Own This City – Pecha Kucha Night, Coventry

Last night I gave my first Pecha Kucha presentation at the lovely PK Coventry.

I’ve been meaning to do something like this for some time, as one of the aims I’ve set myself for this year is to do more public speaking. This is in order to give myself more practice at articulating the ideas around my work.

Here are the resulting slides and words for “Own This City”, in which I give an overview of some of the observations, ponderings and questions feeding into my newly-commenced project, Colony.

Own This City is a section title I’ve shamelessly stolen from a section of New York Time Out, because I think it’s important.

Ownership towards – rather than over – spaces is part of a wider spectrum of interactions between people and place that I’m thinking about a lot at the moment, as I develop a new project called Colony.

Tokyo: population 36 million, and, it seems each of those people desperate to be somewhere different.

Here more than anywhere I’m aware of the city being just a backdrop to that perpetual process of being neither here nor there.

It’s like the background in a platform game – it moves as you move, but it’s not somewhere you will ever touch or be touched by.

So, to what extent are we blinkered as we move around in our everyday life?
Maybe the first step towards owning our city is to stop and to be aware of it?
To slow down.
To simply spend time with a place.
To linger,
To be present.

These people sit in a plaza made from space reclaimed back from the traffic.

I look at this photo and I wonder what sort of sense of ownership they are feeling after having fought for and won back this territory?

I wonder if observation of the city is enough, or does ownership also require being proactive?

As for my actions, I suspect they are more loan this city than own this city: temporary occupations. Passing moments that leave little or no trace on the city itself.

Within my practice I try to affect people’s perceptions of space, which is a slightly different thing to altering the space itself, but it can be just as vivid.

Recently I’ve been learning from the world of pervasive games.

I’ve learned a lot about the power of a silly hat, the power of brief moments of spectacle, the power of conspiracy and the power of doing daft things in public places.

I learned the thrill of knowing the secret life of a place…

…of knowing that these market stalls are really a wiff waff stadium

I learned that familiar things in unexpected places can make people pause and that these pauses can be turned into many different things.

I learned that after the running around and the laughter, serious conversations happen in the pub. Where can you pong? Where would you hide a stash of bats for those in the know?

The thing is, once you start playing in public places, you become aware of how much of the city is only pretending to be yours.

In such a case, I tend towards subversion and a little bit of risk.

Some of the people in this photo have dared to come to this shopping mall with no intention whatsoever of buying anything.

When Nicky Getgood reported there were half a dozen different ballhead stickers, and that there might only be one place in which you could find all of them together, suddenly we were seeing the little blighters everywhere!

Having a task or a framework radically pulls different elements of your surroundings in and out of focus.

Kevan has had a slight, irrational fear of the steps at the back of the Royal Albert Hall, ever since he first encountered them during a chase game.

This is where it starts to get very interesting for me. The play may only be fleeting in terms of its presence on the streets, but its effects and resonances can stay with you for a long, long time

I first became aware of this whilst on a train about here. The wasteland in front is where we had once spent the afternoon playing and sharing a picnic. One afternoon.

This time though it was hosting men in hi-vis and some sort of massive drilling rig! It was a real gut-churning moment of “But it’s ours! They can’t do that! ”

This got me thinking and I started compiling a map of all the places around Birmingham that I now feel I have some sort of ownership towards.

Actually, I got a bit carried away with some of these areas – this large one bounded in red, and the one inside it bounded in yellow. They should really just be a series of perimeters.

Here are the bits I actually claim as mine, and I claim them not through spectacle or subversion, but through quietly and mindfully walking the same journeys over and over again.

Through this process I am starting to gain an affinity for what are, frankly, pretty grotty bits of the city.

These grotty bits are also regeneration areas and I place myself within them as a sort of witness to change.

As I walk on a daily basis, changes on a micro scale reveal themselves:

Shifts in litter, new additions of graffiti, fresh coats of paint.

The same space can get occupied by construction workers, emo kids and office staff at different times of the day.

As I repeat the walks on an annual basis, changes on a macro scale are revealed as buildings are demolished, carparks assembled and the other type of ownership changes hands.

These are the big changes that have a habit of being made by stealth:
the ones where you can never quite remember what was there before…

While I walk, I gather data that describes the landscape. In these drawings short lines indicate open space and longer lines indicate lumps of stuff.

Over the years I hope to capture something of the changes in the fabric of the city.
But when I’m walking I cannot pause to investigate or chat. It’s a solitary, introspective process.

This is where I find myself now: at an intersection wanting to weave several threads together.

For Colony, I want to transform the process that I use to make those drawings into a real-time shared experience. I want the data to manifest itself as you walk through the city.

To do this, I’m having to make the move from closed-box electronics, to building the darn things myself – because I want to own my data in much the same way that I want to own my city.

I want to seed feelings of empathy amongst the participants, so the technology will eventually be housed within what will be some sort of landscape-aware organism that is carried around.

Maybe this organism does not like open spaces. Or maybe it starts to writhe around if it feels too enclosed.

A colony of these creatures will be transported by foot across the city. How will their guardians negotiate the different pushes and pulls acting on them?

• Empathy
• Stares
• Camaraderie
• Flocking
• and the logistics of getting from A to B?

More questions!

How do these factors combine to affect how people will perceive the city in order to be able to navigate it?

What will be shifted into focus?

Will any of these effects be long-lasting?

What sort of desires will be projected onto the creatures,
and what sort of passport will these provide for passing into and maybe owning new parts of the city?

~~~

Many thanks to Janet, the gang and the other speakers for a really excellent evening and a great atmosphere.