sometimes they shrink and occasionally they die. This is more than figurative language - it is a type of cognitive simulation called fictive motion, a sort of mental imagery that helps us reason about the organization of the space around us. In a way, this motion language turns static scenes into dynamic stories and otherwise inanimate objects come alive like characters on the screen. What other stories unfold at the confluence of city and geography?

We might say that a timeline of some sticky plot develops into a nonlinear narrative as geologic time and civic time mingle and juxtapose. Neighborhoods inhabit the heights and hills while urban rivers (the Thames, the Seine, the Chicago) meander through architectural canyons; at every moment the urban dweller has one foot in the present and one foot in the past. Cities like barnacles and lichens cover the natural form, two timescales coexist, coextending side-by-side in cultures of urban adaptation and geologic adoption. The narrative of culture flows from the structure of landscape - in fact, cognitive ethnography has shown how conceptual structure and cultural networks sometimes mimic surrounding geographical structure. Geographical urbanism develops as an entanglement of relationships to gain critical mass and form an identity unique to that particular locational marriage of space and structure. What moral will this story offer?

Narratives become tools to make sense of details, and as the details of the city uniquely blend with the details of the landscape, the story is more of an autobiography of a hybrid place, and the narrative weaves itself through the life of the location. This article uses tools from cognitive science to give a simple and accessible reading of the story of hybrid geographical urbanism, exploring how people think about their environment and providing a cognitive basis for the relevance of geography to urban experience.

ARTICLE:

Cities and landscapes tell a multifaceted story that invites us to participate and spectate. This is a story of relationship and a story of agency, where mountains and valleys and rivers act like characters in the same way that buildings and streets and neighborhoods have a life of their own. Both cities and the geographies that support them converge in a story of identity and imageability, making geographical urbanism a sort of autobiographical tale of this hybrid place.

MOVEMENT AND EXPERIENCE

Our very movement through a city takes us back and forth between being a spectator and a participant. Whenever we happen upon a view out over a large space we take the spectator role, and whenever we have an immersive experience we take a participant role. Think of a city like Honolulu or Paris. Being at street level you are immersed in the feel of the city while walking under palm trees on Kalākaua Avenue or under horse chestnut trees on the streets of Paris - this is what it feels like to have a participant view. Moving to higher ground, whether it is your office building or atop landmarks like the Arc de Triomphe or Lēʻahi (Diamond Head Crater), you get a better view of the lay of the land from the spectator viewpoint. Our experience of the city is an oscillation between these two viewpoints, viewpoints which we will see play an important role in the way that we experience the vibrancy and agency of the landscape and the city.

NATURAL WORLD AND CONSTRUCTED WORLD

Sticking with our two cities, Honolulu and Paris, consider the presence of the “natural” form in these cities. Landforms intermingle with urban forms; geography penetrates the city. Our movement through the city brings us another oscillation: the natural world and the constructed world. From an office window in La Défense we see the Bois de Boulogne at the same moment a tourist on La Tour Eiffel sees those same woods. We cross La Seine to the Rive Gauche or we leave our house in the foothills of the Ko‘olau Range and drive into the city center. The city is a hybrid place with bridges and buildings to our left and rivers to our right – or perhaps mountains, or coastlines, or even road cuts, cliffs, or hillsides, or, (fill-in-the-blank).

Geography is a part of the urban experience because geography supports urban development, giving the city a place to grow. At the same time, geography limits the reaches of the city as some land is more suitable for urban development than other land. Cities that adapt themselves to natural boundaries seem to feel like they belong in a place because they fit themselves to the lay of the land. This is a naturalness of fit that cannot be attained by way of bulldozer. Consider the Ko‘olau Range whose leeward slopes create a border for part of Honolulu, the mountains become a backdrop for the city as the city creeps upward on some of the slopes of the Range, interlacing themselves with the finger valleys that descend and tickle their way into the city. Notice this edge in aerial image #1. This image calls to mind Charles Mulford Robinson’s (1906) description of Honolulu as “one great park, with a city tucked in between, in the vacant spaces”. This border between urban form and landform is like a needle and thread stitching back and forth to hem the edge of the city, the geomorphology both enveloping and penetrating the neighborhoods to create a boundary.

LANDFORMS AND CULTURE

Geography shapes more than the contours of the city, it also shapes the lives of inhabitants by affording different behaviors. Imagine the differences between being a dedicated surfer in Paris versus a dedicated surfer in Honolulu. In Paris, it is nearly an 8-hour drive to good surf break whereas in Honolulu it may be as short as an 8-minute walk. This might appear to be a trite association between terrain and the type of people that dwell in a city, but this is only the beginning of the relationship between landform and culture.

Geography gives us a kind of physical scaffolding that allows us to use land as places to store our memories. The role that landmarks play in wayfinding provides a crisp example of this blend of spatial relations and conceptual structure. Sometimes our languages encode these thinking strategies. For instance, Hawaiian language speakers use two words that distribute orientation information onto the landscape. The two words, mauka and makai connect landforms to human cognition by setting up an unchanging frame of reference that can be used in spatial reasoning. Mauka means mountain and makai means ocean. The intrinsic frame of reference in these two terms serves a similar function to the way port and starboard act to replace the confusion of relative frames of reference (right-left), while remaining separate from absolute frames of reference (north, east, south, west). In other words, depending on your orientation, mauka could be on your right or left, or it could be north, east, south, or west - mauka establishes a guidepost that does not depend on your orientation to be meaningful. Given that most of the cities of O‘ahu are bordered by the sea and by the mountains, mauka and makai fill useful roles for describing location and orientation with respect to the guideposts of mountain and sea (see image #2).

Beyond supplying simple landmarks, geography also works its way into social practices and culture. Moving beyond simple topophilia (Tuan 1974), recent studies of the interfaces of culture and landscape explore how different cultures categorize landscape elements into unique ontologies that deeply structure belief systems and ways of living (Mark, et al. 2011). For instance, Renee Pualani Louis has shown how Hawaiian place names work to tie culture to geographic knowledge emerging from “constant interaction of people and their environment” (Louis 2011). In a way, part of the narrative of culture flows from the structure of the landscape that hosts the culture. The land actually organizes cultural knowledge and in doing so becomes a part of cultural heritage. This reflects the value of a place to its people and opens doors for studies into the ethical issues of geographical urbanism in our shrinking world.

NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES: GEOLOGIC TIME MEETS CIVIC TIME

At this point, we might say that geographical urbanism is a major theme in the storyline of a culture, but at times the narrative appears very nonlinear. The geographic element has emerged over deep geologic time with processes like sedimentation and orogeny, while the urban element appears overnight in civic time with a crane and a building permit. When geography persists in an urban environment, inhabitants live in two timescales with one foot in the present and one foot in the past.

Compared to the endurance of landforms that have emerged and sustained a presence throughout geologic time, cities clearly operate on a timescale that is brief and fleeting, a mere moment in deep time. Both timescales are juxtaposed in our contemporary cities which enfold natural landforms with the constructed environment. Neighborhoods inhabit the heights and hills while old urban rivers (the Thames, the Seine, the Chicago) meander through young architectural canyons. Cities like barnacles and lichens quickly cover the stable natural form, two timescales coexist, coextending side-by-side in cultures of urban adaptation and geologic adoption. On any given path through a city a pedestrian encounters a mix of natural and constructed elements. This fact makes it fair to say that geographical urbanism is a non-linear process in which people cross back and forth between timescales as they alternate between encounters with elements shaped by deep time and those engineered in civic time.

What is the effect of the presence of deep geologic time in the middle of our cities that operate in human-scale time? Does this juxtaposition matter to us or the mountains? It does shape how we think of the landscape and it shapes how the landscape affects our lives. This juxtaposition sometimes even seems to compress timescales when it shows up in the language we use to describe the environment.

MOTION AS A TYPE OF AGENCY

Consider the type of language we use to describe landforms and urban forms; it is a dynamic language giving mountains and Main Street the muscles to move. Landforms can do all sorts of things: run, rise, plunge, extend, descend, meet, leap, twist, turn, spring, jut, meander, wind, or zigzag. Consider “The range runs along the outer edge of the city” or “Corcovado rises above Rio De Janeiro and looks down onto Sugar Loaf Mountain” or “The peninsula springs out into the ocean nearly a mile before coming to an abrupt stop”. Architecture and the built environment also come alive in order to: overlook, to tower, to line up, to face each other, to cluster together; cities grow and expand, sometimes they shrink and occasionally they die (see Oakley 2009 for a discussion of this type of language in architectural writing). This is more than figurative language - it is a type of cognitive simulation called fictive motion (Talmy 2001), a sort of mental imagery that helps us reason about the organization of the space around us (Dewey 2012). In a way, this motion language turns static scenes into dynamic stories and otherwise inanimate objects come alive like characters on the stage.

Landscape theorist Janike Kampevold Larsen’s essay Imagining the Geologic (2013) argues that this sense of movement comes from the “...geologic masses’ own agency” and later she correctly suggests that this type of language reflects a speaker being “confronted with earth’s time”. Fictive motion is often used to describe what landscape elements appear to be doing, an appearance that often reflects the ancient actual movement that produced the landscape element in the first place. Geography is a trace of the past movements of the earth. Our use of fictive motion is simply a reanimation of the landscape process, a speeding up of earth’s timescale until it is fast enough that we can use motion verbs to describe very stable and static landforms.

There may be a relationship between spectatorship and our use of fictive motion descriptions (Dewey 2012), in which our ability to see the overall shape of a landform may facilitate a motion description. In other words, people may use fictive motion more when they have a big-picture view of what is going on (such as a view from a high-rise window), and may use less fictive motion when they are immersed in a scene without big-picture views (such as a view at street level). When a landform evokes descriptions of agency it is because the trace of the geologic motion that produced that landform is recorded in the landform’s shape and location in space. The vertical assent of a mountainside is a permanent trace of the mountain being pushed up into space from its flat surrounding context. The depth of a winding ravine is a permanent trace of the eroding force of the river that winds its way through the ravine, carving ever deeper and wider with each passing year.

Seeing traces of past movement in the geography, we describe the geography as if it were actively moving, and in so doing, we compress our time with earth’s time. In a way we could say that this compression speeds up deep time before our eyes and we sense the natural landscape as being an active agent.

The landforms and urban forms by nature of their shape and extent invite us to animate them with our language. Could it be the contrast between urban form and landform that encourages our notion of apparent motion? Returning to image #1, the urban development and geomorphology tells its hybrid story through our mouths as we narrate their actions. “Look at how those neighborhoods creep their way up into the mountains”. Or is it the other way around? Because with the same palpability, “those mountains seem to poke their way down into the city”. In the case of the aerial image, both the city and the mountain make good fictive motion candidates, but other suitable characteristics in this scene present good attention paths. Consider the erratic zigzagging line that we see in this image as it creates the border between mountain and neighborhoods. Zigzagging is a fictive motion verb that Talmy classifies as a “co-extension path” (p 138) where the path of our attention follows the extension of some linear shape. Even this defining boundary relationship between urban form and landform invites us to think of geographical urbanism as an active agent.

The negotiation of place that unfolds in civic time as the city adapts to the geography that adopts it is itself a dynamic entity. This dynamicity is evidenced by our willingness to animate it through fictive motion descriptions of the transitional spaces between wilderness and urban places. We give this transitional place agency by describing its zigzagging path.

If we can use language that animates a static entity when we describe the growth of a city, the formative trace of a landform, and even the transitional places at the intersection of landscapes and cities, then it might be fair to say that this relationship of geographical urbanism is a force of vitality for a place, bringing a place to life and giving it an identity that emerges through relationships between people and place.

GEOGRAPHICAL URBANISM AS PARTICIPATORY THEATER

We’ve seen a complex story emerge that reflects the non-linear structure of the hybrid place. Cities adapt to the landscapes that adopt them; geography shapes the physical identity of a city by limiting its scale and providing scenery. These geographic actions provide frames of reference and networks of landmarks that shape the cultural identity of the communities that inhabit the hybrid place. In a way, cultures reflect the landscapes they call home.

Beyond shaping our cities and cultures, landscapes invite us to participate in telling their story. Geography shapes the way we look at its form, telling us its origin story through traces of geologic activity that have persisted through deep time, asserting its identity as a dynamic place on the long timescale of geologic time. Responding to the trace of time we reanimate the static world when we use fictive motion to describe a scene. We treat the fossil landscape as an active agent in the production of place. We speak for the land when we tell its story through fictive motion.

It seems as though geographical urbanism results in a sort of participatory theater, a story told by the interaction of people and place. Geographical urbanism is a blending of landscape and urban experience that has an impact on human cognition, making landscape relevant to the urban dweller, grounding a city’s present to its deep past while simultaneously determining the shape of its future. Because of this relevance, geographical urbanism is a vital key in understanding the story told through the relationships between cities, places and our embodiment in hybrid places.

Works Cited (in order of appearance):

Robinson, C. Mulford. (1906). The beautifying of Honolulu. Honolulu. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/beautifyingofhon00robi

Tuan, Y. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Mark, D. M., Turk, A., Burenhult, N., & Stea, D. (2011). “Landscape in language: An introduction”. In D. M. Mark, A. G. Turk, N. Burenhult, & D. Stea (Eds.), Landscape in language: Transdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 1-24). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Louis, R. P. (2011). “Hawaiian storied place names: re-placing cultural meaning” in In D. M. Mark, A. G. Turk, N. Burenhult, & D. Stea (Eds.), Landscape in language: Transdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 167-186). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Oakley, T. (2009). From attention to meaning: Explorations in semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric. Bern: Peter Lang.

Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dewey, R. (2012). A Sense of Space: Conceptualization in Wayfinding and Navigation. (Case Western Reserve University).

Kampevold Larsen, J. (2013). “Imagining the geologic”. In Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (eds.) Making the geologic now: Responses to the material conditions of contemporary life. (pp. 83-89). New York: Punctum Books.

Image Citations:

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Frame: 2109” [aerial photograph]. Scale ~1in:1km. Flight line No: 018. 16/5/00. Downloaded from http://magis.manoa.hawaii.edu/viewer/ on 15/2/14.”

Dewey, R. “Dry standpipes labeled for firefighters to determine which side of the building they are accessing, Honolulu” [snapshot]. 01/02/14. Personal collection.

Cover: ©MONU. Image on Cover: “AMARC#3; Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2006” from Edward Burtynsky’s contribution “Seduction and Fear”. Photo ©Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto/ Flowers, London.

AGENCY & THE MULTI-FACETED STORIES OF HYBRID PLACES
Origin: MONU Magazine #20 (Geographical Urbanism, 2014) / Archive Reprint
Post Type: Field Essay (Reprint) / Theoretical Framework
Circulation: email
Date of Publication: 2026-03-17
Related Divisions: GEOCOG, Land Studies
Purpose:
Reintroduce and situate an early theoretical text within the current body of work, establishing continuity in the development of concepts related to spectatorship, agency, fictive motion, and the cognitive structuring of hybrid geographical-urban environments; to reinforce the role of landscape as an active participant in perception, cultural formation, and spatial reasoning
Author: RYAN DEWEY

Over the past year, I have been developing and testing a different approach through my landscape advisory GEOCOG. The approach I practice treats reclamation landscapes as benchmarkable systems and uses commercially available off-the-shelf tools to define enforceable, auditable requirements long before end of mine life. It’s an early way to save costs while ensuring that you minimize headaches in the end-of-mine phases of your operations.

I presented this work at mining and geomatics summits in 2025, including two invited talks for Hexagon in Vancouver and Tucson. The response was consistent. Operators recognize the problem immediately, but few have seen a practical method for solving it without introducing new software stacks, bespoke modeling pipelines, or research-grade complexity.

This post outlines the core idea without repeating my talk verbatim.

The problem with late-stage landscape design

Most reclamation plans rely on narrative descriptions, static drawings, and generalized slope or drainage criteria. These documents satisfy permitting requirements at a high level, but they do not encode the physical logic of the landscape in a way that survives staff turnover, contractor changes, or decades of incremental extraction.

By the time end-of-mine-life landscape architects are engaged, critical decisions have already been locked in. Bench geometry, haul road alignments, overburden placement, and water routing have collectively constrained what is physically achievable. At that point, design becomes an exercise in compromise rather than compliance optimization.

The gap is not a lack of intent. It is a lack of measurable benchmarks of the original landscape.

Landscapes can be benchmarked like any other system

The central premise of my work through GEOCOG is simple. Landscapes, including post-industrial ones, can be benchmarked using the same logic applied to industrial systems, manufacturing tolerances, or infrastructure performance.

In the US, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) (1977) is the federal law governing remediation in the US, and it requires operators to return the land to the “original contours” which is incredibly difficult to comply with if you don’t have a benchmark, and leaves it open to subjective opinions about what looks natural.

Instead of asking whether a reclaimed landscape “looks natural” or “meets intent,” we can ask:

• What curvature ranges define stable versus unstable slopes under site-specific material conditions?

• What drainage densities and flow path geometries reliably meet erosion thresholds?

• What surface roughness and microtopography ranges support revegetation under local climate constraints?

These are not abstract questions. They are measurable, repeatable, and already implicit in remediation regulations. The issue is that they are rarely formalized as requirements.

