Railway Flap Sign 1 (Grid-networks and flow-networks)

Stand in front of a railway flap sign, a historical form of today's electronic time schedule, and you see, above you, a grid of numbers, letters and symbols for keeping time that changes rhythmically, but unpredictably. Changes are accompanied by a mass of noise, the simultaneous flapping of hundreds of letters and numbers, changes marking the arrival of a new train on the board, the progress of time as a schedule of arrivals and departures, all trains and their itineraries moving to the left to give way to a new train added to the right, signaling that time is moving forward and so is the schedule.

You search the board to find "your" train: the train you had planned to take, the train you always take, the train that you know is due, was due 5 min ago, 20 min ago. Or you search the board to find the train the best suits you: the one leaving soonest, the one with the fewest stops, the one that gets you to the right connection point. You scan the board for times, for place names, for changes to time or place. The board keeps you abreast of changes as they happen; it also helps you to synchronize the time of your day with the schedule of trains, to catch up, or to inhabit the lag of waiting.

The railway sign seems to lay out all that there is to know. The total corpus of knowledge about the trains at that particular moment; changes to this corpus are marked by the noise and visual disarray of the flapping sign. Because of this appearance of completeness, any ideas you might get about knowledge that is not represented makes you a paranoid (which doesn't mean that you are wrong; it simply means that you believe appearances are never all that there is). [whereas search engines work, in part, because they foster in us the radical imagination of limitless information, IF ONLY we can figure out the right sequences of letters and numbers to get us there. The flapping digits of the search engine are the flappings of our furious typing and re-typing, perfecting the query].

The railway sign also presents knowledge about a knowable, more or less visualizable entity: a network of trains. The railway sign thus offers access, through semiotics, through visual scanning, through the right positioning of our bodies beneath and in front of the sign, to knowledge about the workings of a network [whereas search engines use a network to give us knowledge that seems to be about something else: it figures content as the object of our search, while form is the network itself]. The train network, represented by the railway sign, appears as a grid of time and timings, the salient information for railway sign searchers being the timing of arrivals and departures. There is a limit to this network, although it is vast, although marketing for train transportation often tantalizes with the allure of "going anywhere." But there is an empiricism as work in even the most idealistic of train slogans: you can look it up on the sign: a train either goes there (today) or is doesn't (today or ever). There are railroad tracks that go there, or there aren't. [whereas books like "Invisible Web" hyperbolize the endlessness of our already endless imaginations for what might be out there, for what the Internet's network might contain, if only...]. Looking at a railway sign, we place ourselves amidst the possible. [Looking at a search engine's blank field, we take our chances with a space that search engines themselves encourage us to believe goes on and on without cease.] The network of trains can be visualized by a grid of symbols which is finite because the network of trains itself is finite. In this sense, it is not a network at all. But calling it a network of trains is denotatively sound; it also helps us mark a difference. Call it a grid-network.

Search engines visualize the Internet network with a blank rectangular field (the search field) in order to imply the limitlessness of the field to be searched. The search field places the epistemological onus on the searcher, not on the search engine. Search Engine's famous secrecy about their algorithm augments this implication. Older search engines, called directories (e.g. Yahoo), presented a list of categories rather than an empty field. One scanned the categories like an index, or a railway sign. The categories seemed to measure the extent of what there was to be known, to hint at, if not actually demarcate, the boundaries of that space. This was a space of places (Castells, Shaviro). The empty search field indexes a space of flows (Castells, Shaviro, Jameson), which is the space of finance capital in the midst of which search engines like Google now thrive.

Beacon thinks about the form of a search field. It visually echoes the empty search field with its austere online version. It maps that open field onto the field of projection (see Cavell on projection and screens) in its installation version. And it jams that open form, a space of flows, into the grid-network or space of places form of the railway sign [here talk very precisely about the form of the fit; the precise way that the open search field fits within the grid-network search field].