Interactive Landscapes residential retreat
I’ve just got back to Birmingham after a week-long Tour of T’North. Phase I was the Interactive Landscapes residential retreat hosted by Invisible Flock and Compass Live Art.
I keep telling the Midlands folks that it was “up near Filey”, but no-one so far knows where that is, so it’s here:
About 8 artists were selected to take part and, together with the Invisible Flock trio and a few small canines we took over a B&B for a day or two. When I say “took over” I mean that fairly rapidly a lot of surfaces began to look like these:
Invisible Flock had brought along a load of different technical things and our remit was just to try things out and have a bit of a play.
These GPS trackers were something I was already familiar with, although in not quite so large a number…
I’d spent the previous week wrangling laser cutting, Arduino code and an assortment of electronic components, so I found myself bringing some low-tech tech to contribute to the proceedings: a camera obscura, a pen knife and some magnetic compasses. Looking back at what I selected, I think they were all connected by a certain sense of wonder and fascination. I think they were a reminder for me to consider the magic that simple devices can hold and maybe a call to go back to first principles.
After the table-top tech-prodding of the evening before, we headed out to the beach at Muston Sands. You know that sense of wonder I was talking about? It’s there in that first moment when you see the sea, too!
We descended the track down to the sands and then basically we had a few hours to do whatever we wanted. My foot was misbehaving, so I couldn’t roam far, but I decided to turn this to my advantage and to instead concentrate on the details of a small area.
Here it is (click for full-size version):
I spent my time slowly moving through what probably amounts to only the left-hand half of that image, paying close attention to the decisions I was making about where I went and what I stopped to look at and why. I stooped; I peered; I stretched; I surveyed; I zoomed in; zoomed out; I took photos and I took notes. Lots of notes.
The Flickr album is here, should you be inclined to look at a lot of beachy details.
The exercise was sort of practice for a project that’s been lurking in the back of my imagination for several years now, and I think I may finally have found a tool that might do the sort of thing I’m asking of it: Twine, for a series of inter-related word-pictures that you can navigate through, with the intention of capturing – you guessed it – the small details that go to make up the character of a place.
Text isn’t something I work with a lot in my practice, so I’m gradually feeling my way through this one. I’m getting a sense for what the process might involve, but at the moment I’m still a bit stuck on what sort of a thing the final experience might be – should it be something that takes you back to the original physical space, or is it about taking the essence of a place so it can be experienced elsewhere?
Probably a lot of that will get resolved when this turns into a fully-fledged project with the secondary agendas that usually accompany a commission. So, if any of that sounds like a project you can support, then get in touch because I’ve got some ideas I want to make tangible!
…In the meantime, I’ve got some notes to go through and some test branching narrative to construct…