These kinds of questions will never be able to provide the kinds of answers you need if you don’t know what the landscape looked like before the project began. That’s the loop-hole by omission, and in contemporary operations with digital twin capabilities from LiDAR to 3D reconstruction from satellite-scale photogrammetry, to capture at the hand-held device level for aggregating time-stamped snapshots, this loop-hole isn’t the honorable path.

Why COTS tools matter

A key constraint I imposed on this work was the exclusive use of commercially available tools already present in mining, surveying, and planning workflows. LiDAR, photogrammetry, surface modeling platforms, GIS, and standard analysis environments are sufficient.

The goal is not to invent new software. It is to repurpose existing tools to extract benchmarks from reference landscapes and operational phases of the mine itself. To pull every last ounce of value out of tools we already have by extreme mastery of our tools, and to deploy them according to requirements-driven practices that are ontologically coherent with our operational mandates.

By analyzing existing quarry walls, benches, abandoned faces, and adjacent natural analogs, we can derive quantitative envelopes for slope curvature, drainage behavior, and surface morphology. These envelopes then become requirements, not aesthetic suggestions. At the end-of-phase decommissioning of a site, when you hand a landscape architect a benchmarked description of the landscape requirements they need to design to, you liberate them to make your site an award-winning example of how to reclaim a quarry or mine. You win the PR award by caring enough to level up your approach to reclamation.

This is not hard if you time it right. Because the tools are familiar, the method integrates cleanly into ongoing operations rather than being deferred to closure planning.

Defining requirements for future landscape architects

One of the most overlooked risks in mine reclamation is temporal distance. The landscape architect responsible for final contouring is often not the person who wrote the original closure plan or who understands why certain geometries exist.

Benchmark-driven requirements solve this by translating intent into constraints that persist.

Instead of instructing a future team to “recreate natural landforms” which is extremely ambiguous and subjective, the clear requirement becomes something like:

• Maintain surface curvature within a defined range derived from benchmarked stable slopes.

• Route flow paths to match benchmarked drainage densities observed under comparable conditions.

• Avoid convexities or concavities shown to exceed erosion or failure thresholds.

These requirements are auditable, defensible, and regulator-legible. Not using requirements derived from a benchmark is like combining pieces from different puzzles and expecting the outcome to be meaningfully coherent. But when you start from a clear benchmark and deriving the requirements from that first state snapshot, these requirements protect operators like you by demonstrating that reclamation outcomes were constrained by validated system logic rather than subjective design choices.

From compliance to strategic advantage

What began as a compliance exercise has broader implications. Mines that benchmark their landscapes early gain operational flexibility. They can test extraction scenarios against future reclamation constraints, identify problem geometries before they are built, and reduce closure-stage surprises.

This shifts reclamation from a cost center to a form of risk management.

Said differently, not benchmarking is a risk, but it is one you can avoid, and I can show you how to do it with the tools you already have.

If you were at either of the Hexagon summits in Vancouver or Tucson, you saw examples of how GEOCOG applies standard tools to novel use cases, and what that can mean for landscape documentation, benchmarking, forensic landscape analysis, and archeological inquiry. If you weren’t there but want to discover the extensibility of your toolset to solve these new problems, I’m here to help you get started.

This shift also creates continuity. The same benchmarks used during operations become the reference framework for closure, regardless of personnel changes or ownership transitions.

Moving forward

This work is already in use as a proof-of-concept, and the interest from operators and regulators alike suggests the timing is right. As remediation regulations tighten and scrutiny increases, defensible, system-based approaches will become necessary rather than optional.

GEOCOG works directly with mines and quarries that want to formalize their reclamation requirements using existing data and tools. The focus is not on producing prettier drawings, but on encoding landscape intent in a way that survives time, scrutiny, and change.

If you are responsible for long-term land stewardship, closure planning, or regulatory risk within an extractive operation, this is a conversation worth having early.

RYAN DEWEY

Related Reading:

Benchmarking Quarry Landscapes with COTS Tools
Origin: GEOCOG
Post Type: Benchmark Artifact
Circulation: Archive
Date of Publication: 2026-02-25
Related Divisions: GEOCOG, FIELD OFFICE
Purpose: Outline the benefit of early benchmarking in quarry and mine operations while presenting a method for viewing operational sites at end-of-life phases by extending commercially available tools.
Author: RYAN DEWEY

Research proposals are usually treated as administrative documents, private exchanges between applicant and institution. But in my practice they hold a more primary function.

A proposal is a record of where the work stands at a given moment. It indexes which questions have stabilized, which methods have matured, and which lines of inquiry are ready to withstand external scrutiny. It is less an appeal than a snapshot coupled with a vision for what lies ahead.

For that reason, I treat proposal cycles as part of the publication rhythm of my practice. They mark transitions in emphasis and evolutions in focus. They mile mark the trajectory of an inquiry already underway, upstream of any conclusion or closure.

Scholarship, field investigation, spatial intervention, and modeling are treated here as equivalent research outputs. Proposals emerge from that production. They are closer to field reports than applications, documents that register where the work has been and where it is moving.

Recently, two proposals were evaluated through competitive funding cycles and did not advance. As part of a longer research arc, their evaluation marks a moment in the project’s development rather than a conclusion, and the work continues to evolve within the broader trajectory of the research program.

Research timelines and review timelines don’t always align, but that doesn’t mean I can skip this part of the project just because it wasn’t funded. It does have me thinking about the genre that a research proposal is and why it functions the way it does in a practice like mine.

Translation Friction

In Kristoffer Holm Pedersen’s recent essay Seeing the Ground We Stand On (Landezine), Holm Pedersen (Communications Director for SLA, Copenhagen) articulates a structural tension within contemporary architectural and landscape discourse: slow, process-based, ecologically attuned research often resists systems optimized for immediate legibility.

Landscape-scale research operates across temporal registers that exceed conventional cycles of visibility. It requires return, accumulation, and long observation arcs. Its outputs do not always condense into object-based publication formats.

My work is slow by design because the landscapes it studies operate across extended temporal scales. Its pace reflects its subject matter.

This is also reflected in my relationship to institutions that have encountered this work over time. For example, SLA also holds a work produced by my studio during an early phase of the development of this research program documenting post-glacial and post-industrial landscapes in the Great Lakes region. Those same research concerns continue to structure my program today: post-glacial morphology, extraction landscapes, infrastructural memory.

Landscape-scale research exceeds conventional attention spans because it cannot be reduced to the visual alone; it must also be experiential, or it must push observers into experiential engagement in order to approximate understanding of the landscapes being described.

This is the impetus behind my ongoing project An Attempt To Understand A Glacier Without Ever Having Seen One. The work investigates how knowledge can be constructed through mediated observation rather than direct encounter.

This requirement for experience as medium tends to compress audiences when measured against models that treat audience expansion as a primary measure of cultural or intellectual validity.

I say all of this because the two proposals described below sit within that condition.

1) Negative Architectures: Tracing Displacement Logics Across Deep Time

For more than a decade, I have documented glacial grooves, quarry systems, erratics, commemorative landscapes, and infrastructural voids across the Great Lakes region, returning countless times to the same sites but always understanding them anew. These investigations examine (among other themes) the function of removal as a spatial generator.

Glaciers carve.
Quarries hollow.
Spillways incise.

Extraction leaves form.
Displacement leaves memory.
Erosion leaves structure.

I use the term negative architecture to describe landforms produced through subtraction rather than addition, and especially through what persists after the dust settles. These forms operate at multiple scales, from glacial abrasion to industrial excavation to hydroelectric infrastructures such as the Escalier de Géants spillway in northern Quebec.

The current phase of the research extends northward along glacial and industrial corridors linking the Great Lakes to James Bay. Along the way, I proposed tracing several Ohio-found erratics back to their Canadian Shield lithologic origins (Sudbury, Gowganda, etc), to also document quarry systems along the way, and to examine engineered voids as generative, symbolic, and planetary. This project situates architectural thinking within processes of erosion, extraction, and redistribution.

While I draw on metaphor, the goal is more methodological expansion.

Architecture is typically framed as additive. This research argues that removal and accumulation are equally operative spatial systems of production through the delineation of what persists. Landscapes shaped by ice and industry demonstrate that matter itself participates in the production of form across extended temporal scales.

Negative architectures accumulate through removal, it is production through loss (a theme I’ve explored through several exhibitions which might be worth revisiting soon).

I won’t describe the project more here, but the full research dossier, including proposal materials and supporting documentation, is available through the studio archive.

2) When Craft Shapes Thought: Visual and Textual Comparisons in 19th Century Geology

A parallel line of inquiry examines mark-making by removal as a cognitive spatial system at the scale of image rather than landscape. And for my subject, I have been analyzing the landscape engravings used by the US Geological Survey in their 1888 report.

Engraving is approached not primarily as ornament or artifact, but as a record of force interaction between hand, tool, and material resistance. Each mark encodes trajectory, pressure, and constraint in an attempt to preserve fidelity to the subject matter. While photography had existed for decades, publishers in the late 1800s were unable to print photographs in books in an economical way, and for a couple of decades, engraving was used to translate photographs into a format printable by press.

The 1888 US Geological Survey seventh annual report presented a trove of imagery on the glacial landscapes my research is interested in, and so as I attempt to understand the continental glacier that formed these sites, I’ve increasingly become interested in how the engravings depict the major features of the sites in question. Importantly, these engravings operated as evidence and data for scientists who could not see these sites in person, relying on a translation as vicarious embodied experience.

Craft became a tool for advancing scientific reasoning, and my second proposal aimed to outline this both from linguistic analysis of craft metaphor in geologic texts as well as comparative studies between source photograph and output engravings as measurements of data fidelity and reliability. I’ve begun publishing some of that research here, and more complete treatments are on the way.

In short, using statistical analysis paired with discourse analysis and studio experimentation, this research examines line continuity, density variation, and perceptual reconstruction patterns. The objective is to understand how spatial cognition is externalized through material engagement.

Craft becomes a form of spatial modeling executed through removal as the generative force.

So, rather than separating landscape inquiry from material practice, the studio treats both as interlocking systems. Geological displacement and tool-based mark production are studied as different expressions of force shaping form across time.

Again, I am making available for download the full research dossier, proposal materials, and supporting documentation in my publication archive.

On Research Without Walls

Taking a step back, it is easy to see the interconnected continuum of this research, the scale moves from knowledge transmission of morphological data at 2D scale to embodied experience of the same morphological form at planetary scale. The scope of this research exceeds the capacity of any single funding source and therefore advances through multiple phases and support structures.

My practice operates with an autonomous research structure which enables me to approach long-term, wide-horizon inquiry with the rigor of discrete projects, but like I said earlier, research timelines and review timelines also don’t always align. A similar temporal misalignment exists within the subject of the research itself. Glacial processes unfold across durations that far exceed contemporary cycles of visibility. The work therefore operates on a timescale that resists compression into accelerated modes of circulation. What matters here is the continuity of concept across a multifaceted program.

Theory, field investigation, modeling, studio work, and publication are not discrete phases. Each informs the others. Proposals register moments of articulation but do not define the boundaries of the inquiry.

As artifacts of intellectual craftsmanship, the obvious registers my research outputs take include:

• Field documentation and mapping

• Analytical modeling

• Written scholarship

• Site-based investigation

• Archival deposition

• Object-based production

• and more

But in the fullest C. Wright Mills sense of the term, my intellectual craftsmanship dictates the way I structure the internal coherence of my entire way of life which includes the decisions I make about how to structure my practice with autonomy.

The objective is cumulative knowledge production over a life-time, not isolated project completion, and by necessity it displaces everything else, defining the form and register of my life.

But stepping back from autoethnography and back to the realm of transferable ideas, architectural discourse increasingly intersects with ecological systems, infrastructural aging, and long-duration landscape processes. Field-based methodologies that integrate geology, cognition, and design remain essential to that evolution.

Morphologies of displacement are not only spatial conditions. They are epistemological ones. They shape how we understand time, material agency, and the production of form.

The research continues.

RYAN DEWEY

The full research dossiers, including proposal materials and supporting documentation, are available through the studio archive. If you represent a funding body or institution aligned with this work, I welcome a conversation.

Morphologies of Displacement
Origin: STUDIO (Practice)
Post Type: Conceptual Artifact
Circulation: Email
Date of Publication: 2026-02-24
Related Divisions: STUDIO, FIELD OFFICE, GEOCOG
Purpose: Examine research proposals as temporal and epistemological artifacts within a long-horizon research practice. Situate landscape-scale inquiry, craft-based cognition, and modeling as equivalent research outputs. Explore translation friction between slow ecological research systems and institutional evaluation cycles, using displacement as a conceptual framework linking geological, material, and cognitive morphologies.
Author: RYAN DEWEY

You don’t have to be a trout bum or enjoy recreational fishing to benefit from the perspective I share below, you just have to care about learning more about landscapes you love, which I think is probably everyone who reads my work here. And don’t worry, this doesn’t mean I’m going to start posting about fly fishing regularly, unless I have something to share that informs my broader research in the glacial landscapes of the Great Lakes.

This article uses fishing as its surface language, but the underlying project is squarely about perception and landscape intelligence. How rivers organize themselves. How shorelines remember ice. How attention sharpens when the environment has consequences. If you’ve ever cared about reading terrain, water, weather, or history written into land, you’re already the audience for ANGLING DIVISION.

Toward the end of this post, I’ll introduce Room 1910, the division’s field outfitter, where objects are produced as extensions of this practice; material investigations that allow research to exist in hand, in texture, and in place.

The Ethos of ANGLING DIVISION

Returning to the same rivers over a season reveals a cumulative record worth preserving.

The rivers of the Great Lakes region are not incidental features of the landscape. In northern Ohio and across much of the HUC4 basin, nearly every river and stream ultimately drains to the Great Lakes, binding local waters directly to the glacial basins left by the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. These rivers occupy valleys shaped by ice, meltwater, and sediment, and continue to adjust within those inherited forms.

To fish a river repeatedly is to encounter change at a human scale within a geological framework. Water levels shift, substrates move, banks erode or stabilize, vegetation advances or recedes. Fish appear, disappear, or return. These changes are often noticed by anglers long before they are measured elsewhere.

ANGLING DIVISION takes this attentiveness seriously.

Rivers are sites of ongoing formation.

The river valleys of the Great Lakes region emerged from glacial retreat and meltwater drainage. Moraines, outwash plains, and proglacial spillways established the courses that modern rivers continue to follow. While the ice is gone, the systems it left behind remain active.

Rivers are therefore not static corridors but active sites of ongoing formation. They register seasonal cycles, extreme events, and long-term adjustments. They are among the most legible places to observe how deep time and present practice intersect.

ANGLING DIVISION treats the river not only as a place to fish, but as a place to learn.

Practice produces a specific kind of record worth collecting.

Anglers return to the same waters across seasons and years. They notice water clarity, temperature, flow, access, and fish behavior. This knowledge is often informal and personal, retained in memory or notebooks, and lost when individuals move on.

ANGLING DIVISION proposes that this knowledge can be logged without stripping it of its character, and be useful to contributing members who want to see their favorite reach in the context of the broader basin hydrology.

Members are invited to record their catches through a simple submission process, noting date, general location, species, and conditions. Exact precision is not as important as continuity is. Coordinates may refer to stretches of river rather than exact points, you don’t have to give away your secret spot. What matters is repeatability over time.

These submissions form a cumulative record of attention.

We’re building a repository for stewardship.

ANGLING DIVISION is not a regulatory body, a research institution, or an advocacy organization. It does not issue directives or extract data for third parties.

Instead, it operates as a stewarded repository of observations generated through practice. Over time, aggregated records reveal patterns of presence, absence, or change. When appropriate, this material can be shared outward in careful, limited ways, with the consent of members, and without relinquishing control of the archive, and without giving away people’s secret fishing spots.

Data is just data until it produces a material record.

ANGLING DIVISION is intentionally not an app, not a dashboard, and not a real-time feedback system. There are no live maps, alerts, rankings, or feeds. The work happens on the river, in notebooks, in memory, and through seasonal return. Submissions are simple by design and processed slowly, on a human timescale that mirrors how rivers actually change. The primary outputs are printed ledgers and physical objects, not screens. While users submit catch logs through online forms, this is a practice rooted in land rather than devices, in accumulated attention rather than continuous connectivity. The Division exists to pull observation out of the phone and back into the field, where perception is shaped by weather, access, fatigue, light, and consequence.

ANGLING DIVISION is committed to physical artifacts.

At the close of each season, members receive a material record derived from their submissions: River Ledger, a printed report and a compiled register of how the rivers behaved this season across the full set of data-contributing individual anglers. Occasionally, in addition to River Ledger, I produce field objects under the aegis of Room 1910 (the quiet outfitter room of my studio), and these items are made available to data-contributing members first before being released to the general public.

As with other FIELD OFFICE publications and objects, these materials are designed to endure, circulate, and be conserved by their holders.

ANGLING DIVISION membership is an invitation to pay attention, to record without spectacle, and to belong to a practice that values rivers as places shaped by ice, water, and time, and by the anglers that return to them, time and again.

Membership keeps you committed to contributing quality data.

