Jen Southern

I went to see the Decode and Quilts exhibitions at the V&A yesterday. I was really disappointed by the Decode exhibition of digital design. The most positive thing about it was that it was showing digital, interactive and networked works in a major museum space, and its three themes of CODE, NETWORK and INTERACTION made the exhibition very accessible. But where was the content? Even the social media works felt devoid of social impact. The works that were chosen made digital design look like digital wallpaper and mirrors most of the time. At times I was reminded of seeing a video camera linked up to a monitor in a TV shop window when I was a kid – we could have played in front of them for hours, with the novelty of seeing ourselves in real time on a screen. There were four pieces in this exhibition that did almost exactly that, but with different technologies and at different speeds. To me, none of them were as interesting as Bruce Nauman’s 1970′s video work ‘Live-Taped video corridor’. It reminded me of the best of our undergraduate degree work for the BA Multimedia Design course at Huddersfield, although of course some of their work was inspired and influenced by some of the older works in this exhibition. A good exhibition for introducing techniques of digital design, but disappointing if expecting a reflection on the current state of digital design.

Then on to the Quilts exhibition, still thinking about code, network and interaction, and immediately Ele Carpenter and Open Source Embroidery came to mind (a great project in which the shared ethos of open source software and embroidery are brought together).  The code of the complex patterns handed down from person to person through patchwork and quilting patterns, each adapted and developed by subsequent stitchers. These networks evolving through design are also reflected in the communal production process and the social use of quilts as objects passed down between generations. And the codes really are complex, the patterns of tiny pieces in traditional patterns that evolve over time. For obvious reasons a favourite of mine was the Mariners Compass quilt design and a sampler made by 10 year old Ann Isabella Reader in 1800, “Silk satin ground with a design showing a map of England and Wales, with the counties outlined and labelled in stitch. Embroidered in silk in running, outline, split, stem satin and long and short stitch.” (from V&A collections). Each county stitched around with at least 4 silk threads, for her eduction in needlework and geography, an interesting link for me to other textile maps.

In the quilts exhibition code, network and interaction also became social actions, political commentary, historical record, tactile experience and adaption through everyday use. What was disappointing about Decode was there in abundance in the quilts, and is there in other digital work, just not the ones exhibited here.

One of the best contemporary works in the Quilts exhibition was Jennifer Vickers work ‘The Presence of Absence’ (as described here) a quilt made of paper with a square of blank newsprint for each person who has died in the second Iraq war.

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!”

An astronaut is tweeting from space, taking photographs of the earth and posting them live.

http://twitter.com/Astro_Soichi

The captions on photos initially suggested that he is trying to replicate the clear vision of google  “the first time London was not covered with cloud”, and there is always a tension between this clarity and his individual perspective from space, laced with clouds and at angles we don’t recognise from maps and images that adhere to north as top of image.   There is a dialogue between him and other twitter users ordinary things. The comments the images get are often mundane, ‘amazing photo’ ‘please photograph my city’ ‘awesome’, however occasionally an image will provoke speculation on pollution in a river, suggesting that seeing things from above can reveal wider social or environmental conditions.

Soichi also describes his tasks on board the space station. Comments like  ‘time for dinner at last’ put these images and their scale into perspective with everyday life and the ordinary. The liveness of these posts make them more compelling than google, and in a way brings the scale of the achievement closer where it becomes perhaps less amazing. Knowing that a single person took this photograph and posted it to twitter is powerful. And he’s responding to people’s requests, so that it has become a conversation between individuals, between earth and space.

I bought some slides taken in space from Skylab 3, from ebay a few months ago. They are faded and pink, appearing dated and nostalgic. One image I find particularly interesting is of a tornado over the Atlantic, the swirl of cloud obscures the earth as it spreads over its surface. The lack of clarity opens up space for a different interpretation, of more seperation from the lense. Where Soichi tweeting from space connects us directly, these slides and their partial views that are hard to read make the feat of being in space all the more mysterious and amazing, perhaps even something to be in awe of.

I just came across Foursquare http://foursquare.com

Its another social group software that lets users find where their friends are and leave recommendations and play games with each other. Harvard have just started using it with their new students.

here’s how Foursquare describe themselves:

“Check in

People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling us your whereabouts. When you check-in
someplace, we’ll tell your friends where they can find you and recommend places to go & things to do
nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices.
You’ll find that as your friends use foursquare to check-in, you’ll start learning more about the places
they frequent. Not only is it a great way to meet up with nearby friends, but you’ll also start to learn
about their favorite spots and the new places they discover.

Share your experiences with friends
Think of foursquare as an “urban mix tape.” We’ll help you make lists of your favorite things to do and
let you share them with friends. Think beyond your standard review – we’re looking less for “The food
here is top notch” and more for “Go to Dumont Burger and try the most amazing Mac and Cheese ever.”
Foursquare will keep track of the things you’ve done, help you create To-Do lists and even suggest new
experiences to seek out.
As you check-in around the city, you’ll start finding tips that other users have left behind. After
checking-in at a restaurant, it’s not uncommon to unlock a tip suggesting the best thing on the menu.
Checking-in at a bar will often offer advice on what your next stop should be. Every tip you create is
discoverable by other users just by checking-in.

foursquare badges
Earn points and unlock badges!
Every foursquare checkin earns you points. Find a new place in your neighborhood? +5 points. Making
multiple stops in a night? +2 points. Dragging friends along with you? +1.
And as you start checking-in to more interesting places with different people, you’ll start unlocking
badges. There are badges for discovering new places and for traveling to far away places. Spending too
much time singing karaoke or been hitting the gym consistently? Yes, there are badges for those too :)

foursquare specials
Become the mayor! Unlock some freebies!
We all have our local hangouts and foursquare keeps tabs on who’s the most loyal of all the regulars.
If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else, you’ll become “the mayor”… until someone else comes
along and steals your title.
It may sound a little silly until you see the list of places that are offering
freebies to our mayors – free coffees, free ice-cream, free hotel stays – it pays to be a foursquare
loyalist and check-in whenever you go!

