Following on from this post, yesterday I transposed my usual walk to work in Birmingham to the area around my family home in the New Forest.
Rather than taking 20 minutes, we were walking for over 2 hours.
Many thanks to Lizzy and Russ for tailing me at a discreet distance with the telephoto lens.
I set Kevin the task of mapping out his normal route to work in terms of lefts and rights etc and asked him to set off one day from where he was staying in China and Walk to Work following his normal route and ‘do some work’ when he got there where ever that was. The definition of work is blurred here so do something – take photos write sweep the street – whatever.
Paul Conneally
An interesting proposition has come through to work with Paul Conneally and Kevin Ryan on the challenge of transposing people’s usual journeys to work onto different locations, and then performing some sort of work function at the new location.
Kevin’s walk in Chongqing resulted in some really nice images which you can now see on his photo gallery.
Meanwhile, I recorded my journey to work for Paul to do what he will with:
After some discussion, we seem to have a distilled version of my typical day’s work invigilating at a local gallery that Paul will reproduce somewhere else:
That’s the starting point anyway – I’m really interested to see what conversations Paul’s presence might catalyse. We’ve been strict withourselves and dismissed the temptation of too many bells and whistles: Paul’s mission is essentially to sit, to be, and to watch.
Checking the feasibility of telling the SoPG: Yamanote stories whilst travelling in between stations on the Yamanote line.
With one thing and another I’ve been spending a lot of time recently working on different aspects of the Sites of Potentiality Guidebooks series.
As well as developing projects to keep pushing the format in new directions, I’ve been looking at how best to present last year’s Yamanote Line project.
Although most of my documentation at the time was done via photography (and a couple of dozen of rather nice tickets – man! I love that silky black finish on the back!) I really don’t want it to turn into some sort of photography project.
So far I have 2 possible solutions…
The first is a website style format where selected photos are presented alongside bilingual word-pictures of each walk. It’s good in that it goes some way to convey the sense of journey and experience, but I feel it’s still quite a passive mode of consumption.
I’m carefully describing them as website style because I’d choose to display them under very particular conditions where I can control the appearance. Normally I’d be a lot more inclusive with my web design, but this is me in prima donna control freak mode. So there.
To aid the feedback process though, I’ve uploaded the pages for the first day’s walks so you can have a look here. A change-log can be found at the bottom of this page.
The pages were designed to be viewed in Firefox (available here) with all navigation bars removed, in full screen mode and at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768px.
[Internet Explorer does its own thing and adds in a load of visual elements I don’t want ranging from vertical scrollbars through to blue borders around images. I’m PC-based, but a quick test in Firefox for Mac suggests there may be slight issues with variations in the positioning of the text. YMMV]
Here’s a screenshot of what I see. (Click for larger version)
Solution 2 is performance based:
The time taken to do a complete circuit of the Yamanote line by train is about an hour. With 29 stations that’s a couple of minutes per station. Or, alternatively, a couple of minutes per walk.
During off-peak times, I think a carriage on a Yamanote line train would make the perfect venue for a presentation of the project: in sync with the different locations as myself and my audience (a mixture of pre-arranged and incidental) travel from station to station.
Here’s a draft version of how it might sound…
[audio:http://www.npugh.co.uk/media/yamanote_stories.mp3]We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
has been changed from:
私達は調査から終わり、
すべての私達の探検の終わりは私達が着くこと始まった、
In preparing various proposals etc over the last few weeks, I looked again at some of my photos from SoPG: Yamanote Line.
In particular, these ones of queues outside a restaurant in Ōsaki:
I’ve resolved that next time I get a chance to work in Japan, I’m going to develop a project that relates to the time spent in these queues. I’m sure it could be a good forum for some exchanges. Being in the queue could be the the raison d’être for being in the queue. Perhaps others in the queue could recommend other good queues to be in…
Can you apply the old sculpting trick of looking at things in a mirror (to get a more accurate view of what they look like) to an entire street?
Woodlands Road reflected:
Wow. Has it really been 7 months since I first agreed to go and sit under a tent in a housing estate and write poetry with strangers?
Yesterday we gathered in Keith’s house and penned the final batch of the 100 Verses for 3 Estates (Alec Finlay, Gavin Wade and Paul Connolly Paul Conneally Little Onion).
You already *know* there was a good bunch of people there and the atmosphere was great, but the food was delicious and deserves a special mention – thanks guys!
Does it sound like we didn’t work very hard?
There was some serious thinking going on too…
The fight for free space-for wilderness and public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space…Wanderlust-A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit, Verso, 2001 in Occasional Sights-a London guidebook of missed opportunities and things that aren’t always there, Anna Best
Volume 13 started off with sculptor Atsuo Okamoto: he agreed to fill in a page of the sketchbook and pass it on to another artist; I agreed to keep a small section of the artwork “Volume of Lives” with me until I die. Anything’s fair game in the world of artistic collaborations!
Orie Inoue: Is she a fashion designer? Is she an animator? Is she an illustrator?
You decide… (but probably it’s all of the above and more!)
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