ANGLING DIVISION functions as a private membership club in the tradition of physical fish camps and river associations, but for the sake of ensuring quality data rather than for the sake of exclusivity.

Members contribute seasonal observations to a curated regional record, participating in a shared archive that values rivers as lived systems rather than abstract resources.

Membership does not grant access to exclusive waters, nor does it confer authority; hierarchy within the Division is minimal and largely ceremonial, reflecting roles of care, observation, and stewardship. Those reasons fit with what most flyfishing anglers come to the sport for in the first place. This membership is available for you to compare your catch data against the broader hydrology landscape of the Great Lakes basin.

The Division does not advocate policy, manage waterways, or operate as a conservation organization, its purpose is observational, building a long-term record of rivers, species, and seasonal patterns across the region.

ANGLING DIVISION is a natural extension of FIELD OFFICE.

ANGLING DIVISION operates within FIELD OFFICE as a long-term institutional experiment. It extends my existing practice concerned with archives, material culture, and non-institutional knowledge transmission into the domain of rivers and angling. FIELD OFFICE is primarily concerned with understanding the glacial landscapes of the Great Lakes north to the Arctic Circle, and it functions as a way to tune attention to the land. Anglers attune to the rivers that cross these lands, and so I began ANGLING DIVISION as a way to make something with the flyfishing community, to build something that no state agencies, fisheries, or conservation organizations produce. It’s a new way to understand sites in their past, present, and future contexts.

Because of this connection, ANGLING DIVISION documents, ledgers, and objects are issued under FIELD OFFICE to ensure continuity beyond seasons, platforms, or individual participation.

A closing note as we move toward spring:

As the ice retreats and rivers awaken to spring flows, I will find myself drawn once again to the familiar bends and riffles, where water shapes gravel, moss clings to stones, and trout trace the shadows of overhead trees. Each visit to my favorite reaches reminds me that these rivers are not static; they are sites of quiet transformation, marked by shifting currents, fluctuating clarity, and the subtle passage of time.

By logging our observations and catches over the coming season, we create more than a record of fish. We build a continuity of attention, a cumulative picture of these waters, and a practice that binds our own understanding to the rhythms of the watershed. Every entry, whether brief or detailed, contributes to a shared archive that will outlast any single season or angler.

I look forward to seeing the rivers through your eyes as much as my own, and to preserving a season’s worth of insight in our collective ledger.

RYAN DEWEY

For ANGLING DIVISION membership options for fly fishing guides, brick & mortar fly shop owners, benefactor sponsorships, and serious anglers, please visit: anglingdivision.com

ATTUNEMENT TO LANDSCAPES: Attention & Fly Fishing
Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)
Post Type: Field Essay / Ethos Statement
Circulation: email
Date of Publication: 2026-02-04
Related Divisions: ANGLING DIVISION, FIELD OFFICE, ROOM 1910
Purpose:
Articulate the ethos and operational logic of ANGLING DIVISION by using fly fishing as a surface language for deeper inquiry into perception, landscape intelligence, seasonal observation, and the legibility of glacial river systems across the Great Lakes basin
Author: RYAN DEWEY

From drawing to engraving, to texts, reports, and lectures, to early photography then serial stereography, and to my mesh model, every attempt fails to capture the immersive nature of these geologic features on this tiny island in the Lake Erie Archipelago. As I work on completing my manuscript about the glacial landscapes of the Great Lakes (part of my archive record at Nevada Museum of Art), I have followed the development of approaches to documenting complex sites like these grooves, and after recently posting my mesh model of the grooves, I want to contextualize it in the lineage of approaches that inform my model, and also put some emphasis on the ways other modes of representation have succeeded and failed at capturing the sense of awe that sites like this evoke when we encounter them spatially with our actual bodies.

This project sits within a lineage of visual practices that stretch back to the nineteenth century, when the grooves were first being systematically documented at the same moment they were being destroyed by quarrying. The tools have changed, but the problem has not. How does one record a landscape whose significance lies in scale, continuity, and subtle curvature, rather than in isolated features or picturesque views? And how does one preserve knowledge of such a landscape when the physical site itself is under active erasure?

The earliest sustained attempt to address this problem can be found in the stereogram cards produced by A.C. Platt in the 1890s. These images, made as industrial extraction accelerated, represent one of the first technical efforts to convey the grooves as three dimensional phenomena rather than as flattened curiosities. They were not souvenirs in the casual sense. They were instruments of seeing.

Stereography and the Problem of Geological Scale

By the time Platt produced his stereograms, stereoscopic photography had already established itself as a powerful visual technology. It offered something conventional photography could not: the ability to suggest depth through binocular vision. When viewed through a stereoscope, paired images taken at slightly different angles created a convincing illusion of volume, allowing viewers to perceive spatial relationships directly rather than infer them from pictorial cues.

For geological subjects, this mattered enormously. Glacial grooves do not announce themselves easily in single images. Their significance emerges through continuity, repetition, and subtle variation across large surfaces. When reduced to a flat photograph, they risk appearing decorative or incidental. Stereography offered a way to restore some portion of their spatial reality.

Platt’s cards frequently place the viewer at oblique angles to the grooves, emphasizing their length and curvature. The quarry walls and industrial scars are often visible, sometimes intruding directly into the frame. These are not neutral documents. They show a landscape in transition, one being actively dismantled even as it is being recorded.

The timing is critical. In the 1890s, glacial theory in North America was still consolidating its authority. While European scientists had advanced models of continental glaciation earlier in the century, American acceptance came more slowly and relied heavily on field evidence that could be communicated beyond isolated sites. The grooves at Kelleys Island were not just local curiosities. They were persuasive objects.

From Stereogram to Engraving

The stereograms did not remain confined to private viewing devices. They circulated, directly and indirectly, into scientific publications through engravings derived from the stereogram photographs themselves. At the time, commercial printing was unable to reproduce photographs at scale, so for a few short years in the late 1890s, photographs were converted into engravings before printing. These engravings are often misunderstood today as purely illustrative or interpretive. In fact, they functioned as translations between media, each with its own constraints and affordances.

Engraving allowed images to be reproduced at scale in journals and books, but at the cost of depth cues, tonal subtlety, and precision of micro-surface variations in the depicted object. To compensate, engravers emphasized line, directionality, and contrast. The grooves were rendered as insistent parallel striations, their continuity exaggerated to ensure legibility on the printed page, but even still, some shops produced better engravings than others and in another post I’ll demonstrate why certain engravers carved better grooves (both at the formal depictions of geologic grooves and functional ink-holding grooved plates for printing). These engravings filled the academic texts of the 1890s and craft fidelity determined the quality of the data that geologists around the world were using to understand new theories of continental glaciation.

As one of the chapters in my book manuscript shows, this process mattered for enabling the theory of continental glaciation to gain a foothold in geologic and public discourse in the early 1900s. These images helped stabilize the grooves as evidence of glacial motion rather than as isolated erosional anomalies or as simple results of flooding at scale. Directional markings became arguments. Repetition across surfaces became proof. The visual language of engraving shaped how the grooves were understood, discussed, and taught, and for that matter, shaped how people came to “believe” in glaciers as agents.

Importantly, the engravings often abstracted the site away from its industrial context. Quarrying receded or disappeared entirely, replaced by idealized surfaces that could stand in for glacial action itself. In this way, the images participated in a selective preservation of knowledge. They saved form while losing context.

Loss as a Condition of Documentation

Platt’s stereograms and the engravings derived from them exist because the grooves were being destroyed. The act of documentation was already entangled with loss. This is not incidental. It establishes a condition that persists into the present. This past field season I built a stereoscope pinhole camera and visited the sites Platt documented, oriented myself by aligning with landmarks and horizons and recreated some of his images.

My images were taken in the precise location of Platt’s images, only instead of geologic features, most of my images captured various views of the parking lot that sits where the great central groove used to be and the public boat launch where the loading dock used to be. I haven’t developed the paper images yet, but here’s a digital image of that parking lot with an individual tree that appears in Platt’s photos with similar crown shape (I measured the base at more than 9 feet around):

My photogrammetry project was able to document the section of grooves that was preserved, but it comes out of a similar tension of dealing with loss. The grooves that remain are fragmented, fenced, weathered, and isolated from their original continuity. What survives does so under protection, but also under constraint. No single vantage point allows the viewer to apprehend the site as it once existed. Visitors are required to remain on the trail that surrounds the site and to not enter the site itself. The landscape must be reconstructed mentally, or technically.

Photogrammetry offers one such reconstruction. By assembling hundreds or thousands of overlapping images, it produces a composite surface that no individual photograph can capture. For this model I used 11,000 photographs that I captured with a DSLR in, around, and through the site. Like stereography, it relies on the relationship between images rather than on any single frame. Depth emerges from correlation.

I’m reminded of Hockney’s Walking in the Zen Garden (and indeed all of his multi-perspectival images) which points out the fact that composite images are also composites of multiple perspectives. He describes it this way:

“For Walking in the Zen Garden, I took more than 160 photographs...it was then and only really then that I began to realize that one of the areas I was really examining was perspective, that this was what you could alter in photography. When I first pieced them together I thought I had made a photograph without perspective.” (Hockney, 2004, 101).

I think about this quote a lot as I build composite images, especially when I’m trying to decide what perspective an image presents. Stereoscopic images combine two perspectives. Photogrammetry combines as many perspectives as there are source images, and then computes the perspectives that might be missing. Inherent to a photogrammetry image is the density of perspective so much that new perspectives not supplied in the data can be found inside the composite by the strange eyesight of calculation.

Yet photogrammetry is not a simple technological upgrade from stereoscopic imaging. It is simply a continuation of an old problem addressed with new means, and it’s not even state of the art. LiDAR gives a far more precise reading, but at the time I captured these images, I did not have access to a LiDAR rig. There are public datasets of hillshade produced with LiDAR, but the granularity is insufficient to capture the types of details I was able to capture with photogrammetry. Below is a hillshade image of the island. The center of the blue circle contains the same landscape pictured in the aerial photo I took of the grooves and quarry. This gives a sense of the disproportionate granularity between my high resolution mesh model and the low resolution open LiDAR data.

Photogrammetry also diverges from the mediated embodied experience that stereograms provided. Where stereograms asked the viewer’s eyes to perform the work of synthesis, photogrammetry delegates that task to software. Likewise, where engravings emphasized line to preserve legibility, statistical surface models emphasize deviation and variance.

In each case, the goal is not realism in a naive sense. It is legibility under constraint.

Mediated Participation & First-Person Photogrammetry

The visual model of the glacial grooves is the closest I can come to giving someone access to the experience of physically being inside the grooves at the site, but I would be hard-pressed to call the model “immersive,” as I’ve heard it be so called. My hesitation to use that word comes from an experiential hesitation and also a technical one. Experientially, I know nothing compares to being on site. Technically, I know the models more closely depict spectatorship than enabling the participant viewpoint required for something to be veridically immersive.

In my broader research on viewpoint as a tool, I have focused on how attention can be modulated through orientation and disorientation. I am especially interested in the way oscillation of viewpoint amplifies cognitive effect. When a viewer is repeatedly repositioned between participant and spectator roles, their understanding of a site becomes less stable and more engaged. The mind works harder to reconcile scale, position, and meaning.

These visual models are the closest we can get to giving people the experience of being a participant immersed in the site itself. But this is not true participant viewpoint; it is mediated participation which actually makes it a kind of spectatorship. This experience of being removed from the scene itself turns it into a kind of voyeurism.

Oscillation between participant viewpoint and spectator viewpoint increases cognitive effect by modulating attention patterns toward orientation or disorientation.

One of the clearest examples of this oscillation at work appears in Barbara Tannenbaum's curation of Frank Gohlke & Emmet Gowin's photography of the aftermath of Mount St Helen's eruption in American Vesuvius (2013) at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

When I studied that exhibition, what stood out was not any individual image, but the rhythm produced by their sequencing. Ground level photographs, taken from within the devastated landscape, were interspersed with aerial views that pulled the viewer abruptly upward and outward to look down onto the scenes. The sequence of how the photographs were hung in the gallery bounced back and forth between spectator and participant viewpoints, rhetorically structuring the experience to perform the experience of confusion and overwhelm of the eruption aftermath.

To prove the cognitive grounding of this effect, I diagrammed the composition of each photograph in the exhibition and analyzed the sequences with cognitive framing, which solidified a formal model of understanding how the sequence of viewpoint switching structured the textural experience of encountering exhibition rhythms. I’ve published about this research in the landscape architecture journal KERB (RMIT) and in my book with Punctum, so I won’t get into that here, but I do want to share these sketches I made during my analysis of the exhibition so you can see the general way I analyze motion and measure attention in visual composition:

As viewers walked through the exhibition, the photographs they saw switched back and forth between immersive participant viewpoints to distal/removed spectator viewpoints to accumulate a cognitive effect of disorientation. But in my mesh model of the glacial grooves, there is no switching viewpoints. The camera fly through is from the immersive participant viewpoint, but your encounter is through mediated participation. It is an approximation only (like any digital twin or any virtual reality or augmented reality encounter). This isn’t an argument against digital twins or AR/VR. Those technologies give a kind of completeness needed for coordination across systems at scale, but they don’t replace the experience of a human body being human during a human experience of an encounter with a site, which is where I believe the magic happens.

The model cannot be a substitute for being in the site itself. Viewing the model is an abstraction of immersion, and it can’t be anything other than spectatorship. You have to be there to get the participant viewpoint, because then your body has the experience of immersion, and not just your brain.

Platt’s stereograms function the same way as individual images, they give a sense of immersion through simple stereovision, but the view is removed from actual stimulus, it is a depiction and a representation.

Looking through the sequences of images Platt captured, there is a path movement through the site, ambling in and out of grooves, across the quarry floor, around the perimeter to get a better look at views we can’t take today because the subjects were quarried away over a century ago. One has the sense of participation in the scene, but only because of accumulation, not because of phenomenology.

Contemporary Tools, Historical Continuities

There is a tendency to frame contemporary imaging technologies as fundamentally novel. Three dimensional models, point clouds, and algorithmic reconstructions are often presented as breaks from historical practice. In reality, they belong to a long tradition of technical vision, particularly within the sciences.

The nineteenth century was filled with experiments in visual approximation. Photography itself was not immediately accepted as objective. It required conventions, standards, and interpretive frameworks. Stereography was one such experiment, promising access to spatial truth while introducing its own distortions.

My project does not claim to resolve these tensions. Instead, it makes them explicit. The photogrammetric models I produce are not substitutes for the grooves themselves. They are artifacts, shaped by choices about resolution, camera position, and algorithmic thresholds, as well as constraints outside of my control such as the weather and the lighting. They reveal certain aspects of the grooves while suppressing others.

This, incidentally, is precisely what earlier technologies did, too. Platt’s stereograms privileged continuity and depth at the expense of surface texture. Engravings privileged direction and repetition at the expense of material specificity. Each tool made the grooves visible in a particular way, for a particular audience.

I think understanding this lineage matters as we look at digitally constructed images and algorithmic compression. It situates contemporary work within a historical conversation rather than outside it. It also reframes novelty as responsibility. To use new tools is not to escape history, but to add another layer to it. And it also reminds us that the image is not the experience, because the body isn’t present.

Toward a Cumulative Record

One of the ambitions of this project is cumulative rather than corrective. I am producing work that sits alongside the earlier works by photographers before me. My stereoscopic pinhole studies approach the task of trying to understand by recreating the earlier works with the same methods. The stereograms, engravings, photographs, and models form a record of repeated attempts to grasp the same phenomenon under changing conditions.

This cumulative approach mirrors how geological knowledge itself advances. No single observation settles a theory. Instead, understanding accretes through repeated encounters, each shaped by available tools and prevailing assumptions. It’s like the statistical image stacks I process on hundreds of stones to find the standard deviation, accumulating a good sample will yield a solid calculation which gives us good technical perspectives on the world we’re encountering phenomenologically. Theory advances with that kind of accumulated evidence.

The grooves have always demanded this kind of close attention. They evoke a sense of awe which I’ll describe in a future post about the build up of anticipation in reaching the remoteness of this site (and how I believe this contributes to their fame). They are not easily consumed. They resist the single image, the quick explanation, the isolated sample, the selfie. Their scale exceeds human bodies, and their subtlety exceeds casual perception.

That resistance is what has kept artists, scientists, and technicians returning to them for more than a century. The photogrammetry project is one more return. It is not a claim to finality, but an acknowledgment of persistence.

There is a trope in writing about the grooves on Kelleys Island, a replicated exaggeration that every brochure and website copywriter tries to phrase in their own way to avoid plagiarism (and sometimes not even that much effort). It so suspicious that I wonder if some of these writers have never seen the grooves in person. It’s the claim that the glacial grooves on Kelleys Island are “the most spectacular grooves” or “the largest glacial grooves” or “the most accessible example of glacial grooves in the world” — they aren’t. There are bedrock mega-grooves across the globe, including Canada, England, Australia, Greenland, and more, and even further beyond, there are extraplanetary occurrences showing up on Mars.

