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

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.

Shinagawa Station by mdid on Flickr

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.

Man on bench by Jay Morrison on Flickr

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.

17th Street Plaza opening by Jamison Wieser on Flickr

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.

Chaser Country by Kevan on Flickr

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.

Pecha Kucha presentation coming up…

I’ll be presenting at the Coventry Pecha Kucha night coming up on the 10th of May (tickets available here).

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…

Uncertain Eastside presentation for Performance Fictions symposium

Sadie Plant invited me to contribute to her presentation on ‘psychogeography and the city’ as part of the Performance Fictions symposium held at the Electric Cinema yesterday.

‘Performance Fictions’ is the fourth event in art-writing-research network created by researchers from BCU, Goldsmiths, Reading University and University of the Arts London. Article Press, BCU, will publish the papers and contributions from the various events in Spring 2010, to be distributed by Central Books. The volumes will constitute series one of Article Press’s art-writing-research publications.

After Sadie explored Birmingham’s historical rootlessness and uncertainty of place – its location at and function as, a junction – I gave a 10-minute presentation about the Uncertain Eastside work in progress. Below is a transcript with images.

___

When I graduated from BIAD about 3 years ago, it was to emerge into a lot of talk about plans for a brand new cultural quarter covering a chunk of one side of the city. I was concerned and confused by the apparent desire to suddenly plonk a fully-formed artist-led space into position amongst the warehouses.

Detail from THE ANTI-TALENT ZONE

Detail from THE ANTI-TALENT ZONE

My response was to wipe the streets of the designated area free of their existing names. And to add one.

The politics of regeneration is beyond the scope of today’s presentation, and I have little patience for it anyway, but I want to take the opportunity to use this image to show you how closely the borders of the City Council’s Eastside regeneration area are linked to the major traffic routes in and around the city.

In green, as we go up the left hand side is the ring road, going up, just out of shot to the roundabout where it meets the A38 on its way to spaghetti junction. Coming down via Corporation Street, the pedestrian routes of Hight Street and the Bullring area, and the across Digbeth Deritend back to the ring road. The criss-cross of roads and pathways are again being used to define parts of Birmingham.

In 2006 this was mostly all unknown territory to me. By 2009 it was still mostly unknown territory, but now with small incursions around Digbeth and Curzon Street. When I decided I wanted to return to some of the questions raised by the area’s regeneration, it was apparent that my first step should not to be to research it in an academic manner, and subject myself to all the spin, but to get out there and experience it directly.

Bench on roundabout on Coventry Road

Bench on roundabout on Coventry Road

Construction site with sort-of graffiti

Construction site with sort-of graffiti

Greasy spoon internet café

Greasy spoon internet café

Shops and bus stops under the railway lines

Shops and bus stops under the railway lines

Socks

Socks

Subway rambler

Subway rambler

I’ve spent the last month and a half repeatedly walking around the perimeter that defines Eastside, paying attention to how these spaces are being used at different times and by different groups of people. I’ve also been wrestling with how I might fit into the picture.

I wanted to document the process of walking this line, so on each 90-minute circuit I took with me 2 satnav GPS devices that I have programmed to log my position once every second. Rather than doing a straight-forward trace of my journey though, I was interested to see how the cityscape affected my position as seen by the machines.

GPS drawing from two laps around Eastside

GPS drawing from two laps around Eastside

Detail from previous slide

Detail from previous slide

Each of these lines joins my position as determined by the machine in my left hand to my position as determined by the machine in my right hand. The longer the line, the more they disagree.

Despite what we are led to believe, GPS is actually pretty flaky. All sorts of things can affect its accuracy. There may be 3 rather than 8 satellites overhead at that particular time; my body may be blocking the satellite signal; and large buildings and areas of concrete can bounce the signals around. All these affect the perceived position.

Errors and glitches

Errors and glitches

Errors and glitches

Errors and glitches

Looking at the results from any one walk I can see a whole host of different glitches and errors. To be honest, they’re what make GPS an interesting thing for me to work with.

Composite drawing from 6 laps around Eastside

Composite drawing from 6 laps around Eastside

Through overlaying the traces of several laps, however, you can start to filter out the anomalies … or at least start to read which of them are caused by the fabric of the city-scape.

Here’s the cumulative result after 6 laps…

Stood near the base of the Rotunda

Stood near the base of the Rotunda

This detail is from the area at the base of the rotunda, at the edge of the Bullring shopping centre. The long, haphazard lines caused by the tall, closely-packed buildings.

Ring road

Ring road

By contrast, the comparatively open space of the ring road gives shorter, much more uniform lines, occasionally buffeted around by a large warehouse building.

Ashted Circus

Ashted Circus

Here is Ashted Circus, where I momentarily loose contact with the satellite signals as I go through some underpasses.

The Other Side

The Other Side

Whilst walking with the satnavs I was given glimpses of other sorts of errors – biases towards the car, roads I couldn’t cross, residential areas the other side of seemingly impassable road boundaries.

Beautiful scary

Beautiful scary

Sunken oases inside the rings of roundabouts – beautiful but also possibly harbouring great danger.

However, due to restraints in using the GPS logging, I could only observe these in passing. I had to keep moving at a steady pace. I could speculate, but never investigate.

Participants document a building in Digbeth

Participants document a building in Digbeth

So, last Sunday I invited others to join me for an investigative walk. Nominally following the route around the edge of Eastside, but allowed the freedom to drift from it to explore things that caught our eye.

Walk

Walk

Look

Look

Touch

Touch

Climb

Climb

Dare

Dare

We walked, we explored, we looked at stuff, we touched stuff, we climbed on stuff and we dared to cross to the in-between places.

Blog post on Digbeth is Good, http://digbeth.org/2009/10/a-walk-around-uncertain-eastside/

Blog post on Digbeth is Good, http://digbeth.org/2009/10/a-walk-around-uncertain-eastside/

Pete Ashtons blog post, http://peteashton.com/2009/10/eastside_is_uncertain/

Pete Ashton's blog post, http://peteashton.com/2009/10/eastside_is_uncertain/

People are now starting to post their photos from the day online, and their accounts of what happened are starting to appear on blogs where the stories and viewpoints overlap. We also exchanged stories between us whilst we were walking along the route. In situ. It’s my feeling that we needed the 3.5 hours of walking to get to the point where we could gather around the ‘map’ at the pub and have an in-depth conversation about what it signifies. I find this happens a lot – that you need the group performance before you can get to the meaty discussion.

I guess that in terms of this symposium, we’re talking more about performed narratives, rather than performed fictions per se, but I’m expecting the edges to blur somewhat, especially as we move into the phase where we compile the accompanying publication of thus chapter of the project.

After unfurling some of the stories, we will gather some of the images taken by the participants into a publication with the aim of making a document to record this face of Birmingham before it reinvents itself again.

___

From here, Sadie speculated that this sort of drift along a route defined by roadways, exploring the details, progress logged by satnav devices, might be psychogeography 21st Century style.



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