Fermynwoods residency: walking events

This weekend is that of the Corby Walking Festival and as part of my residency I’ve been commissioned to lead (or infiltrate) 3 events.

The first was on Saturday, when we took one of the Possibility Probes for a walk around the area by the Corby Cube – a mixture of town centre, great big architecture and a footpath through some woods.

Not much response from the probe until the swimming baths send it off the scale...

With mighty cold temperatures, squally showers and tuned-to-Birmingham settings that had worked well on our test walk but didn’t seem to be giving us much feedback now, we put up a bit of a fight but then conceded and headed to a cafe area in the Cube to look at the traces and have a good ol’ chat.

Annotated traces gathered on the Corby event - click for larger version

The second event was an 8 mile walk led by rambler David Craddock, for which I made some landscape-reactive sashes.

The weather was kind, there was a good bunch of people – many willing to don sashes – and the recalibrated code gave much better results. More discussion and results to follow, but here are a few images (courtesy of James Steventon, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art) in the meantime…

Mid-way pause and reunion

Concrete canyon, Gretton style

The group (and additions of yellow) make their way through the countryside

view from the top

We’ll be taking the sashes out again today for a 3 mile walk between Fermyn Woods Country Park and Lyveden New Bield.

Settling in to the Fermynwoods residency

I’m a few days into the residency with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art. The downstairs room of the lodge has been transformed into a production line for the landscape-reactive sashes I’m making for the walking festival events on Sunday and Monday.

Saturday’s walk will involve one of the Possibility Probes, so the other day we took it out for it’s first stroll in a rural setting. Still tuned to Birmingham city centre, we were pleasantly surprised at how it reacted nicely to the large trees and bluebell woods!

We also explored around Corby Cube and the town centre with some nice and intriguing reactions there too. Fingers crossed for good weather over the days to come – bring enquiring minds, suitable footwear (we’ll be off-roading it a bit) and warm/dry clothes!

Traces; Walking and Drawing

From the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art website… [source]

GPS traces from a walk in Fermyn Woods

During 2012 we are continuing our exploration of walking and its impact on our understanding of the environment. As part of the Corby Walking Festival 2012, artist Nikki Pugh will be leading walks that allow participants to explore the use of GPS data as a measure of the effect of open terrain, the presence of buildings, and natural phenomena, whilst walking through the landscape to create drawings.

During a residency with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Pugh will be exploring the landscapes of Fermyn Woods, Corby and surrounding area through the lens of locative (GPS) technology. Pugh currently describes her practice as being located at the intersection of people, place, playfulness and technology.

5 May 2012 – from 11.00am until approximately 1pm

Join Pugh for an exploratory walk around the centre of Corby, exploring open space and key architectural highlights from both the steel town’s past and recent developments. Collaborate in navigating an object through the environment as it reacts with movement and the locations it passes through, before sharing the resulting drawing, a digital cartography of the morning’s walk. Departing from outside the Corby Cube, George Street, Corby, NN17 1QG.

Parking is available outside Corby Cube.

6 May 2012 – from 9.30am

Pugh will join rambler David Craddock for a leisurely walk via the Brookfield Plantation and Rockingham. Participate in the walk wearing a responsive sash making present an intimate connection between walking and the effect of the landscape on global positioning systems. The approximately 8 mile route is part urban and part rural, departing from Gretton Village Hall, Kirby Road, Gretton, NN17 3DB.

Limited free parking is available outside the Village Hall.

7 May 2012 – from 2.00pm

Pugh will lead participants over a 3 mile route from Fermyn Woods Country Park to Lyveden New Bield, previously explored through our Encounters programme. The walk will encompass dense forest, open fields and along the historic Lyveden Way to Lyveden New Bield and it’s Elizabethan garden. Wearing Pugh’s specially designed responsive sashes, experience the walk through the lens of GPS technology, before sharing the resulting drawing.

Departing from Skylark Café, Fermyn Woods Country Park, Lyveden Road, Brigstock, Kettering NN14 3HS. A minibus will be available to take participants who wish back to Fermyn Woods Country Park.

