Landscape-reactive sashes

Supported by the current residency with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art I developed these sashes to further explore ideas of group identity and interconnectedness. This follows on from the recent residency with Phoenix Square and feeds in to the ongoing series of research projects relating to Colony.

The basic principle was to have a group of people all linked visually through the wearing of the sashes, but also connected through a network formed by radio transceivers built into the sashes.

One member of the group also wears a microcontroller unit that analyses discrepancies in GPS data and broadcasts instructions to the sashes to vibrate differently in accordance with the results. In this way, everyone who accepts the invitation to become a member of the group is able to feel what the broadcaster senses.

Broadcast unit with GPS modules, data logger and XBee radio for transmitting to the sashes

Sashes and sash innards - ATtiny85 microcontrollers, XBee radios and pager motors

The use of coloured armbands to signify the wearer to be a member of (or outcast from) a particular group is something we humans have been doing for a long, long time. Some research into the subject quickly seemed to suggest that there wasn’t any colour that didn’t have a loaded history so I chose to reclaim my yellow on the grounds that it did what I wanted it to do.

The yellow of the sashes makes the group visible as they move through the landscape. This weekend we’ve mostly been moving through and around fields of rapeseed.

In this context of distributed senses, I’m also interested in a reference to the armband worn in Germany and Austria to signify visual impairment:

Those dots could very easily be modified into a network diagram, right?

~~~

So, for the last few days I’ve been inviting people to walk with me as part of a group.

You can wear the sash in any way that seems appropriate to you – on your arm, on your wrist, around your tummy, over your shoulder, around your leg… I impose a few restrictions; mostly just that the radios are on the top and the vibration motors are near your skin. It’s nice if the yellow fabric is visible, but keeping the electronics dry takes precedence, so this weekend quite a few were worn under waterproofs!

Together we have been learning about what restrictions the system puts on us: how far radio waves travel; how radio waves do not go around particular corners/bends; how long batteries last for etc

Thanks to everyone who joined in and took part.

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.

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

Initial results from the Chin Up Chapeau

Having made a hat to measure my posture as I walk around different parts of the city, I’ve spent the last few days testing it and getting a feel for what sort of results it produces.

Diagram showing position, direction I'm facing and the angle of my head. Click for a much larger version...

Pretty much exactly as I was expecting really, which is probably a good reason to avoid drawing any sweeping conclusions from it – at least until I’ve got to the stage where I collect data without being aware that I’m doing so…

On the plus side, it does reveal lots of unexpected things – posing yet more questions in the process – and that, I believe, is the sign of a good tool!

For these renderings, green represents a neutral head position, with the pointer getting redder as my gaze is lowered. Here are some noticings:

The lower, horizontal section shows me walking along a fairly busy road: eyes front, head direction and angle reasonably constant. The upper section is along a footpath next to a river: my interest is drawn in all sorts of directions and this is shown by the inconsistency in pointer direction and colour

Close-up of a high interest area - head angle changes a lot, as does the direction I'm facing

Head angle decreases slowly as I approach the High Street, but returns to a neutral position a lot quicker as I leave it behind me

High Street Mode gets switched off as soon as I go into the Post Office, on another day it fades slowly as I walk away.

It’s becoming apparent that I need to include some sort of calibration so that I can more reasonably compare tracks from different walks. Currently, differences in how I’m wearing the hat are too easily read as differences in head angle when I put all the traces on the same diagram.

I’ve also expanded the arduino code so that I log date, time, latitude, longitude, altitude, course, speed, bearing, pitch and roll. I think there are some very interesting potential correlations to investigate (for example: when my head angle decreases, do I also walk faster?) and, whilst I may not be investigating them right now, I want to make sure I’ve got the data when I do!

Introducing the Chin Up Chapeau

[or the Shin Up Shapeau. Or the Chin Up Chap! Oh!]

The Chin Up Chapeau

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my posture changes in relation to whereabouts I am as I walk around Birmingham.

As I approach what I perceive to be high risk areas I believe I adopt a significantly more defensive stance: lowering my gaze and stooping slightly. Of course, there are hunches and there are hunches…

I made the Chin Up Chapeau to measure the angle of my head and log it along with locational data so I can see exactly how my posture relates to space. Do I really stoop, or is it, y’know, all in my head? Where are the danger zones? Are the boundaries clearly defined?

The Chin Up Chapeau sports a gps receiver [EM 406a], a tilt-compensated compass[CMPS10], a logging device [OpenLog] and an arduino clone microcontroller [RBBB] along with a few other accoutrements like a soft switch and an indicator LED.

There are still a few niceties to be sorted out, but here’s a visualisation of a quick walk last night:

Head angle, bearing, location ...and a loaf of bread from the Co-op

I’m going to log data as I walk around the city, but I’m very aware of how easy it would be to ‘fake’ the outcomes to match what I think they should be.

Or perhaps I’ll be concious that I’m watching myself and instead make an effort to keep my chin up at all times…

At the very least I now have an electrically heated hat to keep me cosy!

Haunt this city

Hannah Nicklin speaking eloquently and passionately about remaking the city; ubiquity; not wanting to live in a world where there is such a thing as a girls’ drink; magical realism; putting bodies at the centre; the need for art to use technology as material, rather than as tool; and cabbages.

http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2011/07/imagining-better-cities/
http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2011/07/tedxyork/
http://npugh.co.uk/blog/19264_seconds/
http://npugh.co.uk/tag/colony/

Colony Prototyping #2

Thursday came and saw us doing the second round of user-testing for Colony as part of the Platinum showcase.

We walked, stood in smelly corners, manoeuvred in and out of fortified alleyways, got shouted at from cars and stared at from a variety of directions.

It was pretty great.

Moving on from the prototypes I had in March that simply vibrated at random, these prototypes were now loaded with code that made them responsive to their surroundings. Our task for the evening was to find out what that meant when you put that mathematical analysis of data a) into the hands of people and b) in to the streets.

The first group of participants set out to find out how all this works.

Another development since the initial testing was that this time there were two organisms. We’re getting incrementally closer to finding out what it might be like to have that colony of them.

The protoshape I used in March was a “small human sized” pear/water-drop/fish/swaddled baby kind of thing. This had seemed to be an ideal blank canvas upon which to project empathy and from which to project emotions and desires.

Grappling with the over-sized prototype (photo: Pete Ashton)

After a bit of a false start the weekend before, where I had made one that was too darn big, I remade it a lot smaller. And therefore a lot more huggable.

For the second of the two organisms I wanted to try something different, so I added an awkward limb/tentacle thing. Whereas with the drop-shaped blob the feedback vibration motors were very strategically placed along anticipated contact areas with the carrier’s body, the plan for this one was to make something less intuitive to hold and to see how people dealt with it.

A pause at the crossroads

Sash and shoulder; lock and load

Ant probes the streets of Highgate/Digbeth

JV goes for the torso wrap

The photos above show a few of the many solutions people came up with: headwear, neckwear, waistwear and gripped in a variety of different manners. It seemed to me that people were much more inclined to experiment with different ways of holding this creature, whereas with the other … well, this next photo sums up the different modes of interaction very well, I feel:

One blob gets a hug, whilst the other is borne down the street atop of a head

That's not to say that the baby-shape didn't get experimented with too...

A few next steps were identified over the course of the evening:

• People like data. I need data:
  Of some urgency is the need to log the changes in the data as the blobs are carried around. This is very important in terms of me being able to learn more about how this system works and how to tailor the different reactive responses, but people were also asking me a lot if they’d be able to see the traces of their walks.
• Reactive responses:
  There’s a lot of experimenting to be done in order to devise the vocabulary of vibrations (and possibly other responses) that somehow convey a sense of rising distress as the creatures are carried through environments in which they are uncomfortable.
• Reactive responses:
  With the current (no pun intended) set-up I’m limited to having a maximum of 2 vibrating pager motors switched on at any one time. Any more than this and there’s not enough power to drive them and nothing happens – I need to power the motors separately to the arduinos dealing with the data, but still have them controlled by the microcontrollers. I have been pointed towards Darlington transistors.
• Shapes:
  I need to try more of them. More tentacles? Bigger? Smaller? Fatter? Flatter?

Ashley gets his first buzz as he begins his journey with new companion

As well as a selection of interesting interactions with some of the few other people on the streets at that time, I was very pleased at the way the colony organisms provided an impetus for the testers to interact with their surroundings. Ultimately, this is what the project’s all about.

I've no idea what they're talking about, but I'd like to think it's a discussion about the architectural qualities of the local urban environment :)

A reassuring pat on the back for an organism unhappy to find itself in a narrow alleyway with no clear view of the sky

A corner not normally stood in

Not only not enough sky, but a hefty amount of barbed wire between it and you - no wonder they're not happy

A few moments of paying attention to a rollershutter alcove

Many thanks to everyone who helped get the prototypes working in a technical sense, and to everyone who experimented with and offered feedback on how they worked in a practical sense. More photos can be found in this Flickr set.

Platinum at The Edge

Myself and the other artists from the current Platinum cohort will be presenting our various works in progress at a public event to be held at The Edge on the evening of Thursday 2nd of June.

The artists involved come from a diverse range of backgrounds, and the work on show will range from performance through to endurance; presentation through to exploration.

Rob Jones: My Piece

An exploration into personal fears. This work will involve sharing a series of experiences.

Nikki Pugh: Prototypes for Colony

A playful device that aims to gently nudge and augment people’s perceptions of the urban landscape.

Aleks Wojtulewicz: fr36ze

An exploration of the stimulatory effects of adrenaline. The physical act is militaristic.

Sarah Farmer: Cultural Amnesia: what we lost in the fire

A research-led investigation of the cultural history of the arts in Birmingham from the perspective of recent graduates.

Lucy Nicholls: In Preparation for Death

Researching the commodification of the ritual of funeral, while exploring death within its wider social and cultural meaning.

Mark Essen: Club Hot Zeus; BAD MUSIC

John Napier and CLUB HOT ZEUS present BAD MUSIC.

The first prototypes being tested around Digbeth. This time they'll vibrate in response to their surroundings!

I aim to have two prototype organisms there as part of the development of my work in progress Colony. I’ll give a short introductory presentation and there will be a limited number of slots available for you to take the prototypes out for an exploratory walk around the streets of Cheapside.

Do come along if you’re in the area. Free entry; cash bar; FaceBook event.

Making the Colony prototypes landscape aware

Another compilation of Tweets.

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.

WE ARE THE SPLACISTS!

A year ago Paul Conneally contacted me voicing his dislike of our recent work being labelled as “psychogeography” and “situationist”; for these are terms that are left-overs from the 70s.

He invited me to join him in Splacism: “a new movement a new set of ideologies […] with manifestos and the like – all still to be written including the definitions describing the movement”.

