Walk with landscape-reactive sashes: Gretton, Brookfield Plantation and Rockingham

A collation of data, documentation and discussion for participants of the walk around Gretton, the Brookfield Plantation and Rockingham that took place on the 6th of May…

Walk leader David Craddock from the Ramblers was kind enough to let us infiltrate his 8 mile walk with the landscape-reactive sashes.

This was the first outing for the sashes and also the first time I had used my differential GPS set-up in a rural landscape, so quite a step into the unknown…

So many people had volunteered to wear sashes that there was none for me to wear, so my feedback on how things were working was mostly done by quizzing people as we walked or listening carefully to try and hear the buzzes!

Here is a screenshot of my traces from the morning overlaid onto Google Earth.

It was a long route, so the lines don’t really show up at this level of zoom, except for the ‘major incidents’…

Starting clockwise from the top, the first spray of lines is fairly apt, as this marks the spot where one of my GPS modules fell off! It was some time before I noticed, and a while after that before, retracing our steps, we eventually found it submerged in a muddly puddle. Many, many thanks to the lady (Karen?) who came back with me to help me look. She also donated some tissue for the clean-up and, miraculously, a few minutes later the module was dried off, plugged in and working again. Phew!

My lines disappear as we enter the Rockingham Plantation; not due to interference, but the slightly more mundane reason of the battery running out! Although this was spotted pretty quickly, it was some time before the logging commenced again and, since we were still hot-footing it to try and catch up with the rest of the group, we covered quite a lot of ground in that interval.

The sight below was a very welcome one and made that much sweeter by the flecks of yellow from the sashes and the cries announcing that they had suddenly resumed buzzing as I came back into range!

The above point also marked the transition of the walk from rural to urban landscape as our route skirted along the edge of industrial parks on the outskirts of Corby. If you click through to the original – and slightly larger – image you can just about make out that at this point the lines get a bit longer.

Each line represents where my two GPS modules think they are at a moment in time – one end of the line is one module, the other end the other module. Therefore, the more they disagree, the longer the line is.

Out in the open, the modules get a pretty much direct line-of-sight connection to the signals coming from the satellites – the modules calculate similar positions and the lines are very short. (The sashes would have given a few short, weak buzzes.)

As we make our way through the large warehouses and factories, however, the GPS signals are more likely to reach the modules by indirect routes, bouncing off the buildings en route. The extra amount of time this takes affects the calculations of position. My lines get longer and your buzzes get more energetic.

As our route bends around to the left, something happens to cause one of my modules to lose its fix altogether. Here one end of the lines are fixed to a single point, whilst the other ends follow the route we walked. This happens again as we turn off the road onto the Jurassic Way (I think I changed batteries here.)

So, an interesting set of lines that tell a story, although it wasn’t what I set out to find out about! The lines from Charlotte’s logging device tell that particular story a lot better. Below are some excerpts (click on the images to see the original on Flickr), or you can download the .kml files, open them in Google Earth and have a good ol’ poke around. Part 1, Part 2.

Overview of the route taken (no major incidents!)

Smaller lines get bigger as the group enters the dense woodland of the plantation

Close-up of the lines produced when walking through the plantation - here it's obvious that the GPS modules think they're much further apart than they really are

The large buildings of the industrial units also produce long lines

Clusters of longer lines show where the group paused under trees to take turns crossing the stiles

The tunnel under the railway track

Leaving and entering Gretton village at both ends of the walk

So, some nice results there – both expected and unexpected!

I really liked how the group looked wearing their sashes and the resulting traces tell some interesting stories about the physicality of the landscape(s) we moved through.

You can try the GPS tag for more blog posts I’ve written relating to my work with GPS around the world, and the full set of my photos from this walk is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157629978908541/with/7002887160/. Edited highlights here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157629635144548/

Thanks to everyone who took part and to David for leading the walk.

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.

Still Walking festival, coming to Birmingham soon!

Last year artist/historian/typographer/tourguide Ben Waddington came to me with an invitation to be his partner in crime for making something rather exciting happening…

Ben Waddington makes you look up.

Frustrated at the lack of interesting walking tours (in a city that should really be able to do better), and at the lack of visibility for the stuff that is going on, Ben had resolved to do something about it and organise a festival of walking.

After sounding out various artists, historians, architects and enthusiasts, getting a hugely positive response from loads of people keen to share their perspectives of Birmingham, the result was inevitable and Still Walking was born.

Still Walking (a pilot festival for what we hope will be a regular annual celebration of all that walking is and might be) will take place from the 15th March – 1st April later this year. For those of you who like your Interesting Things, that’s sandwiched cosily between the Flatpack film festival and the Fierce festival of live-art-and-things-that-are-a-bit-difficult-to-categorise, both of which we’re partnering with to bring you a great big chunk of amazinteresting this Spring!

We’re awaiting funding decisions before we can finalise the programme and unleash a full website on you but, whatever the outcome, there will be a selection of guided tours, expeditions, instigations and processions offering you the opportunity to see Birmingham in a fresh light.

Our provisional programme spans film, TV, health, history, art, science, fact and fiction. What more do you want?!

Oh, ok then, expect an afternoon of lurve, too…

It’s going to be ace.

We have a holding page up at http://www.stillwalking.org/ where you can sign up to one or both of the mailing lists; Ben’s on the other end of the @StillWalkers Twitter, ready to talk the walk; and there’s a StillWalkers Flickr Group that we’d like to fill with walking goodness…

You’re cordially invited to plug yourself into any or all of those channels and to join us in becoming Still Walkers.