The Kelleys Island site isn’t even large enough to be classified as a mega-groove; it’s merely a groove system by accepted classification schema. There are thousands of striated sites in North America alone. In 1888 Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin reported in the seventh annual report of the US Geological Survey that 2,474 sites of glacial striation occur across the northern United States. He recognized that many people would not believe him and so he proceeded to list the names of the geologists comprising that cohort of first-hand witnesses of these sites along with the count per state. There was a lot of effort put into convincing people of the enormity of the continental ice sheet at the end of the 19th century.

But there is less interest in glacial grooves today than there was in the 1890s. In a simple Google Ngram map of the term “glacial grooves” we see the peak happened in 1894 (I know why, but I’m saving that for a different post). The chart itself resembles a cross section of grooves and shows that interest has fizzled out along the trajectory of the arrow of time; their removal from public consciousness co-extending with their removal from the landscape through quarrying:

In fact, while the glacial grooves enabled the theory of continental glaciation to be derived from observation in North America in the late 1890s, the science of glaciology has largely moved on. As more than one tenured geologist has told me, glacial grooves were “solved a long time ago.” This Ngram confirms that grooves are unsexy in the literature. Still, sites like Kelleys Island remain contested about mechanisms of local formation as seen in recently published contrasting views (Newton, et al. 2018 and Munro-Stasiuk, et al. 2005), among others.

I digress.

In some of the posts that follow over the next few months, I will introduce specific examples from the historical record alongside contemporary outputs from this project. Each pairing will focus on a particular problem of representation: depth, scale, continuity, and loss. The goal is not to draw metaphors prematurely, but to establish a shared technical ground on which later interpretations can stand.

If you haven’t seen the grooves in person, and you have the means, I highly recommend taking a trip. Ferry service opens up again in March.

RYAN DEWEY

One more thing: this is not an ad, but I’m sharing because it’s relevant to people who love the grooves. I made a limited run of this fun little badge for you to sew onto your backpack:

References

Google Ngram Viewer. (n.d.). Google Ngram Viewer. Used for commentary and illustration under fair use. https://books.google.com/ngrams

Hockney, D. (2004). Pictures: The definitive retrospective. London, UK: Bulfinch Press. ISBN 10: 0821228730; ISBN 13: 9780821228739

Munro-Stasiuk, M. J., Fisher, T. G., & Nitzsche, C. R. (2005). The origin of the western Lake Erie grooves, Ohio: Implications for reconstructing the subglacial hydrology of the Great Lakes sector of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Quaternary Science Reviews, 24(22), 2392–2409. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2004.11.018

Newton, M., Evans, D. J. A., Roberts, D. H., & Stokes, C. R. (2018). Bedrock mega-grooves in glaciated terrain: A review. Earth-Science Reviews, 185, 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2018.03.007

Viewpoint & Experience of the Glacial Grooves in Mediated Representation: an Embodied Point of View
Origin: STUDIO (Practice)
Post Type: Weekend Read / Conceptual Artifact
Circulation: Substack (Public)
Date of Publication: 2026-01-21
Related Divisions: STUDIO, FIELD OFFICE, GEOCOG
Purpose: Situate a contemporary photogrammetric model of the Kelleys Island glacial grooves within a historical lineage of mediated geological representation, examining how stereography, engraving, photography, and computational surface modeling each negotiate scale, continuity, loss, and embodied experience. The post frames photogrammetry not as a technological rupture but as a continuation of long-standing representational problems tied to the limits of vision, documentation, and participation.
Author: RYAN DEWEY

I’ve been processing my recent sculpture Everglades Cord and the way that this object operates as a machine for tuning attention to detail through slow looking which I wrote about here. There’s more to say about that, but I’m writing today about a parallel translational work that I produced during deinstallation this past August.

During deinstallation, my son scanned both ends of each log using a flatbed scanner. As he finished each log, I would then trace the outline by hand, stacking the contours on a single sheet. The drawing carries both gestures: one procedural and delegated, the other embodied and durational. I got two drawings from this experience which I’ll share below after I frame the significance of the comparison.

I had wanted to see if I could approximate an analog image for these logs that communicated some of the same results I was deriving from the computational models I was running on the glacial stones I had been mapping on Kelleys Island.

What i ended up with was a remembrance of the importance of being human.

View a video sequence of all 754 scans in order on Instagram

Everglades Cord (2025) presents itself as a stack of firewood, but this apparent familiarity is a misdirection: each log is hand-made through a deliberate combination of precision joinery and the blunt force of an axe. Through close looking and sustained attention, the object resists its own category and becomes a lens for examining how human perception, touch, and intention are registered in material form. What do I mean that it resists its own category? If you look closer it tells you it is not a pile of firewood.

Here’s an installation view of the full set of logs in this dataset:

Here’s a small selection of the scanned images of the ends of logs as a reference for my input data in the computations that follow.

When I produced the standard deviation models of the glacial stones I came across on Kelleys Island (which I wrote about here), I was interested in the variety of stones as much as their shape and size. The variation in color across stones influenced the stack models I built because the pixels in the images had wide variation in color. Some stones were pink, some were yellow, some gray, some brown, some black. These color profiles indexed the bedrock lithologies in the Canadian Shield were these glacial stones originated from, so seeing the variety of color come through in the digital processing was important to me.

But I ran the same statistical models on the full set of stacked images of the logs from Everglades Cord, and those individual images have a fairly consistent color scheme because it is all cypress wood from the same source. So for these objects it was the contour edges and profiles of the end cut cross sections were more important to capture.

On the computer, stacking is literal. You place every image in the same coordinate system and ask the machine to compute something across them. A center. A boundary. A spread. Depending on the operation, you get a different answer. The average image. The median one. The darkest or lightest extreme. The statistical dispersion. Each result is correct, and each model answers a different question.

The mean image tells you where the mass settles. The median resists outliers and points to what is most typical. The minimum and maximum define the envelope of possibility. Standard deviation shows where variation concentrates and where it thins out. Skewness reveals bias in one direction or another. These are not aesthetic effects or filters, or notional impressions. They are factual descriptions of structure. It’s math.

Scanning was slow because I wanted to capture the logs at high resolution, but we had all week to finish, so we took our time. On the drawing side, I traced the contour of each log with a pencil onto a single sheet of paper. I did not erase between tracings. I did not separate them. I simply placed the log down onto the paper and traced again and again, one log after the next, each outline laid on top of the center of the previous tracings.

By the end, the paper held hundreds of contours. A dense, darkened taurus where the outlines overlapped most often. Fainter halos where they diverged. Peripheral lines that appeared once and never again. Toning, abrasive fuzzing of the paper from overworking, ridges following the line of the pencil around the object, polygon upon polygon created in myriad intersections of lines crossing and crossing again. The surface of the drawings shimmer with the reflective sheen of graphite, making these drawings difficult to photograph. The paper cupped into a shallow bowl from the repetition of pencil moving the fibers of the paper, wrinkling the drawing in ways that make it impossible to flatten. All of these “defects” are actually indexes to the human hand.

My intent was to draw a standard deviation by hand, but that’s not possible. Actually, these drawings are not statistical operations at all. They do not calculate variance, they do not measure distance from a mean. While you can inspect any particular point of the drawing and you can get a sense of how many times the pencil passed that point from value, tone, and depth, this is not reproducible, or undoable, or forensically calculable. All that these drawings reveal is where my hand returned.

With that understanding, it’s easy to see that the drawing does not record distribution as much as it records the recognizable legibility of accumulation. This is accumulated presence more than it is statistics, the actual embodiment rather than the analysis of the products of my embodiment.

My hand hesitated around tricky corners. Sometimes on easy passes I pressed harder. A slip drifts, but appears corrected when obscured by the tracing of another log. The pencil line contains timing, pressure, fatigue, attention. None of this is noise.

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Over hundreds of repetitions, a center emerges, but not because it was computed. It emerges because that region kept being protected again and again inside the center of the nested stack. Critically, my trace drawings differ from the photographs because my traces are outlines and the photographs depict the solid object, so the drawing preserves a hollow texture in the center as a void, turning the density of the image into a taurus form.

The drawing does not tell you what the average log looks like, but it does show you how a form becomes stable through repeated encounter.

This is the difference that matters.

The computational stacks describe the set from a comprehensive view. They answer questions like: where is the center of mass, how far do the extremes extend, how much variation exists and in which direction it leans. They are invaluable for analysis. They tell the truth about the data.

The drawing tells a different truth. It shows how a category forms before it can be named. Before boundaries are defined. Before rules are articulated. It shows how familiarity thickens through exposure.

In cognitive science, this is called prototypicality. Categories are not built from strict definitions but from centers of gravity. We recognize things because they are close enough to what we have seen before. The prototype is not an average. It is a convergence of an exemplar type that becomes the standard for comparison across instances to determine whether or not an instance deserves to be a member of the category, or if it differs enough to form its own categorical center. To translate the Greek with attention to literal equivalence, a prototype is the first sort of a thing, and it defines what is and is not a thing in that category structure for what’s called a centered-set. To use a classic example, when you see enough birds that you can distinguish the pattern and find what is prototypical, you end up grounding the category “bird” with the image of the bird with the highest statistical frequency. The prototype varies depending on the region of the world, where I am in the Great Lakes a prototypical bird might be a robin. When I lived in Papua New Guinea it was the bird of paradise (incidentally, last night I dreamed of cassowaries, a deadly flightless bird that runs around the jungle). This variation in prototype is because the category structure is reliant on frequency of entities being grouped, and so the cluster is prototypical.

My log drawings perform that convergence materially. The darkened core donut ring shape is not the mean log. It is the place my hand most often encountered a log and described the edge of a log with the pencil. The peripheral lines are not outliers to be excluded. They are part of the memory of the form that I was tracing.

This is where the human and the machine diverge.

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The machine has perfect recall and no experience. It can store every image and compute across all of them without fatigue, and do it across all pixels for the full depth of the stack. But it does not “remember” in the way a body does. It does not accrue familiarity. It does not learn a form through repetition. It only evaluates it, and re-presents it to us in visualizations, often in compressions we can’t experience in real life. For instance, this minimum stack analysis where the annular growth rings bleed through the stack to produce a crossing of growth rings impossible to visualize without computation:

The drawing, by contrast, forgets constantly. Each trace overwrites the previous ones imperfectly. Memory here is not storage as much as it is sedimentation. What remains is what was returned to most often. The drawing is chronological. It is a time-stamp of what came before. What is underneath is before, what is above is most recent. This is accretion, like dust piling up. The relationship is prepositional (like all of my work if you read closely).

Seen together, the stacked images and the drawings are not redundant. They are complementary. One explains variation. The other explains recognition. One models precise difference between instances of the type. The other records how sameness emerges across instances of the type.

I originally thought I was making a picture about these logs. I was not.

I was making a picture about how knowledge takes shape. About how categories form not through calculation alone, but through repeated, embodied contact. About how memory is rhythmic, not archival. About how meaning thickens where attention keeps landing.

I’m not saying the machine visuals aren’t useful or interesting, I like them as visuals and will exhibit them in future installations of Everglades Cord, but I had a lot more fun making the pencil drawing by hand, because while the machine gave me clarity, the drawing required actually engaging the object. I learned more about the logs phenomenologically than I could statistically. Still, both are necessary to get a complete picture.

As an artist making objects, I don’t actually often develop images with my hand. I sketch, I diagram, and I use drawing as a tool, but I don’t often use it as a medium. So when I was in the process of tracing the objects I was using body motions familiar to me in the techniques of tool manipulation. Some artists might contend with this as a drawing since I traced shapes on top of shapes, they might disagree with how I categorize the output of the action as a drawing. But I factually “drew” this because I pulled the pencil around the forms and toward myself which is a primal act that we acquire as we sense make in the world as infants, drawing things toward ourselves to inspect them and learn them. Of course, I also draw tools like blades toward myself all the time in the manipulation of wood and stone and metal, so drawing a pencil toward myself has the same benefit of precision in laying down an accurate line as does the cutting edge of a blade pulling through wood, and I’m very practiced at that. It’s a drawing. It’s precise. But it’s definitely human, even if it was assisted by the template of the log contours being traced. Here we’re back at categorization, when a bird is seen more frequently than another it becomes prototypical. This frequency-dependence transcends domains; what is prototypically a drawing to a 2D artist and what is prototypically a drawing to me derives from frequency. If I keep writing, laying line down after line, I worry the stack of concepts will destabilize, so I’ll wrap it up.

The hand-made drawing here records where form and gesture intersect, marking each encounter as it happens, while the statistical stacks treat the forms as a population, analyzing variation and consistency across the whole set. I hope this work is received less as a comparison of skill or precision and more as an invitation to engage openly, to witness the human rhythm embedded in the act of mark-making.

RYAN DEWEY

Everglades Cord is available for institutional loan and scholarly circulation by arrangement. Enquiries from museums, research institutions, and curatorial contexts are welcome.

Origin: STUDIO (Practice)

Post Type: Conceptual Artifact

Circulation: Email

Date of Publication: 2026-01-21

Related Divisions: STUDIO, FIELD OFFICE, GEOCOG

Purpose: Explore the contrasts between human and computational representations of form, memory, and category, using traced logs from Everglades Cord (2025) to situate drawing as a practice of perceptual, embodied accumulation alongside statistical analysis of photographic stacks.

Author: RYAN DEWEY

ACCRETION & LEGIBILITY

Postal materials appear in my practice because they sit at an unusual intersection of infrastructure, evidence, and time. They are designed to move through systems, to be handled, marked, delayed, and rerouted, and in doing so they accumulate traces of those systems in ways few other media do. An envelope is never just a container. It is a record of coordination across institutions, standards, geographies, and hands.

I am interested in postal artifacts not for their imagery or nostalgia, but for their procedural density. Rates, cancellations, routing marks, inscriptions, and wear patterns are all signals. They document decisions made under constraint, often invisibly, and they persist as physical residue long after the operational moment has passed. In that sense, postal materials function as compact field reports.

Working with them allows me to study how abstract rules become material outcomes, and how large systems leave legible traces at human scale. The postal system is not my subject so much as my instrument.

If you enjoy documentation for its own sake, you are in the right place.

A DIGEST

This post serves as a guide to a five-part series exploring how the objects produced through my studio practice (covers, postcards, and related dispatches of works on paper) exist simultaneously as official records of expeditionary activity, as artifacts within contemporary philatelic discourse, as 2D works from my studio, and as elements of FIELD OFFICE documentation.

I recognize that this material is specialized. It is not intended for every inbox, and I wrote this digest to function as an entry point for those who wish to engage more deeply. If this isn’t for you, just skip it and come back with my next post. But if you are curious (and I hope you are), here is a summary for readers who want a concise overview, followed by a suggested reading path for those ready to navigate the full archive.

SUMMARY OF PRACTICE

Across these five articles, I examine how postal artifacts (whether produced during training expeditions, in the field, or as mobile observation tools) mediate between personal record-keeping, public communication, and formalized philatelic practice. The objects are simultaneously:

• Reflective artifacts of my studio practice, capturing procedural decisions, field observations, and creative design systems.

• Participatory documents in contemporary philately, entering the postal system under real-world conditions and engaging with established collectors’ norms.

• Official records of expeditionary activity, including training exercises, site-specific field observations, and longitudinal monitoring of movement and landscape.

This duality makes categorization difficult. The pieces operate across multiple communities, from art audiences to philatelists, from curators to fellow spatial practitioners, all while preserving their documentary and communicative functions.

THE 5 MAIN ARTICLES

1. Do Postal Artifacts from Expedition Training Qualify as Polar Philately?
   Introduces the conceptual framing of expeditionary postal artifacts, arguing for their inclusion in polar philately and situating training covers within the broader practice.

2. Proof of Concept: Designing & Testing Expedition-Related Postal Artifacts
   Describes design strategies and practical testing of covers and templates, showing how objects were iteratively developed in the field.

3. Postcards from Around the Great Lakes
   Examines postcard-based field records, including boxed dispatches and the SITE SEEN mapping project, emphasizing materiality, movement, and philatelic outreach.

4. Is This Philatelic Mail or Contrived?: Authenticity, Contrivance, & A Porous Boundary
   Explores the contested distinction between authentic and contrived mail and situates my work within that debate, highlighting the dual status of designed correspondence as both artifact and functional mail.

5. Patterns in Postal Damages: Forensic Analysis of Mishandling Errors in Expedition Covers through Automated Sorting Processes
   Provides a data-driven look at how a set of 101 identical covers interact with contemporary postal systems, including errors, damage, and processing outcomes, adding a layer of material and procedural insight.

ENGAGING THE ARCHIVE

Selections from these objects have been shown in exhibition contexts, while others (such as the set of 101 covers and their catalog corpus) remain largely unpublished. This digest is designed to allow curators, researchers, and art audiences to conduct close readings of the texts and images without imposing on broader mailing lists.

If you wish to explore the series to its full depths, follow the order above to experience both the conceptual framing and the practical, material documentation. It’s dense, but the function of these articles is to benchmark the inherent structure of this aspect of my practice. For readers seeking a high-level understanding, the summary above situates the works within my ongoing exploration of expeditionary practice, studio methodology, and contemporary philately.

