Cobra Mist is an spectro-poetic essay on landscape and the (de)militarization of space. Director Emily Richardson captures what is left of Orford Ness, Suffolk (UK) after it was used by an unsuccessful, secret Cold War era military ‘over-the-horizon’ radar project. If there is an adequate picture of a Cold War world, Richardson has convincingly recorded it.
A time-lapse – a technique deeply linked to showing the animate in what we otherwise would observe as inanimate – brings the terrain of this stretch of land near Suffolk to life. 360 degrees and panoramic scenes are alternated with claustrophobic, interior stills of ghostly structures seemingly held up by nothing but shadows and light. Still lifes composed of left behind objects and strangely amputated buildings on the omni-present horizon start to quiver with live as time is sped up. Richardson’s film shows us a world left behind after an event of apocalyptic proportions.
Similar to Richardson’s film ‘Petrolia’ Cobra Mist shows the effects of human intervention on nature. Martin Heidegger in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ calls Gestell the result of the human intervention which treats all of nature as a reserve i.e. a Bestand to be exploited. Heidegger does not necessarily condemn technological exploitation as such, – rather what is condemned is calculative reason – but instead points out another way of interacting with our environment through the concept of the fourfold or Geviert. By gathering earth, sky, mortals and divinities Heidegger arrives at the conclusion that such a Geviert is what creates a world in which the thing is able to ‘thing’.
Orford Ness was exploited by a secretive form of calculative reason: the military logic of intelligence acquisition and geo-surveillance through the use of radar. The film take its title from a Cold War era code-name of a project that set out to create and test a so-called ‘over-the-horizon’ radar installation to facilitate long-range surveillance. That is to say, what was exploited at this site was not a fossil resource but a natural resource nonetheless, namely acoustical space itself.
The soundtrack accompanying the film brings this out. Composed and constructed out of ‘found sounds’ at the site itself, by using high-sensitivity microphones left overnight, the soundtrack treats the acoustical space at the site as an archive of sonofacts, sonorous artifacts lingering in the airwaves at Orford Ness. The soundtrack or perhaps more to the point, the soundscape, feels like a sonological archeology. Sound composer Benedict Drew and sound recordist Chris Watson thus jointly unearth a sonic archive of Cold warfare.
Radio-static like noise washes in and out of audible range backed by a disturbing, highly resonant, bass-ic artery. The screeching of sea-gulls and other bird-like sounds seem to oscillate in such a way that they become indistinguishable from high pitched frequency modulation, a technique used in radar technology. And then there’s the rain hitting the camera creating an intimacy, visually enhanced by a hand quickly wiping the lens clean before the sun breaks through.
Cobra Mist joins the two orders of visibility as proposed by Jacques Derrida. First there is the ‘visible in-visible’. Anything we want to keep secret, hidden from sight such as ‘a nuclear arsenal in underground silos’ or in our case an over-the-horizon radar installation belongs to this order of the visible invisible. Secondly what Derrida calls absolute invisibility: ‘that [what] refers to whatever falls the register of sight, namely the sonorous […]’. Something is absolutely invisible when we cannot see it by looking at it. It can only come to us through sound, smell or touch.
Radar, a technology of calculative secrecy, is the sonic or electromagnetic detection of objects afar. Air or microwaves are excited, to carry to and from, to return, information regarding objects which are ‘absolutely invisible’. We cannot see these objects, we can only send signals to them. The signals sent, return, and as such they are revenant.
Radar then is an acoustical gaze and as such a hauntological mirror. Derrida: ‘[It] sees me without me seeing it looking at me’ . And since we cannot see it, it can only be heard. This is similar to what Swedenborg, who in a way haunted Kant, calls the ‘listening eye’ as cited by Lyotard: ‘To the inside of the Ear belong those who have a sight of internal hearing’. That’s the nocturnal look, the listening eye.
Radar: the listening eye. Radar, in its very technicality, gathers earth, sky, mortal and divinities, a conclusion reminiscent of Don Ihde’s phenomenology of the Shoreham nuclear powerplant.
But to return to Richardson’s film: Cobra Mist does not show us a, to use a tired cliche, desolate landscape. On the contrary. As the ‘wholly other’ it renders us desolate or more precisely as Lyotard puts it in Scapeland (The Inhuman): ‘landscape leaves the mind desolate’. We lose ourselves in this landscape, this ‘world of sound’ in which ‘hearing breaks down the defenses of the harmonic and melodic ear, and becomes aware of timbre alone’.
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