Whilst we’re waiting to be able to announce the programme, we’d love to hear from you if you’d like to volunteer for the upcoming festival or to offer an event for next year’s shindig. We’re also asking which Brum celebrities you’d like to see leading a guided tour of Birmingham.

In the meantime, spread the word: Still Walking is coming soon!

Potato

On making things

I came across this short documentary this morning:

We Make Things. from Ryan Varga on Vimeo.

Here are my resonant points:

• Technology as the tools we use to communicate with other people.
• Making technology accessible is: looking at something, knowing it, understanding it, taking it apart, putting it back together, remaking something new.
• Understanding the technology as having come from somewhere: as having an origin, as being made.
• I do a lot of work with technology, but I’m not actually interested in technology – I’m interested in people.
• Technologies of various kinds have the power to change our relationship to the world, to other people.
• Not having to allocate technology to an expert. Community is the biggest thing that’s motivating. The tools themselves are boring.
• Development practice in some ways is as meaningful politically as protest and voting.
• The maker movement is portrayed as something that’s new, but it’s not: it’s a return to knowing how things work.
• We’ve been through this era where things got kind of abstracted and sealed off, where we weren’t looking at them. [The technology inside things.]
• It’s very hard for people to connect with a mentor – with a master, if you will – and the information share from generation to generation …we’ve let technology get in between that.
• The separation of language and action. When we describe something linguistically, it’s very easy for us to form what that thing is and it doesn’t necessarily resist us very much. When we make something, the thing we make doesn’t always do what we want it to do.
• When we’re doing critical making we’re not doing craft. We use making, not to come up with some kind of object for display, and not to come up with some kind of product to be sold, but as one way of guiding a shared experience. So we make together, and we think together, and we talk together…
• The MakerBot is something that’s like, even though it’s digital, it’s kind of pulling us back to that to that time before the Industrial Revolution where people truly took time to figure out how things were made and what they were made from.
• Objects with no traces of their production process are the wrong goal.We need to figure out ways to see the traces.
• The great revolution: it’s not going to be people actually doing, it’s going to be that people understand what people that do, do

Those ideas around traces of the making process and understanding the origins of technology were in my head as I walked around Eastside this afternoon collecting data for Uncertain Eastside.

It’s important to the work, and to me, that the two GPS units are carried around the city by hand, and that I push myself physically to do this (I do two circuits back-to-back, 7 and a bit miles). That those screens of numbers, of data, have an origin in human toil.

Disintegrating shoes (after a day gathering data around Nottingham)

update: And then, as if to prove the point, I processed the data from the day’s walking and got this, so I’ll have to do it again:

:( That's 7.32 miles I'll be walking again next week, then... #badGPSday

19,264 seconds of qualitative and quantitative data (Curzon Street, 2010)

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.

Last year my focus was on the perimeter of Birmingham City Council’s regeneration area. Since walking and gathering the GPS data for Uncertain Eastside and organising the Walk and Talk event (in which we gathered lots of visual and anecdotal data) I’ve been increasingly aware of buildings going up and coming down in the area around Curzon Street and Millennium Point.

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 various plans 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)

The rain eased.

Google Earth view of the first 3 circuits of the area around Curzon Street

Poised. Waiting for the rain to ease.

The making of Location Aware

Last Friday I was in Nottingham making a new piece of work as part of the Territorial Play event organised by Trampoline.

Using the same dual-GPS process as for Uncertain Eastside, I selected a route that took me through a variety of different urban environments including narrow streets, open wasteland, alongside large buildings and around the foot of the castle.

Wasteland with desire lines

Each circuit of the route (2.2 miles) took approximately 45 minutes to complete and started and finished at the Broadway Media Centre where the event was hosted.

We had a ‘project room’ that we were using as a base for various tech + mapping activities. After each circuit I returned here, processed the data and turned it into a .pdf file that my glamorous assistant Russell would take to the printers whilst I set out walking again.

By the time I returned there would be a new print put up on the wall combining all the traces from all the previous walks.

Cumulative prints of the GPS traces

I only had time for 3 circuits, but my shoes seemed to think that was plenty.

I’m really pleased with the results and had some great feedback and conversations with the other people at the event.

To share a little something of the resultant drawing – and how it relates to the landscape – I’ve added some details from the drawing to the Google Map of my route. Click on the yellow placemarkers to see the image and read the associated text.

Overview of the final route

Detail from the resultant drawing referenced to the part of the route it came from.

So, head on over to the map: zoom in, zoom out, change views, click on things and have an explore!

Walking Route for Location Aware

I’m currently working on the route I will walk for my piece Location Aware at this Friday’s Territorial Play platform event in Nottingham.

The problem is, I don’t know Nottingham, so I’m crowd-sourcing some input on a route I’ve put together from Google Maps.

If you know Nottingham at all, then I’d be grateful for any feedback on this route (larger version here, or click though for zoom-able version on Google Maps):

My first proposed walking route - what do you think?

I’m looking for the following qualities in the final route:

• Safe for me to walk with a PDA visible in each hand.
• Total walking length of about 45 mins (I think the current one is about an hour).
• Passing through a range of different built environments and open spaces.
• Starting and finishing at the Broadway Media Centre.
• Some interesting places to see on the way. Several times during the course of the day!

I’ll be going to Nottingham on Thursday afternoon and will hopefully get a chance to investigate the route ahead of the first scheduled walk at 11am on Friday.

Prior to that though, if you can suggest any changes to make the route safer, more interesting or maybe just different, then I’d love to hear from you!