I’m primarily focused on accretion, movement, and documentation here; the stamps are incidental and convenient as tools to manifest the visibility of a systems view in an clear way. My goal is not to shift this channel toward postal history, but to lay down foundational benchmark pieces that document a parallel, cross-disciplinary practice that outlines an aspect of spatiality that co-evolves with my research, travels, and production.

Most of the items depicted in these posts are available for circulation and exhibition. I’d like to find the right institutional home for the set of 101 covers, in particular. Enquiries are welcome.

Thank you for reading.

RYAN DEWEY

All United States postage stamp images depicted in this publication are © United States Postal Service. Images are reproduced solely to illustrate philatelic items included in commercial availability of this body of work, in accordance with Chapter 2, Section 282 of the Postal Operations Manual. All images remain unaltered for compliance with USPS requirements and are used strictly in the context of this research, documentation, and items offered for sale or exhibition. Inquiries regarding acquisition or exhibition are welcome.

PATTERNS IN POSTAL DAMAGES

In June 2023, I produced an edition of 101 cacheted expedition covers as part of training activities for a forthcoming field project on Baffin Island. These covers were mailed to my temporary address on a Great Lakes island and processed through the USPS Area Mail Processing facility in Pontiac, Michigan. My intent was to sell them individually as records of my training activities, but I decided to keep them together because upon their delivery back to my address, the set of covers displayed extensive mishandling, including folding, scuffing, ink transfer, and misaligned cancellations, despite having been prepared in strict compliance with Chapter 2 of the Postal Operations Manual, which governs the proper handling of philatelic mail. I realized these covers comprised a corpus of mishandling as much as a record of my training activities.

Initial examination revealed at least thirty-two distinct handling patterns across the set, suggesting repeated machine passes and inconsistent treatment during automated sorting. The degree of marking and physical distortion raised questions about both equipment and operator interventions. I sat down with Daniel Piazza, Chief Curator of Philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, to look through my corpus and to see what his take was on the condition of these objects, and he helped me think through several factors that shaped my analysis, notably, the mismatch of phosphorescent tagging in the franking.

The covers incorporated mixed-era postage, including United States Scott numbers #1324 from 1967 and #2091 from 1984, and it was possible that differences in phosphorescent tagging could have caused sorting errors. The rigidity of the mail pieces was also considered, as early test mailings included cardstock inserts, whereas the bulk set did not. Volume-related processing and operator response to repeated rejects were another potential source of mishandling.

To investigate these factors, three controlled follow-up mailings were conducted. Early trials had already included covers with mixed postage supplemented by a clerk-applied contemporary stamp, so I needed the follow-up mailing as a control. When I received them back, these control covers showed minor wear consistent with multiple machine passes and slight offset from cancellations but no catastrophic damage. A set of covers using only the historic stamps arrived intact aside from minor back-flap transfer. Finally, covers franked entirely with contemporary postcard-rate stamps processed smoothly, emerging nearly pristine with only minor corner wear. Ultraviolet examination at both 254nm and 365nm confirmed that both historical stamps carried some phosphorescent tagging, nearly eliminating stamp selection as the primary cause of mishandling, although it is still possible that slight variations in the age of the phosphorescence across mixed-era stamps triggered a kick-back in the automation, but importantly all stamps used did phosphoresce. Rigidity likewise did not account for the damage, as the contemporary-only covers lacked cardstock yet arrived undamaged.

The evidence suggests a more plausible cause: that the extensive mishandling observed in the bulk mailing was the result of operational conditions at the Pontiac facility rather than deficiencies in the stamps or cover construction. High-volume sorting, compounded machine rejects, and operator interventions produced the multiple forms of physical distress. The corpus demonstrates how expedition covers interact with contemporary postal systems and how adherence to philatelic handling protocols can vary in practice. If some of this sounds familiar, it is because I have previously written about this corpus here.

These covers function simultaneously as field records, philatelic artifacts, and studio objects. They document training-stage expeditionary activity while engaging with real-world postal operations, producing material evidence of both procedural and environmental contingencies. The patterns of damage, the misapplied cancellations, and the physical distortions all form part of the story of their circulation.

The full set of 101 covers is available for exhibition and institutional acquisition, and enquiries are welcome. Selections have been exhibited previously, while other covers have never been publicly shown. This project is intended as a foundation for understanding how contemporary expeditionary mail operates, both in relation to philatelic practice and in the broader context of FIELD OFFICE documentation.

RYAN DEWEY

ABSTRACT

This article examines a set of 101 cacheted expedition covers processed through the USPS Area Mail Processing facility in Pontiac, Michigan, in June 2023. Forensic analysis of the returned covers identifies extensive handling errors, including folding, scuffing, ink transfer, and misaligned cancellations, despite compliance with philatelic handling protocols. Controlled follow-up mailings indicate that the damage resulted from operational conditions, high-volume processing, and operator intervention rather than stamp selection or cover construction. The study situates these covers as both field records and philatelic artifacts, highlighting how expeditionary mail interacts with contemporary postal systems while producing material evidence of circulation, mishandling, and procedural contingencies. The full set is available for exhibition and acquisition.

Keywords: Expedition covers, Postal history, Philatelic items, Mail integrity, Forensic analysis, Postal handling errors, Automated mail sorting, Postal Operations Manual compliance, Michigan Metroplex, Mishandling patterns, Postal system inefficiencies, Improper sorting orientation, Misapplied cancels, Postal damage analysis, Philatelic condition reporting

All United States postage stamp images depicted in this publication are © United States Postal Service. Images are reproduced solely to illustrate philatelic items included in commercial availability of this body of work, in accordance with Chapter 2, Section 282 of the Postal Operations Manual. All images remain unaltered for compliance with USPS requirements and are used strictly in the context of this research, documentation, and items offered for sale or exhibition. Inquiries regarding acquisition or exhibition are welcome.

ENQUIRE ABOUT THIS WORK

This text examines the long-standing divide within philately between authentic postal use and mail deemed contrived. It situates contemporary postcard-based practices within this contested space, arguing that intentionality and authenticity are not mutually exclusive. By framing designed correspondence as both a reflective artifact and a genuine participant in postal circulation, the article proposes a broader understanding of how expeditionary and preparatory mail can function as valid contemporary postal history.

Keywords: Philately, Postal history, Authentic mail, Contrived covers, Expedition mail, Contemporary philatelic practice, Postcards, Collecting theory

Any discussion of contemporary philatelic practice must contend with a long-standing and sometimes uncomfortable distinction within the collecting community: the divide between what is considered authentic postal use and what is dismissed as contrived mail.

At its most rigid, the argument runs as follows. Mail that exists because it needed to exist, that is, correspondence generated independently of collecting intent and sent through ordinary necessity, is authentic. Mail that is produced by a collector, especially when designed with collectors in mind, is suspect. In its harshest formulation, if a piece was created because it would be collected, it forfeits its legitimacy as postal history.

This position has deep roots. Postal history as a discipline matured through the study of commercial correspondence, administrative mail, and utilitarian transit markings. Collectors learned to read envelopes as forensic evidence, not as expressive objects. From that perspective, intentionality matters. A cover addressed to oneself, a postcard designed with philatelic awareness, or an item franked for thematic resonance rather than necessity can be interpreted as staging rather than documentation.

Many collectors therefore regard expedition mail produced by known philatelists, artists, or expedition personnel responding to collector demand as compromised. The label “contrived” is often applied broadly, collapsing a wide range of practices into a single category of diminished interest. This attitude persists even though much of what is now considered canonical expedition mail, especially from the Heroic Age and early Modern period, was itself produced with an acute awareness of audience, symbolism, and posterity.

What complicates this distinction is that expeditions have always been communicative enterprises. Expedition mail has rarely been accidental. It has carried messages not only to recipients but to the future. Cachets, inscriptions, route markings, and explanatory text were intentional interventions, not passive byproducts of transport. The difference between “authentic” and “contrived” often rests less on the object itself than on retrospective judgments about motive.

My postcard projects sit deliberately in this contested space.

On one hand, they are designed. They reference historical forms. They embed templates, visual systems, and topical postage choices. They are produced by someone who is fully aware of philatelic conventions and community debates. By orthodox standards, this alone may place them outside the strictest definition of authenticity.

On the other hand, they are also real correspondence. They convey actual messages. They move through the contemporary postal system under real conditions. They are handled, delayed, damaged, misrouted, and postmarked by the same infrastructure that processes all other mail. Their material state upon arrival is not simulated. It is the outcome of use.

In this sense, they occupy a dual status. They are both designed artifacts and records of postal action. They do not pretend to be something they are not, nor do they exist outside the systems they engage. If they are contrived, they are contrived in the same way many historic expedition covers were: intentionally composed, consciously symbolic, and nevertheless authentic participants in postal circulation.

Rather than attempting to resolve this tension, I am interested in holding it visible. The postcards ask whether authenticity must be defined by absence of intent, or whether it can accommodate reflective practice that is still embedded in lived movement, material encounter, and institutional constraint.

If polar philately is understood not only as the study of where mail went, but how expeditions communicated about themselves, then preparatory and training-stage artifacts deserve consideration, even when they are self-aware. These postcards do not ask to replace traditional postal history. They ask to sit adjacent to it, as contemporary artifacts that document how expeditionary communication is practiced now, with full knowledge of the traditions it inherits.

Whether individual collectors accept or reject them is, ultimately, a personal and community decision. My aim is to make the case that their ambiguity is not a flaw, but a record of how philatelic practice continues to evolve.

RYAN DEWEY

Is this Philatelic Mail or Contrived? Authenticity, Contrivance, & A Porous Boundary

Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)

Post Type: Framing / Conceptual Analysis

Date of Publication: 2026-01-19

Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG

Purpose: Examine the contested distinction between authentic and contrived mail in philately and situate contemporary postcard-based practices within this discourse

Author: RYAN DEWEY

All United States postage stamp images depicted in this publication are © United States Postal Service. Images are reproduced solely to illustrate philatelic items included in commercial availability of this body of work, in accordance with Chapter 2, Section 282 of the Postal Operations Manual. All images remain unaltered for compliance with USPS requirements and are used strictly in the context of this research, documentation, and items offered for sale or exhibition. Inquiries regarding acquisition or exhibition are welcome.

This article documents postcard-based field records produced during training and regional travel across the Great Lakes between 2022 and 2023. These postcards operate as hybrid artifacts, functioning simultaneously as correspondence, material samples, and philatelic objects, while moving through active postal systems.

Two bodies of work are presented: training dispatches from Kelleys Island and the ongoing SITE SEEN project. Together, they position postcards as a preparatory and exploratory mode of expeditionary philately that preserves postal context while prioritizing field observation and movement.

Keywords: Postcards, Great Lakes, Expeditionary philately, Postal history, Field documentation, SITE SEEN

INTRODUCTION

In the first two articles in this series, I argued for the inclusion of expedition training artifacts within the scope of polar philately and described a set of training expedition covers produced on Kelleys Island as proof-of-concept objects. This third article shifts focus away from covers and toward postcards, not as a lesser philatelic form, but as a distinct communicative device with different affordances.

Postcards operate closer to the hand, closer to daily movement, and closer to improvisation. Where covers tend to be ceremonial, postcards are opportunistic. They allow for faster response to conditions, quicker inscription, and more frequent dispatch. For my purposes, they have also proven to be a primary mechanism for philatelic outreach, introducing postal artifacts to audiences who are initially drawn to content rather than to philately itself.

Between 2022 and 2023, I produced several postcard-based projects tied to my expedition training, my broader research into post-glacial landscapes, and my ongoing movement through the Great Lakes region. Some of these postcards were sent individually, others as part of boxed dispatches to subscribers, and others as roaming field records mailed intermittently as conditions allowed. Collectively, they form a parallel corpus to my covers, one that privileges immediacy, material variation, and accumulation over formal completeness.

This article introduces those postcard projects and examines how they function simultaneously as field records, narrative artifacts, and gateways into philatelic thinking for non-specialist audiences. I’ve written before about the role of QSL cards, DXpedition, and expedition-related postcards in the inspiration of my postcard designs. This article documents the function and distribution of the cards I produce for my roving landscape observatory practice.

POSTCARDS AS FIELD RECORDS

The earliest postcards I produced during this period were conceived less as messages and more as records. They functioned as timecards of presence, evidence that I had been somewhere, doing something, at a particular moment. The comparison to a timecard is not metaphorical. In most cases, one postcard entered my archive, one returned to my studio, and others entered circulation. Together, they form a triangulated record of activity, intention, and outcome.

Some postcards were handwritten. Others carried adhered samples: clay collected from shorelines, sand from quarry floors, or sediment lifted from glacial grooves. In some cases, water from the site was used to soak and dry the postcard surface, leaving tide lines, stains, or warping that could not be simulated later. These were not aesthetic flourishes added in post-production. They were the result of the postcard being treated as a working surface while I was still in the field.

The cards often traveled with additional ephemera. Notes, fragments, and inserts accompanied them in boxed sets dispatched when I was on the island. These boxed mailings allowed for a more expansive transfer of material context, but the postcard remained the anchor. It was the item guaranteed to pass through the postal system, to receive markings, to be handled, sorted, bent, delayed, and sometimes damaged.

That damage matters. Bent corners, surface abrasions, and water exposure are not incidental failures but records of transit. Like covers, postcards participate in the journey, they are factual artifacts of the journey in addition to their function of describing the journey.

BUILT-IN TEMPLATES AND FIELD DISCIPLINE

While many of these postcards appear informal, they are not unstructured. I designed them with embedded templates that could be activated or ignored depending on conditions. Some include form fields, gridded areas, or reserved zones for annotation. These layouts recurred across designs to train my hand through use, as much as these layouts increased speed, they impacted the way I would reflect upon and relate the activities I was undertaking.

This approach reflects a broader concern I have with field discipline. Under expedition conditions, especially during training, cognitive load is high and attention is fragmented. Templates allow documentation to persist even when intention falters. It is so easy to be distracted when you’re immersed in fieldwork. Templating functioned here to ground my thought process into a formally constrained communication protocol. Not every postcard is fully completed. Not every field is filled. That incompleteness is itself informative.

Importantly, the postcards do not assume an audience fluent in philatelic convention. Their primary function communicates content: a drawing, a sample, a map, a note. Only later does the mechanism of postage, cancellation, routing, and provenance assert itself, and only if the reader becomes curious about it enough to investigate. This ordering is deliberate. There is a debate in postal collecting circles about covers and postal artifacts that are contrived or authentic. My postcards straddle that line, a distinction that I will address that in a subsequent post because the nuance deserves its own treatment.

SITE SEEN: ROAMING POSTCARDS & MAPPED MOVEMENT

Running parallel to the boxed dispatches is an ongoing postcard project titled SITE SEEN. These postcards are sent as I move through the Great Lakes region observing post-glacial landscapes and collecting samples. Each card features a small thumbnail drawing, often produced quickly on site, and a map of the Great Lakes printed on the face of the card that I annotate with a red dot to indicate the location of dispatch graphically.

This gesture is simple, but it collapses scale by making the approximate location legible next to a known map abstraction of the lake bodies. The same dot marks a precise location and a regional context simultaneously. It situates a local observation within a continental system shaped by glaciation, retreat, and hydrological reorganization.

The SITE SEEN postcards are not sequential dispatches from a fixed location. They are scattered signals from movement that I still send to myself and my archive when the fieldwork encounters a relevant new site. Each card is intended to stand alone, legible without requiring the others.

POSTAGE, PLACE, AND AFFILIATION

Across both postcard projects, postage selection is treated as a content-bearing decision. I select stamps with topical relevance to geography, hydrology, geology, or infrastructure related to the site of posting. This practice is consistent with my approach to covers and reflects a belief that postage is not decoration but annotation.

Where possible, I use local water to wet the stamps. Lake water, quarry runoff, or collected samples are used to affix postage, embedding a trace of place into the adhesive layer itself. This detail is invisible once dry, but it matters. It reinforces the idea that the postcard is not merely sent from a place but partially composed of it.

These gestures are small, but cumulative. They communicate care. They also signal to recipients that the object has been thought through at multiple scales, from image and text down to adhesion.

SYSTEM FRICTION AND POSTAL REALITIES

In practice, postcards introduce their own frustrations. One persistent issue has been the refusal or inability of post offices to hand-cancel postcards dropped into interior mail slots after hours. Despite being mailed from vastly different locations, many postcards bear identical postmarks from regional Area Mail Processing Centers, where batch mail collected after hours is consolidated and processed.

This collapse of spatial specificity is a loss, but it is also data. It reveals how contemporary mail systems abstract place, privileging efficiency over locality. For a project concerned with movement, landscape, and provenance, that abstraction becomes part of the story.

Damage is another recurring factor. Postcards are more vulnerable than covers. They arrive scuffed, bent, and sometimes partially illegible. I do not attempt to prevent this entirely. Like the machine handling of my training covers which I’ll describe in a future article, postcard damage records the conditions under which contemporary expeditionary communication actually occurs.

OUTREACH BY INDIRECTION

Many recipients of these postcards did not identify as philatelists when they received them. They were drawn by content: landscapes, drawings, samples, and notes. After repeated exposure to the postage, cancellation, routing, and classification issues, some recipients became interested in postal history as a topic itself.

