A Body of Work
Made Visible

Two of those numbers are the art; two are the build. Git* only remembers the last week, which was the making of the site. The ten years before it lived in a Vimeo showcase and my own head. Everything below the "six days" mark is straight from git, with real timestamps.

The recordings began as a coping mechanism. I have generalized anxiety and a real fear of flying, and somewhere around 2016 I discovered that if I pointed a camera out the window during the parts of each flight that frighten me most, I had something to do with my hands and my attention.

It turned into a decade-long habit, then quietly into a body of work. Same formula every time: landscape, timelapse, as steady as possible (you'll see that took some time to dial in). Same title format every time, for ten years. (A therapist pointed out that's the obsessionality that comes bundled free with my anxiety.) By 2026 there were 255 of them, across 45 airports and 11 countries.

The push to finally do something with them came from a master class with Trevor Paglen at Anderson Ranch. A week spent thinking hard about images, machines, and who an image is really for. I came out of it wanting to stop sitting on ten years of footage.

Here was the problem. The clips were on the internet in a Vimeo showcase, which was public, but only findable if you had the link. My artist statement was on a Squarespace page. But there was no way for anyone to actually experience the thing as a whole: a decade of anxious minutes, all the routes, all the weather, the shape of the habit over time. You could watch one clip. You couldn't stand inside the project.

I'm not a coder. Every previous attempt to present it in a visually interesting way stalled out on the gap between what I could imagine and what I could build. That's the gap this last week closed.

From here down it's git. Aug 6–11, 2026 — five working evenings and one deliberate day off. The bigger the day, the more got made.

1. Aug 6 · Wed nightFirst commit1 commit

   Turning a decade of Vimeo titles into data

   • Scaffolded the page, a data pipeline, and the catalog — pulled from ten years of consistently-titled Vimeo clips (that obsessive naming finally paid off: every one parsed cleanly).
   • One page, one data source: add a flight, and the whole thing updates.
2. Aug 7 · ThuThe shape of it9 commits

   The day it became an interactive piece

   • Locked the look: the Dusk palette and Iowan serif — one serif for the writing, one monospace for the instrument-panel data.
   • Built the coordinate route map (great-circle arcs, no coastlines — the way an instrument sees the world) and the beeswarm timeline of every recording.
   • Added the flight-conditions layer: historical airport weather for each takeoff and landing, plus filters and a sortable gallery.
   • Wrapped it into a deployable site.
3. Aug 8 · FriPresentation15 commits

   Making it feel like a piece, not a database

   • Hover a gallery card and the clip plays right there; click it and it opens in a custom dusk lightbox instead of Vimeo's chrome.
   • A present/full-screen mode, a rewritten statement, and a long fussy fight to get the hero spacing identical whether the site stands alone or is embedded in Squarespace — so it finally lives on amandadahlgren.com.
   • Chased down 20 recordings showing "no weather" — a station-ID quirk for the Hawaii and overseas airports — and fixed them.
4. Aug 9 · SatPause0 commits

   A day off

   • Nothing shipped. Let it sit.
5. Aug 10 · Mon nightForensics8 commits

   Growing the archive and getting the record honest

   • Added 14 new recordings, then spent the night as a detective: overnight international flights that had been dated on the wrong calendar day (a landing lands tomorrow), a duplicate upload with the wrong title, capture times recovered from the original files.
   • Auto-matched most recordings to their true local capture time by walking each day's itinerary in order.
6. Aug 11 · TueExact + navigable8 commits

   Exact weather, and a map you can actually use

   • Once I'd filled in the exact capture time for every flight (a shared spreadsheet did the heavy lifting), we pulled the weather for the precise hour of all 255 — no more estimates.
   • Made the map and timeline navigable: click a route or an airport and the gallery jumps to just those recordings; click a timeline dot to watch it. Spaced out the legend, grew the beeswarm taller.

Somewhere in the middle of building this, I got curious about a question I'd never actually asked: were the skies I'd been so afraid of really as fraught as they felt and how could that be visualized? So Claude pulled the historical airport weather (METAR) for every one of the 255 recordings and sorted it the way pilots do: by how far you can see and how low the clouds sit.

The answer: 87% of them were clear-and-open VFR. 81% were fully benign with good visibility, calm winds, nothing hazardous. A decade of dread, and the record says the weather was, overwhelmingly, fine. Interestingly, the scariest flight I've ever been on, a stormy takeoff from Jackson Hole to San Francisco that included de-icing and an unscheduled refuel in Salt Lake City because the airplane couldn't safely take off at full weight, didn't even rate "LIFR" (low instrument flight rules).

Claude Code wrote nearly all of the literal code. My job was direction: deciding what the piece should be, catching what felt wrong, watching each change on my own screen, and approving what got published. When this page says "I built" or "we fixed," that's shorthand for that whole back-and-forth. It's not a claim that I typed every character.

A short glossary, since I had to learn these too:

git / commit

The tool that records every change we make, as a timestamped history. Each "commit" is one saved checkpoint. The counts on this page are real, straight from that history.

METAR

A standard hourly airport weather report. Pulled from a free public archive, it's how we reconstructed the sky over every takeoff and landing.

VFR / MVFR / IFR / LIFR

Flight categories pilots use, from clearest (VFR) to properly socked-in — set by visibility and cloud height.

Beeswarm

The timeline's style: every recording is a dot, nudged so none overlap, so a busy travel stretch swarms upward instead of hiding behind itself.

Vercel

Where the site is hosted, so it has a real live link — then embedded into my Squarespace page.