These last few weeks I’ve been giving the development of Colony an extra big push to get it as far along as possible ready for next week’s public event.
Having previously been able to get the tech working on a temporary breadboard set-up, the next stage was to solder everything onto a more robust base that can be used inside the organisms that get carried around. The next stage after that was to start carrying it around!
With the circuitry in a shoulder bag, one GPS receiver on my left shoulder and the other in a glove on my right hand with a vibrating motor, I made myself more location aware as I made the 3.75 mile walk to and from work yesterday and the day before.
The code generates a measure of difference between the two calculated positions and then buzzes out a code so I can feel the values as I walk.
Initial findings are: it’s great! Super-exciting to have that extra sense that no-one else is aware of, and you can see the trends in output as you move from one type of terrain to another.
I’ll be refining the code over the next few days and also getting the circuitry into an organism ready for carrying. Do come along to The Edge on Thursday to find out how I’ve got on.
I want to explore themes of affiliation with place; of different ways (relating to my practice) that feelings of responsibility, empathy, custodianship and connectedness can be fostered.
With the early form of a presentation entitled “Own This City” in mind, I took these two photos yesterday:
Let’s see if they make the final cut of 20 slides…
I spent last Friday working with two Year 5 classes at Wyvern Primary School in Leicester as we explored an alternative method of teaching the Sun, Earth and Moon module. (scheme of work).
Working alongside one of the Y5 teachers and another artist Linda Harding we designed two days of activities. The first, with Linda, in which the pupils made models of the planets and then the second with me where planets and pupils went outside…
Jupiter and a slightly inconveniently located water hazard
The day I worked on was split into 2 2-hour sessions, one with each class. I burst into the lesson, announced launch to be in T minus 20 minutes and set about calling out the crew names whilst the teacher set the countdown timer going on the whiteboard.
After locating notebooks, donning space helmets and checking our gravity boots I gave them the mission brief: NASA had ‘acquired’ a couple of items that claimed to be some sort of aid for travellers. I played them a sample entry:
Our mission was a fact-finding one – we had to check the accuracy of the Guide’s entries in order to determine if we wanted to try and obtain the full version (the versions we had were trial versions limited to the solar system only).
After launch and hyper drive out to the edge of the field solar system, our teams of astronauts navigated their way sun-wards visiting different planets and checking the information given by the Guide against what they already knew or could deduce.
Unfortunately the entry for planet Earth was entirely unacceptable, so we agreed to spend time collating our own facts which we would then send to the publishers so they could put this straight.
I placed the planets out on the field so the relative distances between them were correctly scaled (although I forgot to get an orbit diameter for the moon). The planets themselves were not to scale, which is just as well because with these distances between them, we’d have had to have made the Sun 15cm across and Earth only 1.3mm across.
The planets at their relative distances from the Sun
A favourite moment was glancing back onto the field after I’d placed the planets in position to see a crowd of dogwalkers and dogs gathered around Saturn scratching their heads and wondering what was going on!
I’ve always struggled with the “hacker” terminology, finding it quite limiting and a hurdle to explaining what hackspaces/hackerspaces are about to the various people I find myself having to explain what hackspaces/hackerspaces are about to. However, I’ve long been a fan of how Noisebridge presents itself. This extract from their wiki:
Noisebridge is a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning. Noisebridge is also more than a physical space, it’s a community with roots extending around the world. […] We make stuff. So can you.
The definition is in terms of the verbs, not the tools that are used to realise the projects.
I’ve just come across this short introductory video to Noisebridge which I also find presses a lot of my buttons – loving the emphasis on creativity of all sorts: expressed in the space via the craft area, the darkroom, the kitchen, the gas cylinders in the background as Mitch talks, and the massive library! Check out the video below:
Note the importance of community. We always took this as our starting point for fizzPOP, but unfortunately we didn’t manage to get a cohesive group together last time. As you can probably tell, I would absolutely love it if Birmingham could support a Noisebridge equivalent, but ultimately it’s down to the community as to what happens.
Head on over to this recent thread on the fizzPOP discussion group where it seems momentum is gathering around fizzPOP 2.0. If you want to contribute, now would be a good time to do so.
What started as an exploration into my relationship as an artist to a proposed cultural quarter has expanded to also include a significant amount of sustained investigation into witnessing and documenting the change in that urban landscape.