This indirection is intentional. By leading with content and allowing mechanism to become gradually familiar to the point of interest, the postcards function as a form of philatelic outreach. They invite curiosity without requiring prior allegiance to the discipline, and I’m not expecting people to become philatelists (I barely count as one myself). Over time, as recipients retained envelopes, compare postmarks, and ask about postal decisions, these content-seekers became collectors by default, or at least collector-adjacent.

In this sense, the postcards perform a different but complementary role to covers. Where covers often address an existing philatelic audience directly, postcards act as translators. They widen the aperture.

CONCLUSION

The postcard projects described here operate as both field records and communicative artifacts. They document movement, observation, and material encounter while participating fully in the postal system. Their informality is structured, their vulnerability intentional, and their circulation essential.

Together with the training expedition covers discussed earlier, they form a layered approach to expeditionary philately that begins long before arrival at the poles. In the next article, I will quickly discuss the issue of classification authenticity, are these contrived mail pieces or actual philatelic items? And then I will immediately turn outward again in my final article in this series, examining how contemporary mail systems shape expedition practices by analyzing a corpus of 101 identical training covers as a record of handling decisions, errors, and constraints imposed by modern postal infrastructure.

As with the previous articles, I offer this work as a case study and invite feedback. If polar philately is a record of how we communicate about exploration, then the preparatory stages deserve attention. They reveal not only where we are going, but how we learn to tell the story before we arrive.

The items depicted in this and other articles are available for circulation in exhibition contexts. I welcome enquiries.

RYAN DEWEY

Postcards from Around the Great Lakes

Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)

Post Type: Research Documentation / Philatelic Outreach

Date of Publication: 2026-01-19

Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG

Purpose: Document postcard-based field records and SITE SEEN dispatches as a form of philatelic outreach linking post-glacial landscape observation, expedition training, and contemporary postal practice

Author: RYAN DEWEY

All United States postage stamp images depicted in this publication are © United States Postal Service. Images are reproduced solely to illustrate philatelic items included in commercial availability of this body of work, in accordance with Chapter 2, Section 282 of the Postal Operations Manual. All images remain unaltered for compliance with USPS requirements and are used strictly in the context of this research, documentation, and items offered for sale or exhibition. Inquiries regarding acquisition or exhibition are welcome.

ABSTRACT

This article presents training expedition covers as proof-of-concept artifacts designed to refine philatelic methods in advance of a polar expedition. Produced during field training on Kelleys Island, these covers document research activities while testing strategies for integrating philatelic practice into expedition routines. Their design draws on influences from historical polar covers while introducing new elements, including contextual inscriptions, in-field customization, and narrative emblems that link each cover to broader research projects. By ensuring that each piece carries both provenance and story, these covers serve as communicative objects for collectors, future researchers, and non-specialist audiences alike. The project demonstrates how training covers can expand the scope of polar philately, bridging archival record-keeping, artistic practice, and expeditionary communication, while preparing the foundation for covers to be produced during the forthcoming Baffin Island expedition.

Keywords: Polar philately, training expedition covers, philatelic design, expedition communication, narrative artifacts, in-field customization, provenance in philately, philatelic outreach

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

I began to produce a series of covers documenting my activities during my expedition training activities on a local island, both to refine the process and also to develop the professional habit of integrating philatelic considerations into my anticipated expedition activities. I wanted it to become a natural habit, so that when I am otherwise distracted during an expedition, I can easily continue to post covers from muscle memory if nothing else.

In this article I will trace the design decisions back to the covers that influenced me, but first, let’s look at the main cachet produced by my training expedition:

The back markings on my covers include a hand-inked designation of this posting as a “TRAINING EXPEDITION” across the middle of the top flap, a stacked web address in the lower right corner which recipients can use to access expanded details of the project, and an off-set description of the overall project stretched along the bottom flap.

The back text description resulted from my frustration with some of the covers I’ve collected. In some cases there is no discoverable information about the expeditions they represent other than the clues in the transit markings and other philatelic facts present on the cover. I’ve often wanted to know more about the expedition, so I dig for details, but come up empty-handed. I made the design decision that my cover should give enough information to contextualize the activities graphically depicted on the cover to provide a self-contained story while simultaneously providing sufficient provenance information to point collectors to the permanent custodial source for more information about the expedition (e.g., my archive record at the Nevada Museum of Art).

This text enables the transfer of a complete story about the cover as it passes hands from one collector to the next in the secondary market. It reads:

“FIELD OFFICE is a landscape observatory focused on the past, present, and future role of glaciers in the Great Lakes region & the Arctic. Training began in 2022 for THIS STONE WANTS TO GO HOME, an expedition to the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island in Nunavut in the Arctic Archipelago. The expedition will return a granite glacial erratic to the last remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the continental glacier which moved this stone south from the Canadian Shield into Ohio during the last ice age. Monthly visits to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie by boat and plane became practice sessions for landing on a remote island, rapidly setting up a base camp, and getting to work collecting data, conducting research, and scouting on the island in all weather conditions. A project of the artist Ryan Dewey whose archives are stewarded by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art under the title AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND A GLACIER WITHOUT EVER HAVING SEEN ONE.”

This should be enough information for curious philatelists a century from now to dig up the historical facts of the expedition, should someone be curious. One cachet from my collection (AINA Day of Issue 1995) has a similar type of contextualizing description printed in three languages on the back (Inuktitut, English, & French).

While I like the use of the off-set printing for text blocks, for imagery I prefer the ink stamp, and I did not want the iconographic elements to be printed onto the cover. The precision gained by printing helps keep order to the complexity of imagery elements, but it comes at the expense of neglecting the human hand.

Consider how this “Canada Welcomes Earth Sciences” cover from 1972 depicts thematically related research disciplines in an orderly grid. While visually appealing, there is sterility in this cover that I don’t think helps tell the story that I intend my event covers to convey. So to avoid this, the front markings on my training cover are all hand stamped with archival ink on custom cut mats with designs to commemorate expedition research, route details, and milestones.

The front markings are a series of iconographic emblems of the activities of the expedition. Starting from the top left, a circular emblem reading “GLACIAL GROOVES” depicts a series of glacially-carved grooves in limestone (a significant geologic feature of the island), and is part of a photogrammetry mapping project I undertook in 2023 to build a navigable 3D model of the grooves.

To the right of the grooves emblem is a grid overlay on the shape of East Quarry, a location on the island that I extensively mapped during my successive training sessions. The grid and double circle reticles denote a pin-pointing of sites within the quarry, and the emblem as a whole is labeled with the text “EAST QUARRY GLACIAL STONE INVENTORY: 542” — the result of the first round of mapping the quarry, which was to locate and photograph every glacially-transported stone that was found within the bounds of the quarry.

A similar double circle inside the outline of a form adorns the front of this Resolute Bay cover, where the eye of the seal depicts a sun icon and the moon icon is depicted inside the tail flippers. The amorphous quarry perimeter in my training cover and the abstract seal outline in the Resolute Bay cover both feature double circles inside the outline of a form, relating the form to the meaning of the contained items. Both share a formal nesting relationship that semiotically links the contained to the form of the container.

Centered below these two emblems is the outline of Kelleys Island where I’ve taken the initials of the island KI and rotated them clockwise by 90 degrees, resulting in a stack of letters that resemble a rank insignia, placed next to the words “FIELD OFFICE” the registered legal name of my expeditionary platform. The image of the island is oriented as it lays on the coordinate grid in an absolute frame of reference. Off the southwestern shore of this image, a smaller emblem with a four-block grid and the words “SITE SEEN” connect this cover and the depicted activities with a Great Lakes mapping project of the same name that my studio conducts on an ongoing basis. The SITE SEEN project records findings through dispatches of postcards that feature form fields, check-boxes, sketches and maps to record coordinates and details of each foray (to be completed in-field), which I will describe in another article on postcards.

The the earliest covers to enter my collection was this Russian Antarctica cachet, and I was drawn to it for the color and layout of the front elements. My outline map of Kelleys Island reminds me of the image of Antarctica on this cover. The sequence of abstracted country flags set in a line, but askew, give the image a sense of the human hand, instead of a letterpress or off-set printing of details on the cover. My SITE SEEN emblem has a similar form as the flags on this cover. I wouldn’t say that the influence this cover has on my work is a direct mapping of element to element, but the influence could be described as more of a vibe than a mapping. The cohesion across the colors, the obvious hand application, the attempts to use design to tell a story. Maybe I’m including it here because it makes me happy to look at it, but it’s been an inspiration as an aspirational piece.

Approaching the island from the eastern shore is the outline of one of the vessels of the island ferry service, with text in negative field reading “CONVEYED ACROSS LAKE ERIE BY FERRY.” This emblem sits between the address and the island. There is a spatial relationship between the vessel and the rendering of the island that I’ve seen in several covers. My favorite example of juxtaposition denoting maritime spatial proximity is this Martin-de-Vivies & St Paul 1989 cover where the French fishing vessel AUSTRAL is positioned adjacent to the outline of St Paul, and the vessel faces the island on the approach with radiating lines of visual prospect cast onto the island denoting arrival on the island. [Note: the current fishing vessel Austral (IMO: 9039262, built 1993) is not the same vessel depicted on this cover which is actually the Pierre Pleven built in 1966, purchased by SAPMER in 1980 (Bateaux de Saint-Malo) at which time it was renamed to Austral as depicted on the 1983 French Southern & Antarctic Territory Scott #103.]

Above the ship is the only frivolous inked marking on the cover, a circled “KI” rotated 90 degrees and inside a thick lined circle, a design influenced by the tax-stamp circled “T” emblem.

Bow and stern on a ferry aren’t always obvious, but above the stern in my depiction of the ferry is an inked, fillable form-field circling an outline of Kelleys Island with the words “FLOWN OVER KELLEYS ISLAND” and “DATE:_____” and “PLANE:______” atop which is hand-drawn in red ink the complete flight path originating from the island, circling sites on the island, and returning to the airstrip on the eastern shore of the island. The date and tail number of the plane are written in red as well.

The concept of including flight information in a fillable form template stamp occurs on several covers in my collection, but the example I like best is this 1972 Polar Quest cover. In addition to the robust form field for ink pen edits with coordinates, date, personnel, there is additional information about the transport written beneath, providing a rich detailed description of the journey. Other inspirational covers that are marked as being carried on flights include this In The Footsteps of Scott, Antarctic Expedition 1984-86, with “FLOWN OVER THE ARCTIC CIRCLE BY CESSNA 185 FLOAT PLANE” seal with drawing of plane inside. And, while not a polar cover, this Swiss first day Aerophilately Days cover from 2016 has a flight plan traced out city-to-city depicting the different modes of air travel. The flight path depiction is generalized, but provides a view of the itinerary that helps imagine the journey. I wanted to fold in the flight path in my emblem, so I drew in the path shape of the flight trajectory. Like a signature on the front of a cover, these hand-drawn elements expand the story with an artifact of the journey imbuing a level of authenticity to the cover.

SOURCE & DESTINATION

The addressee for all 101 covers in this mailing was general delivery to myself on the island. None of these covers were hand-back service; they all entered circulation, and were collected during my next trip to the island. The result of this mailing was a collection of 101 examples of USPS mail handling which reads like a corpus of automated sorting mistakes. Considering the USPS Postal Operations Manual (POM) chapter 2 outlines their commitment to handling philatelic items with care which my covers did not receive, I took it up to analyze this corpus forensically and produced a comprehensive map of the processing errors and handling decisions which I will explore in another article.

POSTAGE DECISIONS

The postage used for my training covers intentionally coordinated with vintage topicals geographically related to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes (US Scott #2091) and Canada (US Scott #1324). Kelleys Island sits in Lake Erie less than 3 nautical miles from the southernmost Canadian Island, with the border between them. Since my training took place in the Great Lakes, #2091 made sense, and since my Nunavut / Baffin Island expedition will take place above the 60th in northern Canada, I used #1324.

In terms of alignment, I placed #1324 in the top right corner edged by #2091 on three sides, since Baffin Island, the ultimate destination of my training activities, is roughly northeast of Kelleys Island in Winkel-Tripel projection. Each cover was hand-canceled at the Kelleys Island post office with a round canceler and killer bars. As I’ll discuss in a future article on lessons learned, the vintage postage decision proved to be problematic in machine sorting, a consideration that will impact the design of my Baffin Island expedition covers.

FINAL THOUGHTS

My approach to producing these covers attempts to create narrative objects that document a moment in time during my training. The design process I’ve used emerges from the context of the traditions of expeditionary covers, and I hope that my training covers can help expand the scope of the discipline, while also exposing the intrigue of expedition mail to new non-traditional audiences from outside of the community of philatelists. Since my expedition is archived by a major museum of art, the philatelic items I produce will be shared with traditional art-viewing audiences, exhibition curators, art historians and other researchers who might not have deep exposure to polar philately, making my covers a kind of philatelic outreach. Refining my approach to producing covers ahead of my expedition ensures that my work will be accessible to a non-specialist public, but it also gives me the opportunity to solicit feedback from polar philatelists to ensure I develop items that resonate with the expectations of the discipline.

The research and activities documented on these training covers differ from what I will do during my actual expedition, but this has helped me practice my approach and has helped me work out some of the thoughtfulness I know I’ll need to take in designing my covers to document my next steps. This article introduced what I am attempting to do and contextualized my covers to some of my influences, and in my next article I’ll explore some of the mechanisms of customization that can be found across philatelic items, and I’ll describe ways some of my covers attempt to expand these mechanisms to tell new stories.

I would be interested to hear from our community, what stories do the covers in your collection tell? What makes a cover stand on its own as a compelling narrative? I welcome your insights as I continue refining my approach to the production of my covers.

RYAN DEWEY

CITATION:
Bateaux de Saint-Malo. (n.d.). Pierre Pleven. Retrieved from https://www.bateaux-de-saint-malo.com/fr/fiche%20Pierre%20Pleven.htm

Proof of Concept: Designing & Testing Expedition-Related Postal Artifacts

Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)

Post Type: Research Documentation / Philatelic Analysis

Date of Publication: 2026-01-19

Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG

Purpose: Document and contextualize training expedition covers as proof-of-concept artifacts refining philatelic practice ahead of a polar expedition

Author: RYAN DEWEY

All United States postage stamp images depicted in this publication are © United States Postal Service. Images are reproduced solely to illustrate philatelic items included in commercial availability of this body of work, in accordance with Chapter 2, Section 282 of the Postal Operations Manual. All images remain unaltered for compliance with USPS requirements and are used strictly in the context of this research, documentation, and items offered for sale or exhibition. Inquiries regarding acquisition or exhibition are welcome.

This article examines the overlooked role of training expedition covers as artifacts within polar philately. While most attention has focused on commemorative and field-issued covers, items produced during expedition preparation reveal how expeditions are communicated and narrated before departure. Drawing on collecting practices and a notable 1989 Belgian Polar Exploration Society training cover, the study situates training correspondence as both practical documentation and narrative relics. By framing these covers as part of expeditionary communication, the article argues for their inclusion in philatelic discourse and introduces forthcoming case studies from the author’s own training expeditions, where cover design serves as both documentation and public outreach.

KEYWORDS:

polar philately, expedition covers, training expeditions, philatelic artifacts, expedition planning, public engagement, field communication, philatelic outreach

BACKGROUND & INTRODUCTION:

I began collecting paquebot and expedition covers because I’m interested in how they have been used to communicate about the actual work of expeditions. Paquebots are a kind of mail piece named for the type of vessels that carried them, packet boats, an early maritime mail system. Pieces of mail transported by paquebots were emblazoned with markings and ink stamps that describe the vessel, the location, and other notable details transpiring while the mail piece was in transit. You can read the story in the emblems and trace the path with the time stamps. Expedition covers are a little different; covers are the term for the wrapper, the envelope, and in the contexts of expeditions, they carry markings related to the purpose of the expedition as well as the routes traveled. They are a simple form of a travelogue, and an early sort of public relations for science, fueling interest at home for research happening far far away.

Here is an example of a paquebot from my collection, and later I’ll share an expedition cover.

It is this communicative aspect that interests me. The cover as a document presents a kind of storytelling about what is happening in the field. When I’m considering whether a new cover is right for my collection, I tend to gravitate toward examples that have some cohesive narrative that plays out in the design decision details. I’m drawn to mechanisms that enable rapid customization of a cover in the field, to record information about conditions or some variable of the expedition that couldn’t be planned for ahead of departure. Some polar philatelists collect serial dispatches from one location over time, but I’m drawn to pieces that can stand alone and tell the story without the sequential diachronic context. In terms of eras, while I’m fascinated by the stories of the Pioneer Period (everything up to 1954) my philatelic interests focus on items from the Modern Age (1954-onward). While I collect both southern and northern items, I prefer the north, for reasons that will become apparent.

What really drew me to polar philately is that I’m using it to learn about expedition communication as a practice. The abundance of commemorative event covers from polar expeditions indicates that the production of philatelic items by expeditionary crew is an important element in communicating expeditionary research to a broader public.

There is a supply and demand relationship between collectors and personnel from the polar bases who respond by obliging the requests of collectors to send a piece of mail from the poles. I read this as evidence that people between the poles want to know what’s happening on the poles. But the National Science Foundation finds this annoying, and in the early 2000s they began actively discouraging personnel from engaging in “unauthorized philatelic activities.” The NSF views this collecting audience as interfering with the research mission of expeditionary endeavors (The Antarctic Sun, 2003).