Parking is available at both Fermyn Woods Country Park and Lyveden New Bield.

Additional Information

All walks are free and do not require advance booking. Please arrive at least 15 minutes before the walk departs for registration and to receive a briefing on the walk ahead.

For the complete Corby Walking Festival 2012 programme please visit www.corbywalkingfestival.org.uk

Walking is… the principal means by which someone encountering a different neighbourhood or foreign landscape gets under its skin or gets to know the social, cultural and physical terrain. Moving within different environments allows us to detect properties of sameness and difference and therefore form a comparative perspective and better understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world.

Detours and Puzzles in the Land of the Living, Andrew Irving, University of Manchester

Exhibition of Colony-related work at Phoenix Square

Following on from the residency I recently did at the Phoenix Square digital media centre in Leicester, traces of my work are now being exhibited in their public spaces around the foyer and café.

I understand there’s a short gap over this weekend to make way for an animation festival, but other than that my work runs through until Friday the 30th of March.

Phoenix playtesting sessions #2 & #3

Due to low turn-outs, these sessions were more testing than play, however we still had some very big smiles!

By Thursday I’d made some units that communicated with each other via XBee radios. They remain happy whilst still in range, but once separated you have a short grace period in which to link up again. After that an alarm goes off.

For the first of the two playtesting sessions it was the first time the units had been taken outside, so we wanted to get a feel for what sort of maximum range they have. Not until after having experimented with corridors and lifts, first.

Faraday Cage: third floor.

Maplin’s carpark wasn’t big enough, so we moved on to the ring road and then the St George’s retail park. You can just make out the person carrying the other unit in the distance…

Range-testing in the biggest carpark we could find...

For the last session we headed into the city centre and experimented with corners, pillars and mezzanines in various streets, theatres, shopping centres and multistorey carparks. I’m afraid I was so engrossed in what we were doing that I totally forgot to take any photos!

Next step is to expand this out to a group and start working with range information to see how that affects the coalescence of a group moving through the city.

Phoenix playtesting session #1

I’m now approaching the half-way stage of my residency at Phoenix Square, however the last 2 days have been beset by various tech and mech crises so it feels like I’m only just getting started!

Last night was the first of my playtesting sessions in which members of the public have signed up to come along and get hands-on with whatever I’ve made.

Due to the slow start I hadn’t got the radio communication up and running, so we did a few experiments using the old faithful sonar goggles instead. After a gentle start in the empty room next door, we headed down to the public space of the cafe/foyer/cinema area.

Having now had their appetite well and truly whetted, my enthusiastic volunteers then wanted to use the goggles out on the streets!

We tried a range of locations and a range of challenges (including bollard slalom and fountain circumnavigation). This was the first time the goggles had been used in such an uncontrolled environment and I was very impressed as the guys’ willingness to try stuff out. As they said, the bar has now been set very high for the next time they’re used!

Corridor Challenge. The challenge being to not end up in either the cinema or the ladies loos!

Using the goggles to navigate from one side of the market to the other.

The video above shows a snippet from an experiment in moving together as a group: the lead person is using their sonar to navigate from one side of the square to the other, but the person behind has their sonar switched off, so they have to listen to the lead’s bleeps in order to be able to follow them.

My photos and video from the session are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157629115638094/detail/

Residency at Phoenix Square, Leicester – participants wanted

23/02/2012: Updated with this eventbrite link.

Next week I’ll be the third and final resident at Phoenix Square in the series that started with Engagement Party and The Institute for Boundary Interactions.

My blurb has yet to make its way onto the website, so here’s the skinny:

Over the next few months, a range of artists will be living, working and creating brand new artworks at Phoenix Square, taking inspiration from this unique cultural building and its surroundings…

Nikki Pugh is evolving technological creatures that affect the way you navigate the cityscape.

Nikki’s project ‘Colony‘ is an ongoing series of experiments in which she is developing a group of creatures that respond in real time to the landscape through which they are being carried.

Having already built prototypes that vibrate differently depending on whether they are in open or confined spaces, Nikki will be using radio communication and biofeedback to investigate aspects of flocking and interconnectedness.