The Google Earth view of the area (with imagery that seems to be from 2007) is already drastically out of date, but it gives a rough idea about the range of contrasting terrain there now.
As well as spending hours walking all the streets in the zone I’ve selected, concentrating on paying attention to the details of the spaces, I’ve been collecting and processing GPS data to use as a measure of how developed the streets are. I will repeat this over the years to come as a way of logging the changes taking place on both macro and micro scales.
Google Earth view of the area I've been investigating
At the bottom left of the image above there is a relatively green area: old factory plots that have now turned to grassy wastelands and the park on the corner at the top of Fazeley Street.
Bartholomew Street, now closed to traffic and without any buildings around it. The bottom right corner shows where my path passes under the railway arches at the corner of Fazeley and New Canal Streets
Here the GPS data is fairly consistent. Water-heavy buddleia bushes overhanging the pavements on closed roads induce a few wobbles and railway viaducts cause momentary loss of signal, but on the whole the open terrain doesn’t interfere much with calculations of position.
Contrast this with the data gathered from around the various Further and Higher Education buildings on and around Fox Street and Grosvenor Street.
Tall buildings closely packed together reflect and block the satellite signal, causing the GPS calculations for position to be very inaccurate.
At one point one of the GPS devices calculated I simultaneously had one hand next to the halls of residence and the other on Digbeth high street opposite the coach station! (About 800 metres away.)
If even a small proportion of any of the variousplans for Eastside are realised we look set to get more lines like this in the future.
I’ve come to refer to those two areas respectively as the Green Zone and the Learning Zone. The third zone in the area is the Rubble Zone – the plots between Millennium Point and the ring road that have been razed with the exception of 3 buildings: Belmont Row Co-op works, the lock keeper’s cottage and the Moby Dick’s pub.
From left to right: Cardigan Street, Gopsal Street, Penn Street and a tiny piece of Belmont Row. Currently mostly rubble.
The presence of all three of these buildings can be seen to affect the GPS traces. The image above hints at Moby Dick’s on Gopsal Street. For now the lines are uniformly short, but stand by for Eastside Locks. [link to pdf of proposed developments]
So there we have it: a snapshot of a part of Birmingham before it changes beyond recognition. Quantitative data gathered over several hours of walking a set pattern of streets whilst paying attention to the details, the changes and the people – I’ll tell you about it on a walk or in a pub sometime. Qualitative data in the form of 19, 264 lines that speak volumes if you know how to listen – probably a limited edition print coming soon.
19,264 seconds of qualitative and quantitative data (Curzon Street, 2010)
I wasn’t expecting to get much of a trace off them, but it turns out that it worked quite well! Here are a few shots of the data I got overlaid onto Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed on your computer you can download the .kml file and have a zoom around for yourself.
Jack Martin and Tocil halls of residence, with a few pauses along the way
Walking up Library Road and then walking alongside the WBS Teaching Centre. Is it the trees making the GPS lines longer, or the bricks?
Walking across the fields on the hill, the lines are much shorter as both modules agree more closely in their calculated positions.
A diversion around the lake
Back to civilisation and once again the scattering effect of the buildings can be seen.
I’m still fascinated by how the quality of the lines are affected by the fabric of the landscape and, as shown by the images above, the walk we did covered several different terrains so the resultant drawing has several different characters in different places.
Until yesterday I’d never seen much more of the campus than the Arts Centre, so I found it very difficult to try and relate where I was to Wood’s map of walkable space (with the buildings left as empty space). I’m really pleased that the GPS logging worked so well and I can now figure out where we went and link that back to Traverse Me.
I also like the little clusters of lines that show where we paused and had little conversations. Now I can link thoughts back to where we were when they bubbled up.
Today I was completely fortuitous in stumbling across Jeremy Wood‘s Traverse Me GPS drawing project at Warwick University and the walk and talk event being run this afternoon.
Detail from Traverse Me
I hit send on the email I had been writing, jumped in the car …and managed to get to the Mead Gallery minutes after the group had departed! Luckily though, I located a “tall man with a beard” just outside and managed to join the walk. It’s safe to say that if I hadn’t have spotted them then, then I would never have found them.
Jeremy’s walk took us behind carparks, through hedges and across fields, revealing both the hidden-away secret places and the huge extent of the land owned by the university.
Having spent the last week or two working on another round of walking Eastside using GPS data to map the extent to which the landscape has been built upon, Wood’s work and the discussion around it was great for making me consider my own work.