But there is something incredibly human about the relationship between those who journey to tell stories of their travels. Travelogues, oral storying, and recounting tales from a journey to an audience are old and ancient practices that transcends cultures, and is one of the basic narrative structures of the monomyth known as the hero’s journey. Recounting experiences to others and relating the details of things we see expands how we understand ourselves in the context of existence, which is critical in perpetuating wonder and curiosity about the world we live in; incidentally an idealized motivation and a goal of Science proper. I say this as a credentialed scientist myself; it is the obligation of the one who has seen to tell others what has been seen, to bear witness of what we try to understand.

Stories helped sustain public interest in expeditions, and the near-mythic narratives of the Heroic Age of polar expeditions relied on a curious public with a thirst for the exotic. Philatelic items were one tangible way that gave recipients the sense of connection to the extraordinary activities of polar exploration as they unfolded. These covers were more than mere tools of public relations, they were actual artifacts of the exploration itself. Beyond mere extensions of the intellectual craftsmanship of research pursuits, expedition covers uniquely hold an aura of intrigue since, unlike academic reports, the covers (as discrete objects) participated in the journey of an expedition, giving the cover the status of something like a relic, or perhaps a portal. An object that delivers to collectors a partial conceptual access to a distant moment both in time and space.

When a collector (or their estate) liquidates their collection, it brings to market a fresh opportunity to own something significant, with a story that has likely been forgotten. When I acquire a new piece for my collection, I read up about the context of the expedition, the sender, the research, the timeline, and I’m not alone in this. A fresh purchase of an old object spurs on a kind of renewal of interest in the events signified by the cover, which incidentally forms my practical motivation for collecting expedition covers.

Beyond my primary motivation of surveying philatelic items as channels of communication, I have a secondary motivation to design event covers for my own expeditionary activities. In 2022, the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art acquired the archives for my expeditionary practice, and the research in my archive is focused on tracing the movement of glacial stones north from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Circle. I am now in a long process of organizing an expedition to the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island in the Northwest Territories, and my expedition will produce postal artifacts as a record-keeping practice. My expedition to Baffin Island will return a glacial erratic to the remnant of the ice sheet responsible for moving it south during the last Ice Age. The Barnes Ice Cap is the remaining slab of ice from the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

As I design the covers for my expedition, I’ve begun collecting historic pieces with new interest, and shortly after my archive was acquired, I began thinking through the various ways I could tell the stories of my expeditions. It only made sense that I began thinking about how I could fold philately into my communications strategy, and in my preparations and training expeditions, I’ve produced a number of cover designs. I’m a member of the American Society of Polar Philatelists, and I’m making training covers from training activities south of the Arctic Circle, but do these pre-expedition works count as polar philately? I believe they do.

There is some precedent for considering training activities within the category structure of polar philately. In fact, one of the first polar covers I collected was produced by the Belgian Polar Exploration Society during a training expedition in 1989. Depicted on the cover a team of two explorers (presumably the cover signatories) trek across an ice field towing a pulk sled past two onlooking polar bears. Above this scene, a text stamp describes the departure site and provides the commentary “NICE BUT COLD -45 CELCIUS.”

But in the years since I acquired this Belgian cover, I am yet to find another item from a training expedition, and while I’m sure they exist, with the exception of archives, I have not seen much discussion of the artifacts of expedition preparation correspondence. So when the notable polar philatelist Hal Vogel wrote in a recent issue of Ice Cap News (Vol. 69, No. 4, p. 94), that Amundsen’s 1925 flight expedition was formed in 1924, and even earlier with “feeble polar flight attempts” in 1922, the assertion that these early years of training mattered to the discipline of polar philately gave me some hope that maybe what I have to offer could be of interest to the community at large. If we take an expanded view of contemporary expeditionary preparations as belonging to the strict schedule of what counts as polar philately, maybe what I have is worth sharing. And so, long before my boots hit Arctic ice, I am sharing my current training (south of the 60th parallel) as a case study for the under-explored territory of polar expedition preparation, and the philatelic items they produce in the lead up to the expedition proper.

Toward that end, I’ve prepared a series of articles that will describe the particulars of my training expeditions and will posit a series of generalizations that might help other collectors expanding their collections to include materials produced in the lead up to expeditions on the poles. In the next article, I’ll share some of the covers my training activities have produced and I’ll describe the actual objects I produced. I’ll also look at several specific influences from polar philately that I drew on in my design process, and I’ll draw connections between the covers I collect and the covers I produce. I will catalog some of the mechanisms found on polar covers that enable in-field customization that I’ve adapted in my approach to presenting data samples from my activities, rendering the cover as a poetic artifact of the expedition research. The third article will look at an approach I take that can be seen as a kind of philatelic outreach, sharing the discipline of philately with new audiences who might be more interested in the content than the mechanism, and how I’ve been able to convert the content-seekers into philately-minded collectors who otherwise might not know about the formalized discipline of philately. My fourth article will consider questions of contrivance and authenticity in philatelic mail pieces. My fifth article will take an expanded view of the journey that a cover takes through contemporary mail systems by looking at a collection of 101 identical covers sent during my training, and treating that collection as a corpus that can be analyzed for details about implications the mail system has on contemporary expedition practices. A goal for all of these articles is to solicit input from the polar philately community to help refine my process and design. Knowing that my articles describe preparatory work done outside of the Arctic Circle, I thank you in advance for your generosity in reading these articles and invite your feedback.

RYAN DEWEY

CITATION:

The Antarctic Sun. (2003, January 12). Dear sir, please don’t write. National Science Foundation. Retrieved from https://antarcticsun.usap.gov/pastIssues/2002-2003/2003_01_12.pdf

Do Postal Artifacts from Expedition Training Qualify as Polar Philately?

Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)

Post Type: Framing / Positioning

Date of Publication: 2026-01-19

Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG

Purpose: Establish conceptual justification for including expedition training artifacts within the scope of polar philately and introduce a multi-part series on training covers

Author: RYAN DEWEY

Most sites and objects are first encountered at a distance, and most of the time they are dismissed just as quickly. A glance is enough to categorize. Enough to move on. It’s how we convert new information into background information in the search for relevance and significance.

This habit of rapid categorization is efficient, but it is also deceptive. The quick read often tells us more about expectation than about what is actually present. In fieldwork, in landscapes, and in encounters with material objects, that initial reading is frequently wrong, or at least incomplete.

Much of my work revolves around the gap between first impression and sustained attention. While looking is incidental, it is also a subject in its own right. I explore how recognition emerges over time through repetition, proximity, and careful engagement, and how objects, sites, and materials respond to the rhythms of observation.

Everglades Cord is one attempt to make that mechanism visible.

The Deception of the Ordinary

At first glance, the work reads as a simple stack of split firewood. It is easy to pass over. Many people do.

That misreading is not incidental. It is structural to the piece. The form borrows the visual language of the ordinary, the utilitarian, and the overlooked. Only when attention slows does the object begin to resist that reading.

Closer inspection reveals that each log is fabricated rather than split from a tree. Seams, join lines, growth ring-pattern mismatches, and subtle inconsistencies in grain and knot placement come into view. There are also absences. Voids shaped like logs that once occupied those spaces and are no longer there. The stack begins to read less like accumulation and more like construction.

The shift from glance to recognition is the work. Not metaphorically, but operationally. The object is designed to reward proximity and time, and to withhold itself from cursory interpretation.

Attention as a Material Process

Attention is not neutral. It has structure. It is shaped by habit, context, and expectation.

In fieldwork, I have learned that repeated engagement with a site often produces entirely different readings than an initial visit. What looks like debris becomes evidence. What appears random begins to show pattern. What felt resolved opens into further questions.

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The same dynamic is at play here. The work does not announce itself as sculpture. It requires the viewer to press in, to investigate, to test their own assumptions about what counts as form and what counts as residue.

This is not an argument for slowness as virtue. It is an observation about how understanding actually accumulates.

Material, Source, & Labor

The cord is built from reclaimed cypress lumber believed to have been cut from South Florida swamps before current protections on the Everglades banned logging. The wood was acquired legally, long after it had been removed from the landscape and stored following the closure of a furniture company.

No protected trees were cut for this work.

That distance in time matters. The material carries with it a layered history of extraction, storage, reuse, and transformation. It is no longer a living tree, but it is also not neutral matter. Its prior life in a wetland system, its removal, and its prolonged dormancy are all embedded in the work.

Each log was assembled through deliberate, repetitive labor. I shaped and joined fragments of lumber into forms that could convincingly pass as split firewood. I broke conventional rules of joinery so that when split with an axe, the edges would read as real. Knots and grains were arranged to preserve the illusion of having come from a single trunk.

That labor matters. As Thoreau noted, firewood warms twice, once in the work of carrying and cutting, and again in its burning. Here, the warmth is abstracted. The stack holds both the labor embedded in its making and the larger, less visible heat released through canopy loss and extraction. Each time the work is moved, from studio to gallery and back again, that warmth accumulates through handling and care. The cord remains reversible. It can circulate as artwork, as stored fuel, or, at the limit, as a funerary pyre. In that final transformation, labor, material, and heat collapse back into the body that assembled them.

Looking Through the Work

As attention deepens, the cord begins to function less as an object and more as a frame. Light passes through the interstices between logs. The gallery wall beyond becomes visible. The stack shifts from mass to aperture.

This quality has led to a related line of inquiry. The porosity of the stack holds the potential to act as a large-scale pinhole camera. I intend to return this cord of pre-ban cypress to the swamp from which it was originally cut and construct a purpose-built crate that doubles as a camera. Hundreds of small apertures between the logs would admit ethereal light onto a large sheet of photographic paper, producing a diffuse, spectral image of the surrounding canopy. I have built a smaller functional model of this camera to produce test prints.

Wood returns to site. Canopy becomes image. Memory is fixed in emulsion.

This extension is not a departure from the original work. It is a continuation of the same attention mechanism, pressed further.

A Longer Geological Memory

Everglades Cord also sits within a broader arc of research I have been pursuing through FIELD OFFICE across the Great Lakes region. That work traces landscapes shaped by ice, water, and limestone, and the deep histories that connect northern and southern ecologies across geological time.

In some reconstructions of plate tectonic movement, the continental block that would become the Great Lakes region occupied positions much closer to the equator, and in earlier deep-time interpretations, at times south of it. During long intervals of the Paleozoic, shallow tropical seas covered much of this terrain, depositing the limestone that now underlies large portions of the region.

These conditions supported ecologies markedly different from the present. Warm, shallow marine environments and later wetland systems left material traces that persist beneath glacial overprint. Cypress and cedar, both closely associated with limestone substrates, function as botanical indicators of those deeper continuities, even as climates and latitudes shifted dramatically over time.

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This is not a claim that the Everglades and the Great Lakes are equivalent landscapes. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that they are connected through a long arc of material formation, plate movement, and ecological succession. Southern swamp and northern quarry are separated by latitude today, but linked by substrate, memory, and the slow rearrangement of the planet itself. In the Great Lakes region, these deeper limestone and marine histories are partially obscured by glacial overprint, where ice reshaped the surface while leaving earlier substrates and their ecological signals intact beneath.

The cord, built from southern cypress and encountered in northern contexts, carries that tension. It is a displaced material that quietly points back to a geological history in which present distinctions of north and south had not yet settled into their current positions.

Why Pressing In Matters

In landscapes, in archives, and in objects, the quick glance is almost always insufficient. It flattens complexity and reinforces expectation. Deep looking does not guarantee understanding, but it creates the conditions under which understanding can emerge.

This is as true for a stack of wood as it is for a quarry face, a glacial groove, or a site long shaped by human and nonhuman forces.

The work asks a simple thing of the viewer. Slow down. Move closer. Stay with what resists immediate recognition.

Often, that is where the real structure begins to appear.

My practice often reads like a pile of wood at first glance: dense, ordinary, and easy to overlook. But spend time with it, move closer, linger, and the structure begins to emerge. Materials, methods, and histories interlock across projects. Attention reveals patterns that are invisible to a casual scan. In that slow unfolding, the work becomes legible, and the world it constructs begins to draw you in.

Explore Everglades Cord and other works in my studio practice on my website. See how materials, labor, and sustained attention come together to reveal hidden structures, perceptual dynamics, and the layered histories embedded in each project.

View the Project

RYAN DEWEY

NOTE: Everglades Cord was installed at SPACES Cleveland as part of documentation and research between exhibitions. The work continues to circulate and is available for loan to institutions, botanical gardens, or projects seeking engagement with material, labor, and attention. It is part of ongoing studio and FIELD OFFICE investigations into perception, structure, and the histories embedded in material.

EVERGLADES CORD — Slow Looking and the Labor of Attention
Origin: STUDIO (Practice)
Post Type: Conceptual Artifact
Circulation: Email
Date of Publication: 2026-01-14
Related Divisions: STUDIO, FIELD OFFICE, GEOCOG
Purpose: Explore looking and sustained attention as both method and subject, situating my sculpture Everglades Cord (2025) in a broader practice of material, labor, and perceptual inquiry
Author: RYAN DEWEY

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At the heart of this work is Composite Statistical Image Analysis (CSIA). Rather than treating individual stones as isolated curiosities, CSIA aggregates large numbers of observations into composite images. These images reveal patterns that are otherwise invisible: directional trends, clustering, relative size distributions, and morphological variation across stones in a given site.

What the collection of composite images make clear is not just what is there, but what it signifies. Recurrent forms, consistent alignments, and subtle deviations signal the underlying physical processes that shaped the landscape, but also the social processes since the presence of these mismatch stones makes legible the decision-making workflow of the economics of this particular site. In other words, the analysis exposes the grammar of the terrain, the constraints, forces, and histories that have produced what we see.

These visuals are striking, but their value goes beyond aesthetics. Images like these allow me to:

• Identify spatial structures and correlations that would be difficult to discern on the ground

• Compare multiple sites or areas systematically

• Translate raw field observations into analytical models that inform decision-making

For land stewards or site managers, this approach provides a nuanced, evidence-based perspective. CSIA does not dictate what a site “means,” but it surfaces signals that support strategic intervention, conservation planning, or interpretive design. Where conventional mapping might register only topography or coverage, composite statistical images reveal latent organization in materials and patterns that can inform stewardship at both the micro and macro scales.

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The Glacial Stone Inventory is ongoing, and the CSIA work continues to expand its reach. Each new composite strengthens the capacity to discern meaningful structures in the landscape, making the site itself a live archive of insight. This is a system to see the landscape as an active, interpretable system and the project provides a working methodology and visual language for reading the landscape.

Read more about the project

These methods continue to inform how I engage sites with land stewards and institutions seeking a deeper, evidence-based understanding of the landscapes they manage. Further materials from the Glacial Stone Inventory and related FIELD OFFICE work will be published as the project develops.

RYAN DEWEY

COMPOSITE STATISTICAL IMAGE ANALYSIS: Glacial Stone Inventory
Origin: FIELD OFFICE
Post Type: Benchmark Artifact
Circulation: Email
Date of Publication: 2026-01-12
Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, GEOCOG, STUDIO
Purpose: Establish Composite Statistical Image Analysis as a method for aggregating field observations into interpretable visual structures that reveal material distributions, directional forces, and latent landscape organization, supporting nuanced site interpretation and land stewardship decision-making
Author: RYAN DEWEY

Cut faces, haul roads, benches, access routes, and exposed strata record sequences of decisions made under specific operational, economic, and organizational constraints. These features form a system that can be documented and modeled directly from the site.

They also preserve evidence of human coordination.

Extraction patterns, tooling marks, circulation layouts, and infrastructure placement reflect how work was organized, how risk was managed, how material quality was evaluated, and how knowledge moved through the operation. The landscape carries traces of planning, adaptation, success, and failure.

My work in quarry landscapes focuses on developing methods to make both layers legible. The physical structure and the human logic embedded within it. Mapping and modeling are used to document existing conditions with enough resolution that operational patterns, decision strategies, and cultural habits emerge without being imposed.

Case Study: Forensic Reading of a Quarry Landscape

One project examined an abandoned limestone quarry through a forensic lens. Spatial relationships, extraction sequences, tooling traces, and infrastructural remnants were documented to reconstruct how the site evolved over time.

Aerial imagery, ground-level documentation, and diagrammatic modeling were used to identify operational phases and material flows. Bench geometry, cut orientation, and circulation paths revealed how efficiency, safety, material quality, and labor organization shaped the present form of the site.

Beyond physical form, these traces reflected how teams coordinated work, how knowledge was transferred across shifts and phases, and how decision-making adapted as conditions changed. Choices left behind evidence of priorities, constraints, and assumptions embedded in daily operations.

As the site was mapped, apparent irregularities resolved into a coherent operational structure. What initially read as disorder clarified into accumulated process shaped by human judgment over time.

The primary outputs were maps, diagrams, and models. These materials established a reference layer that captured both physical conditions and the logic that produced them. They supported future use without collapsing complexity or prescribing an outcome.

Mapping as Decision Infrastructure

This work treats observation as a technical and cultural discipline.