~~~

Last Tuesday I gathered people from different disciplines around me to give feedback on a newly-started project. After bemoaning the perceived lack of a peer group to one group of guests, the response was that I should celebrate my unique position between disciplines and become my own movement.

Later conversation rather suggested that one Hannah Nicklin identified with that too.

~~~

It wasn’t until later that evening that I remembered I already had my own movement – technosplacism as a subset of splacism.

24 hours later Hannah and I were brainstorming a manifesto.

~~~

WE ARE THE SPLACISTS

We will own this city.
We will take it back.
We will link and shift.
We will affect and be affected.
We will look, and be seen.
We will expose and re-see.
We will glory in the moment, the collage, the marking and then passing on.
We reject the beginning, middle and end.
We reject your shopping centre, your pavement, your cultural quarter.
We will build our own constructs.
We will build our own bridges.
We will find the edges and push them.
We will fail spectacularly, vitally, elegantly.
We will span.
We will look up, down, under and behind.
We will leap.
We will invite others to do these things too.
We will make exchanges.
We will make adventures.
We will make beautiful moments.
We will reveal the ugly.
We will hold your hand.
We will whisper in your ear ‘let go’.
We will run, skip and jump.
We will be motionless.
We might dance.
We will dream.
We will be generous, but we may subtle about it, too.
We will reclaim the city, not for you, but with you.
We are you.

WE ARE ALSO THE TECHNOLSPLACISTS

We will learn how to use the tools that make the things we want to happen happen.
We will help others learn wherever we can.
We will construct our manifesto – collaboratively – online, because the Internet is also a space :)
We will shift between space, online and off, taking on the form and the arena that suits us best.
We will bodily augment the layers of virtual space, story, marketing, capitalism, that exist in the city, with our own stories.
We will hold the data-harvesting done in the city in the name of ‘games’ (foursquare, loyalty cards) accountable.
We will find our own energy sources.
We will learn how to flex the central nervous system of the city – the data streams in its weather detectors, CCTV, red light cameras – for our own aims.
We will release all that we can via creative commons, so that they can be reclaimed, remixed, re-purposed.
We will cut, and we will paste.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.”
We will pervade.
We will not be technosplacist when being splacist will suffice.
We will never underestimate the power of gaffa/electrical/masking tape
We will be artful. We will be skillful. We will fail usefully.

~~~

I don’t know if this is the Splacism Paul had in mind all that time ago – I’m not even 100% sure if this is the Splacism I have in mind now – but it’s a mighty fine start and writing the manifesto was a very interesting process.

We’ll let them sit for a while and see what they evolve into. As Paul said: “let [the words] become themselves and more…”