A central concern of his project (238 miles walked over 17 days) seems to have been to fill in space; casting a network of lines over that which could be walked. Wood says he “responded to the structure of each location and avoided walking along roads and paths when possible”. The resulting mapdrawing – complete with scale mark, title and signature – is covered in swirls, contour-like lines, pictures and spirals.
The white "tooth" sticking out from the heavier line on the top left of the map corresponds to the copse. The spiral just below it and to the left originates from the highest point - to the left of where I am stood - and spreads out over the fields.
By contrast, the Eastside walks I’m doing are very much dictated by road layout. As previously observed, Birmingham’s regeneration zone is very much defined by the road boundaries around its edges (c.f. Southampton‘s cluster of relevant cultural organisations).
The more recent work I’ve done to document the development in the Curzon Street area is also very road-centric, using them as a natural (man-made) grid by which to, well, traverse the area I’m investigating. Since I’m interested in measuring change, I need a certain amount of consistency so I can walk the same route in the years to come. Changes in my route have to come from changes in the built environment.
It was nice to hear of similarities in Wood’s experience of recording GPS trails to mine. The way you balance confidence as you stride about an area with deference to the possible intrusions you are causing to the people living and working there; the way you can be intent on following a predetermined route, but can savour the contrivances of circumstance that throw you off your course.
I asked Wood about his thoughts on how he felt the act of carrying a GPS receiver legitimised his erratic behaviour whilst out walking. I’m very aware of how in projects of mine such as Sites of Potentiality Guidebooks, Invigilator and Uncertain Eastside the objects I am carrying or wearing greatly add to my feeling that I have a right to behave a little bit strangely…
I may not want to draw a lot of attention to the fact that I’m holding two PDAs in my hands, but I want them to be visible so people know I am Doing An Art Project.
Having recently also been working on the first Uncertain Eastside publication, I was also curious about the need for telling the stories of the things we see and encounter whilst out on our, largely solitary, walks. The traces from the GPS data are all well and good, but I also want people to know about the security guard at the halls of residence who jokingly asked me if I was counting my steps as I veered around outside his office, or the rain-heavy rhododendron bushes that cause particular squiggles on my drawings.
Today walking and talking events are seeming increasingly important to me as a means to transmit the story of the work.
One of the most challenging things has been to edit the 1000+ photos submitted by the Walk and Talk participants down to what is now a mere 84.
There have been some difficult decisions involved in trying to represent nearly 4 miles worth of varying landscape in a succinct collection of images. In very approximate terms we’re talking one photo per 75 metres. Is it possible to capture the essence of a place with so few photos? Well, I hope we have at least provided a few reference points by which the changes that will follow can be gauged.
Layout screenshot - Walk and Talk event photos
I quite often drive on the ring road along the Watery Lane – Dartmouth Circus section of the Eastside perimeter and even in the one year since I started this project several buildings have been demolished and you can see multi-storey carparks going up not far away. Makes me wonder how fast things would have changed had we not have crunched our credit.
Layout screenshot - rear cover
I’m nearly at the point where I can start sending off for proofs and ISBN numbers, so hopefully the publication will soon be ready to be released into the wild.
Having come across Curby/Kerby/Kirby a few times since then, I’m now prepared to concede that it is an actual real life childhood past time.
In fact, I quite fancy trying it.
Banbury Street
Bartholomew Street
For the last three days I’ve been walking around the grid of streets around the Curzon Street area collecting data for a new piece of work. This walk took me along Banbury and Bartholomew Streets (pictured above).
As you can see, both are currently closed to traffic.
As I was walking past yesterday morning, a crane was lifting yet more of the concrete blocks into position at the lower end of Banbury Street. I’ve no idea what the plans are for these two roads or the grassland next to them, but I’ve felt a fondness for them since w i d e o p e n s p a c e [video] and would like to gather people there at least one more time before the diggers move in and we lose this little oasis.
Taste the Game went really well yesterday and I’ve had loads of positive feedback, which is always nice.
Jumping straight in to planning the next one for the 29th though, so here’s a simple slideshow of my photos and video on the basis that it’ll tell you as much as any words I can put together right now will…
A big thank you to everyone to contributed and took part.
My main area of enquiry is centred around interactions between people and place: often using tools and strategies from areas such as pervasive games and physical computing to set up frameworks for exploration.
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