Geological exposure is recorded in place.
Spatial organization is diagrammed from existing form.
Operational traces are documented as evidence of coordinated activity.

Interpretive insight appears as a top layer and remains traceable to mapped conditions. Conclusions can be examined against the workflows, decisions, and constraints that generated the evidence.

This approach creates a shared frame of reference. Designers, planners, engineers, and stakeholders operate from the same documented reality. Tacit knowledge becomes visible. Explicit knowledge gains context. Both can be conserved, interpreted, and reused.

From Quarry Operations to Organizational Systems

Quarry landscapes make accumulated decisions visible. Their transformations are explicit and irreversible, which makes them effective sites for developing observational rigor.

Similar conditions exist inside organizations. Processes evolve. Workarounds emerge. Knowledge becomes embedded in routines, tools, and artifacts rather than documentation. Over time, strategy drifts away from practice.

By reading the traces left behind, physical or organizational, it becomes possible to infer how decisions are made, how knowledge flows, and where breakdowns occur. This provides concrete input for strategy, design requirements, and institutional learning.

Every action reflects an organization’s knowledge base.
Every action reflects its culture.

These projects demonstrate how disciplined mapping and modeling reveal those layers and make them usable. The quarry serves as a clear example of how structure, human logic, and institutional memory already exist, waiting to be documented and understood.

RYAN DEWEY

FROM QUARRY TO CANVAS — Mapping, Modeling, and Applied Observation
Origin: FIELD OFFICE
Post Type: Benchmark Artifact
Circulation: Archive
Date of Publication: 2026-01-09
Related Divisions: STUDIO, GEOCOG, FIELD OFFICE
Purpose: Demonstrate methods for mapping and modeling quarry landscapes to reveal both operational structure and human decision-making traces, and connect these insights to organizational knowledge and strategy
Author: RYAN DEWEY

Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)

Post Type: Benchmark Artifact

Circulation: Email

Date of Publication: 2026-12-29

Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG

Purpose: Present the Glacial Grooves Mesh Model as a perceptual and analytical instrument for reading deep-time processes encoded in terrain

Author: RYAN DEWEY

Photogrammetric data reconstructs glacial grooves at sub-centimeter scale; mesh used for hypothesis testing and diachronic comparison. Built from data I collected on Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. Site Location: 41.616338559191945, -82.70649799527524

Conceptual Overview

The Glacial Grooves Mesh Model is a spatial instrument developed to make subglacial processes legible at human scale. It translates glacial abrasion patterns into a continuous mesh that can be navigated, measured, and reasoned about as a system rather than as isolated markings.

Rather than treating glacial grooves as static features, the model treats them as a record of force vectors, pressure regimes, and material negotiation across deep time.

What the Model Is

The model is derived from high-resolution field capture and reconstruction of the Kelleys Island glacial grooves, among the most extensive and well-preserved examples in North America.

The mesh allows curvature, concavity, convexity, and directional bias to be examined continuously across the surface rather than inferred from discrete measurements.

“Forensic-scale 3D photogrammetry reconstructs primary and secondary glacial grooves at sub-centimeter resolution, producing a high-fidelity mesh (3.8M vertices, 7.6M faces) for basin-scale analysis. Systematic cross-section, historical overlays, and site analysis recover lost groove morphology erased by quarrying, map erosional trajectories, and locate state-change markers. This work situates the grooves within Lake Erie’s broader glacial system, testing how erosive forces evolved across substrates and revealing the grooves as signals of planetary-scale movement. Data are integrated into an ongoing project archive at the Nevada Museum of Art, informing a comprehensive terrain-based understanding.”

ryandewey.org/field-office

Why This Matters

Most landscape interpretation relies on labels, diagrams, or representative samples. The mesh model allows direct engagement with process logic. Viewers are not told what happened. They can see how ice moved, where pressure intensified, and how material resisted or yielded.

This approach changes how geological evidence can be communicated to non-specialists, planners, designers, and stewards of land.

What This Enables

• New modes of geological interpretation
• Comparative analysis between sites shaped by different glacial regimes
• Transfer of deep-time reasoning into contemporary landscape and infrastructure decisions
• Visual storytelling that does not dilute technical rigor

Related Material

Short video and blurb originally published at ryandewey.org/field-office

Previous Post:

Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)

Post Type: Practice Structure / Orientation

Circulation: Indexed Only

Date of Publication: 2025-12-29

Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG, ANGLING DIVISION, 1910, DRIFT CABINET

Purpose: Introduce readers to the structure of the practice and explain how artifacts and insights are produced

Author: RYAN DEWEY

I have heard on multiple occasions that my work is hard to see in one place; that it exists in fragments, archives, or private collections. The truth is, FIELD OFFICE has always been about active observation, research, and experimentation across landscapes, material production, and community practice. What I’m sharing here is a map of the practice: a way to make visible how expeditions, artifacts, data, and insights connect across divisions. Understanding this structure gives readers a clear path to explore the work itself, see the relationships between projects, and follow the logic behind the insights that emerge from both FIELD OFFICE research and Angling Division activities.

I want to start with a simple map of the practice, a way to see how observation, research, and analysis flow across different facets of FIELD OFFICE. Understanding the structure makes the individual artifacts and projects easier to follow, while also showing how each division contributes to the broader vision.

1) FIELD OFFICE

This is my landscape observatory in motion. Fieldwork, expeditions, and landscape research happen here, forming the raw observations that feed everything else in the practice. It’s where data is collected, patterns are recognized, and questions take shape. This is where my work begins and returns, before becoming anything else.

2) STUDIO

As a visual artist, I proliferate objects and material output as a way to think about the world. FIELD OFFICE research uncovers concepts and relationships that I translate into tangible artifacts. Observations and analysis are made material, creating objects and documents that carry knowledge forward.

3) GEOCOG

I also run a strategic fieldcraft consultancy that applies analytical models I design to inform projects in land stewardship, quarry and mine analysis, ag tourism and ag tech, but I work on things related to what I observe through FIELD OFFICE, which is why my consulting feels grounded in something bigger. Observations translate into practical and strategic applications that connect research to real-world decision-making for industrial partners, family offices, and land use agencies.

4) ANGLING DIVISION

I produce a regional fly-fishing intelligence publication for the entire Great Lakes watershed (HUC 04, US & Canada). By pairing self-reported angler data with geomorphological and ecological indexes, we interpret trends across rivers, conditions, and species throughout the season. Insights culminate in the end-of-season Ledger available exclusively to data-contributing members. Anglers’ repeated observations of particular rivers over time align naturally with FIELD OFFICE methods, turning individual experiences into collective intelligence that informs both members and the practice itself.

5) 1910

The premium outfitter branch of ANGLING DIVISION. Handmade rods, kit, and gear are designed and produced based on insights from ANGLING DIVISION and FIELD OFFICE, translating observation and analysis into high-quality, low-volume, heritage-quality products. I don’t expect to write about 1910 here unless something about the design of the product gives insight to a larger systems-level observation, or functions as a broader cultural note. If i showcase a product here it will relate directly to developing attunement to landscape, or a tool I develop that expands an approach to fieldwork.

6) DRIFT CABINET

This is an experiment, a mobile micro-exhibition space, literally a cabinet on wheels. The project combines archival and current FIELD OFFICE outputs for public engagement, showing research and artifacts together in context. Don't expect much content on the cabinet, it only appears intermittently and it’s designed for in-person experience, but it's part of what I do, so I've included it here. If you’re a Great Lakes regional institution that wants to host a temporary installation of Drift Cabinet, feel free to reach out.

That’s the basic map of my practice.

Seeing the six divisions together gives a clear sense of FIELD OFFICE’s rigor and continuity, how observation becomes insight, and how the work extends from research into interpretation, craft, and community.

Each artifact you encounter in upcoming posts may touch one or more of these divisions, but much of this will remain behind the scenes. Sometimes I’ll produce narrative translation posts to provide the connective tissue, showing how observations, analytical methods, membership data, and material outputs interrelate, but I’ll never bombard with drivel, and I’m not peddling my wares here.

I didn’t want to start writing and referencing these divisions without a clear map, because without seeing the structure, my practice can look a little confusing. But I believe that organization is a kind of prosperity, and the way that I have structured my practice feeds the by-products, insights, and latent value from one division into the next division as new material. I can’t let it go to waste, so I build the structure to put it into use.

Thanks for sticking with me.

RYAN DEWEY

Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)

Post Type: Framing / Context

Date of Publication: 2025-12-16

Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG, ANGLING DIVISION

Purpose: Introduce archival artifact series and orient readers

Author: RYAN DEWEY

I’ve been quiet publicly for a while, but FIELD OFFICE has remained active, tracking landscapes, testing methods, and gathering observations across expeditions and research projects. Over the past several years, this work has accumulated into a body of artifacts: expedition logs, analytical slides, forensic landscape analysis, Blue Books, and ephemera studies.

One of the skills I rely on as an anthropologist is living with the data. To find the stories embedded in the information I collect during discovery and research, I need to process it, follow trails, tie up loose ends, and uncover the unifying organization within the apparent mess of notes. I’ve been building out ontologies, mapping semantic relations, and constructing conceptual models to make sense of it all within the practice. This is why I haven’t always opened my fieldnotes publicly; after the fieldwork, it is the work of understanding and structuring the data that has taken priority for me.

I’m starting to make some of that work available here. Artifacts will appear gradually, not necessarily in strict order, and each comes with context and metadata so you can understand what it represents and how it fits into the practice.

Publishing these artifacts is less about the date they were produced and more about sharing the work itself. Each piece reflects a step in FIELD OFFICE’s ongoing inquiry, whether it’s a slide from the Hexagon Quarry Analysis, a Blue Book documenting an exhibition, a technical report serving up quarry comparison, or a record of an expedition to study glacial formations.

My goal is to make these materials accessible and legible, so readers can see the reasoning, method, and observations that guide the unification of my practice. Narrative translation posts will follow, helping to connect artifacts across projects and divisions.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll encounter images, expedition logs, digital models, and ephemera studies, each artifact available on its own, each revealing part of the ongoing work of FIELD OFFICE. But you’ll also see some of the new projects I’ve begun which emerge out of the momentum generated by the research. I won’t bombard you, and the density will ebb and flow, sometimes like the tide, but most often like the meltwater at the edge of a glacier. More soon.

RYAN DEWEY

Over the past year as I’ve conducted training and research projects on Kelleys Island, I’ve begun producing a series of philatelic covers to commemorate the work.

A “cover” is an envelope (in other words, a letter cover) that becomes collectible because of design features, historical significance, or usage characteristics. There is a rich tradition of using covers to commemorate and communicate about expeditions in polar philatelic history, and I want my endeavors to contribute to this history, so I’ve been researching covers and have begun mailing covers from my expedition training trips.

Some of these commemorative covers are available for purchase in my shop, and I’ll be presenting various covers I’ve designed at the American Philatelic Society’s convention on Saturday, August 12, at a table in the Cachetmakers Bourse at the Great American Stamp Show in Cleveland. A copy of these covers also belongs to my expedition archive at the Nevada Museum of Art.

I want to talk today about the design process and mention some of the observations I made about the contemporary postal handling of philatelic mail. At some point, I’ll produce a more formal analysis, and I’ve already produced a 220-page document outlining the traces of postal handling on each cover, as well as a taxonomy of auxiliary markings and USPS processing mistakes, but today I’m just introducing these covers and mentioning briefly the types of damage they’ve received.

Here’s an example of a cover I designed and mailed in June:

A description of the project was offset printed on the back of the cover, and the remaining markings were produced with ink stamps that I designed for each aspect of the training expeditions that I wanted to commemorate. I’ll write about those projects another time, but I want to mention the postage stamps and the postmarks first.

The covers I like best are the ones where stamps are thematically related to the project that the cover commemorates, so for me, I needed the stamps to relate to my project. Finding Great Lakes topical stamps that looked good with my design was a challenge, but I was able to find two topical stamps that I think do the trick. The first design feature the Saint Lawrence Seaway (Scott #2091) which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and the second design features a blocky mountain scene in honor of Canada (Scott #1324) which relates to my project since I’m training for an expedition that will take place in Northern Canada. It might seem trivial, but I also took care in placing them on the envelope in a way that geographically reflects the latitude arrangement of Canada (placed at top), and the Great Lakes (placed at bottom). I’ve used Scott #2091 on the postcard correspondence that I mail to my subscribers, and at some point I want to talk about this stamp a little more, but not today.

I had originally intended to wet the stamps and flap with water from Lake Erie, but the gum was running and the flaps wouldn’t dry flat, so I ended up resorting to an acid-free glue stick to keep everything in place.

I had a couple of options in how I would handle the mailing of these covers: I could leave them stamped but unmailed, I could stamp them and have them postmarked for hand-back mail, or I could stamp them and mail them from the post office on Kelleys Island and see what happened to the covers during mail delivery. It was a risk, but I mailed them to myself on the island. Since Kelleys Island is a small post office, all mail leaves the island for Area Mail Processing before returning to the island. Previously, this mail would have stayed in Ohio in the western basin at the Toledo Processing & Distribution Center (P&DC) which now takes place at the 900,000 square-foot Metroplex Michigan P&DC in Pontiac, Michigan — of noted fame as the busiest postal facility in the United States.

All mail that I send and receive goes through Metroplex and along with 30,000 other mail pieces each hour, zips through one of their Advanced Facer-Canceller System (AFCS) machines and has a facer cancel applied to the mailpiece marking it with the Metroplex Michigan designation.

MISTAKES WERE MADE

When I received all of my 101 covers back in the mail, I was frustrated at the damage and excessive markings that destroyed these covers. Most of the mailpieces I collect are in pristine condition, but these came back looking kind of sad. But the longer I looked at the mail, the more I recognized patterns of handling treatment that made me wonder what the hell happened when my envelopes entered the facility.

When I look at the collection as a whole, it is clear to me that the person who processed these covers at Metroplex in Michigan was having a very bad day. As I mentioned, I've built a taxonomy of how these covers were processed and there are at least 32 types of handling in this collection, along with excessive marking, folding, and damage to both the stamps and covers. After I finished cataloging the auxiliary markings and cover condition characteristics, I began thinking of this edition as a corpus of data on the mail system. As individual objects they’re a commemoration of my expedition training, but as a whole collection, they’re also an index of how Area Mail processing centers impact the lifecycle of bulk mailing of items of philatelic interest.

Simple tools from discourse analysis make it easy to identify the batch processing mistakes in the narrative these covers tell. You don’t have to be a careful reader to tell that these were mishandled, but as I was figuring out each step in the processing which resulted in the damage, I found myself drawing on habits I’ve carried over from my days in anthropology and linguistics. There is a good story here, and I’m thinking through how I want to tell it.

In the meantime, I’ll close with a reading from Chapter 2 of the Postal Operations Manual (POM) which describes the handling of philatelic mail, including explicit directions for employees to exercise care to prevent damage, and to avoid over-canceling covers to preserve attractiveness, and to keep the covers from being mutilated in the mail-stream:

231.35 Philatelic Covers

Employees should exercise care in handling all philatelic covers to ensure that they are not damaged in mail handling. These covers are generally identifiable by a design (cachet) on the left side of the envelope.

231.36 Defacing Philatelic Covers

Postal Service employees should ensure that philatelic covers are not over-canceled; back-stamped, marked "received this date," or otherwise defaced on front or back; used as a top piece in a bundle for destination-package labeling purposes; or bent, folded, mutilated, or damaged by rubber bands.

Take a look at a couple of covers I received from Metroplex, Michigan P&DC.

Here is cover #022:

Note: While I consider the placement of paper tape in the top left quadrant of this cover to be a misplacement, I don’t have it circled in red in the thumbnails below, but it is marked in the analysis tables. I also have the upside down orientation and placement of the facer cancel marked in the tables, but not circled in red. I’ve used red circles to make it easy to see the errors and damage where it might be less obvious.

Here is cover #074 which sustained gross folding, as well as orientation mistakes through the IMb barcode sprayer & the AFCS:

All of this damage, while disheartening for me as an artist, is incredibly fascinating for me as an anthropologist because it’s a clear index of system errors in human-machine interaction.

At one point it seems like a human noticed how badly this mail was being processed, and it appears that they recognized this was philatelic material they were mutilating and attempted to intervene, but they failed at that too. A few covers from this edition do not have any damage at all, and only four (4) covers have a hand cancel from Metroplex instead of the AFCS markings for the AMP metered cancel. But even these hand cancels are excessive and sloppy, and made a mess on the backs of other covers as the cancels transferred wet ink in the sorting process. Here’s an example:

I’m still processing this data and I’ve begun talking to people who know more about this than I do, so there is probably more to come in this story. In the meantime, beginning Sunday, August 13, you’ll be able to purchase some of my other field project covers in my shop.

All United States postage stamp images depicted in this publication are © United States Postal Service. Images are reproduced solely to illustrate philatelic items included in commercial availability of this body of work, in accordance with Chapter 2, Section 282 of the Postal Operations Manual. All images remain unaltered for compliance with USPS requirements and are used strictly in the context of this research, documentation, and items offered for sale or exhibition. Inquiries regarding acquisition or exhibition are welcome.