Stay tuned for opportunities to become part of the colony and contribute to the play-testing in and around Phoenix Square.

Nikki Pugh is an artist who investigates issues around interaction: how we interact with spaces and landscapes; how we interact with each other; and how we interact with objects. Her practice is located somewhere in the intersection of people, place, playfulness and technology.

Basically the plan is to do a series of experiments involving radio communication and, I think, galvanic skin response readings. You probably know enough about me by now to know that this will mean going out into the streets and trying stuff out to see what happens.

Since I’m particularly interested in flocking and interconnectedness for this residency, that also means I’ll be needing to muster small groups of volunteers in order to try stuff out and see what happens.

If you’re up for spending some time next week exploring the streets of Leicester whilst carrying a small radio unit and with a few sensors attached to your fingers, you can sign up at this eventbrite page.

Thanks!

one thing leads to another

I’ve just started a 2-week residency with fizzPOP at independent artist studios The Lombard Method.

Over the bank holiday weekend we’ve been running a project – open to the public – to try and cobble together a Heath Robinson style chain reaction contraption to fill one of the studio spaces. Cardboard, gaffa tape, cake and random strokes of genius being the main ingredients.

For the main chunk of the residency I have a few projects that I am intending to work on. These include a second-by-second walk-through of the GPS data from Uncertain Eastside, building a Tannerin style instrument and circuit-bending a butterfly.

I fully expect that I might end up doing something completely different though!

chain reaction from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Almost Perfect: the redux

Andrew pointed out that the video from the Almost Perfect residency I was a part of last year has made its way onto YouTube:

Hopefully this will shed a little light on the “what is locative media?” question for some of you!

Almost Perfect; almost possible

As I outlined in yesterday’s post, Emergent Game is going great guns at the moment with us going to Japan to do workshops as part of Dislocate08 and alongside project space hanare. These then feed into a weekend of intercontinental play and exploration as part of igfest.

And that’s only the stuff that’s happening next month…

Meanwhile, I’ve been approached by the Banff New Media Institute, Canada to apply for their Almost Perfect co-production residency that runs throughout November.

Apart from the obvious excitement of potentially being able to develop work at the Banff Centre, I’m regarding this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the timing within the evolution of the Emergent Game series being spot-on and the peer advisers guiding the residency being incredibly relevant to my practice.

I’ve submitted a proposal to develop prototype hardware/software that can be placed in the game area that allows your average mobile phone to start interfacing with protocols such as Twitter, Flickr and GPS.

Our experience with Emergent Game so far has shown us a) that it’s a great framework for motivating groups of people to interact creatively but also that b) the extent to which people can use methods of engagement that are technically possible are limited by what features are available with their mobile phone. In the first iteration of Emergent Game we noticed a completely different style of play from a Ludens with an iPhone compared to the majority of participants using older, mid-range phones.

Using GPS and being able to access the internet whilst on the move are towards one end of spectrum that even has something like MMS at the other. Picture messaging may be possible, but cost often makes it prohibitively expensive. We need to overcome some of these hurdles in order to open up the accessibility and make Emergent Game more viable for larger-scale projects.

Before I can get to tackling these projects though, there’s another hurdle to get over: finding the funding to get me to Canada.

Coming so soon after the activities in Japan (I’ll be there for 4 weeks in total) it’s not going to be possible for me to self-fund the trip to Banff. I estimate I need about £3000 to cover airfare, accommodation, food etc.

Arts Council have generously contributed to the funding of mine and Ana’s work in Japan, so for various, entirely understandable reasons they’re reluctant for me to simply put in another application to them. However, we’ve negotiated that I can put in a second application, but this could really only be for a maximum of half of the total budget and I need to match that with cash contributions from elsewhere (NB cash rather than support in kind).

The timing is incredibly tight, so logistically I need to submit any Arts Council application by the start of next week. That means I also need some ideas of where to get the match funding over the next few days.

So, this is a crowd-sourcing post: has anyone any suggestions for sourcing about £1500?