Jen Southern

I just got comob working on the Nokia N96 borrowed from the mobilities lab.

It seems a bit slower than the iphone, and the zoom of the map and satellite images seem to stop zooming in, but the lines and locations keep going so that I ended up with the locations mismatched (on a different scale) with the map or satellite image. This would be quite a serious issue if we were playing a game with the phones, the ability to zoom in and out to see the whole group or an individual would be quite important in the version of fox and hounds that I’m proposing to play. For other applications, performances and installations it might not matter so much.

I’ve ended up using an O2 pay & go SIM, with an internet bolt on for £7.50 a month, (unlimited internet),  using the MMS settings.

This is the track from Christ Church (where the Macclesfield exhibition will be in June) to the site of a forced landing on 14th May 1942.  The walk is about 7km there and back (4.4 miles).

This is an account of the forced landing from http://www.peakdistrictaircrashes.co.uk

“The aircraft was being used for delivering spares to an unrecorded destination, No.3 A.D. Flt being based at Hawarden, when the pilot became lost in bad weather and decided to force land the aircraft when he ran low on fuel. He landed the aircraft in a field at Lyme Green, reported locally to be close to the Macclesfield Canal, but did not have sufficient space to stop and the aircraft ran into a hedge causing minor damage.”

The silk escape map that I’m making is about navigation, and translating maps to the ground. By leading the audience to this spot to witness the physical geography of a place that once provided the ground for a safe landing, the idea of an escape map becomes tangible, the conditions of landing become real perhaps. The map, the navigation, the crisis and the translation between the material artefact of the map and the plane come together in a crossing of object, history and physical experience, through the act of navigation.

I’m continuing to do mobile blogging while I’m walking in an attempt to put mobile reflection-in-action into practice using easily available tools. The risk is that this blog fills up with short observations and large images, but I think its worth it to experiment with the tools. I also recorded voice memo’s towards the end of the walk. They allow me to think out loud a bit more, as if chatting while walking and the quality of those comments is quite different to the blog posts.

When I was walking yesterday I kept stopping to send blog posts. The terrain was too rough to actually blog while I was walking. I don’t think ‘moblogging’ really means blogging while you’re self-propelled and moving, it really means ‘away from your computer’, so people do it on trains or at conferences or with friends. Looking at what I actually wrote in my posts they are mostly observations of the route that are related to my work: flying, mobility, water, territory, walking etc. They lack reflective writing because it interrupts the experience of walking and perhaps require some thought or description afterwards. What I find interesting about them now is that I can see how the process of walking lent a different perspective to the things I was thinking about, but its implicit in the images rather than explicit in texts.

When I saw the flat balloon in the hollow I was thinking mostly about the crater, I grew up near fields with old grown-over open cast mines and they were exactly this shape. The balloon that had landed there out of the wind just made a focus for the image. But alongside the cloud (in which I could see an aeroplane at the time, but the camera doesn’t capture) the hope and joy of the original balloon, its journey floating over the landscape (imagine a Simon Faithful balloon) and its un-glamorous destination end up being more interesting. And as those imagined flights become part of a series of routes and paths, the motorway, the aircraft, bridleway, packhorse route, footpath, tyre tracks, abandoned cars, mobility is firmly inscribed into the landscape in every post.

I was also using the voice memos app on my iphone to record the things I was thinking about as I was walking and those recordings more accurately reflect what I was thinking about and how the landscape and the act of walking was effecting thought processes. (Strangely they don’t download onto my computer though, and the iphone would only allow me to email or MMS them if they were shorter. It would be easier to move the audio files around if I used my voice recorder but I’m trying not to carry too much kit).

Frifi is an iphone app that allows you to see where friends are and to SMS style chat with them, and find directions to them. We have been working towards adding sms or twitter style chat to our comob application, to allow for co-mobile discussion as well as location tracking within groups. I still think that our linking lines make the group a different thing. Just knowing where someone is with Frifi feels like watching them, but with a connecting line we are together in a kind of social agreement.  I haven’t used this app live with other people, although we could have done with something similar yesterday as 4 of us tried to meet up in central London, but didn’t know where to suggest as a meeting point because we weren’t sure what each other had been doing before.

http://www.frifi.net/

“The one and only phone to phone GPS contact location and free SMS Style chat app you need for the iPhone. See where your contacts are using the FriFi maps, zoom into their location and get directions to where they are. Share your location with your friends and keep up to date with places of interest they have pointed out. Drop your own pins and mark places for your friends to see, along with your own notes for them to read.Priceless for hiking, nights out, keeping tabs on the kids, sudden change of meeting place, work colleagues, festivals… you name it!”