Last week I was a visiting lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, working with the first year undergrad Landscape Architecture students. They were a great bunch of students and really applied themselves to the challenge I set. It was a two day project, and the brief was titled “Hacking Maps: The map is not the territory.” The challenge was: How can we use easily available mapping tools to represent places as we know them on the ground?

This question is closely related to my own research interests in relationships between digital mapping, particularly google maps which has a very static, monolithic view point, and how we experience the world on the ground.

The work the students produced, having never made anything in google maps or google earth before was, in the most part, very thoughful and engaged. And while many worked with how they experienced the city on the ground (e.g. a map based on how far you can freewheel on a bicycle in the city), others immediately thought about their current location  in relation to other people and places, and there are two groups in particular I want to describe. The first made a project called ‘I am here, this is me’, basing their work on the idea that you may be on one location, but that where you have been previously and where you want to go in the future are as much part of your identity. They asked everyone in their class (quite an international group of students) to name a location that has shaped them, and where they picture themselves in the future, and to draw both locations. These images were attached to markers in google maps and linked to the current location of that person.

A second project asked where home is, and what image they associate with home.

Both these projects produced maps of ‘the ground’ and their experience of now, that is intrinsically linked with elsewhere.

(My introduction to the project included work by locative media artists such as jeremy woods, christian nold, esther polak, Jeff Knowlton & Naomi Spellman, Teri Reub, Glowlab, and google map projects such as Mr Beller’s Neighbourhood, uksnowtweets and meipi. I had framed the talk with Monika Buscher’s work with landscape architects and the problem of the view from nowhere within the view from somewhere, and talked very breifly about De Certeau’s reading and writing the city, Tim Ingold’s wayfairing and Nigel Thrift’s notion of qualculation.)

A few days later Doreen Massey is an invited speaker at Lancaster University, discussing the 1991 essay ‘A global sense of place’ in which she calls for a new way of thinking about place that is not reactionary, but allows for peoples feeling of fragmentation in a globalized world. This sense of place is about active social relations, not a static history, it is about links to elsewhere, rather than boundaries with and us and them, it is of the multiplicity in all places, rather than a notion of a singular local identity, and a uniqueness of place that is continually reproduced through wider social relations, the uneven-ness of experiences of globalization, and the multilayered past of a place that also has global linkages. In other work Massey links static ideas of the local to the shift of tectonic plates, so that even the ground we stand on has moved in from elsewhere.

It was striking to me that the combination of the challenge and using google maps as a tool, very quickly provoked a response from students that is in line with this notion of place, as outward looking, linked and multiple.

In thinking about landscape architecture, this also relates to Andrea Kahn’s  Keynote at the AHRA conference ‘Field/Work’, that there are three territories that an architectural site encompasses, an ‘Area of Control’ (the site to be built on), an ‘Area of Influence’ (the broader territory that influences the site) and the ‘Area of Effect’ (the territory that is effected by the design actions of the architect). She also talked about the site as a constellation as Massey does, site as a relational construct.

Reading ‘from place to PLACE: maps and Parish Maps’ eds Sue Clifford and Angela King – reminded me of this incredible parish map we saw in Wales…

extracts from the signage at the Church

The Bro Dysynni Map

This ‘map’ of the area was researched and constructed by eighteen local people, who worked for two years on separate parts of it which were finally brought together and completed in July 1995. It was exhibited locally, and then in June 1996 was part of the Parish Map exhibition at the Barbican in London, celebrating the 10^th anniversary of “Common Ground”, an organisation which encourages community projects, bringing togther creativity and personal feeling for the environment.

“Know Your Place – Make a Map of it” was the slogan used by Common Ground to promote the first Parish Maps in the Year of the Environment, 1987. Since then over a thousand maps have been made all over Britain in all kinds of ways, to celebrate and help to preserve the places people care about.

Why was it made?

The process of making a map together is one way of strengthening meaningful connections between people and places. The better you know a place the more it means to you. Our record of the Bro Dysynni is a personal one, reflecting the way we each felt about the many varied featurs of this beautiful landscape. Now it has a permanent home here in the valley at Llanfihangel Y Pennant, local inhabitants and visitors will be able to share it for years to come and help care for what is also important for them.

How was it made?

Each person chose a patch of land, walked it, got to know it well, made and enlarged a tracing of it from the OS map, collected materials from the communal rag bag and then began sewing at home, emphasising those things most important to them in individual ways. As all these little patches of embroidered land were created and completed, they were brought together and fitted into the base, which was softened by a layer of stuffing.

The Citizen Cartographies workshop at Laboral in Gijon, Spain, brought together a series of projects in which map making features as a key element of the process. There were great examples of two aspects of mapping, firstly as a participatory or collaborative process that allows discussion of issues connected to local spaces, often in-situ, and secondly map making as representation and communication. It is clear that mapping can be an extremely useful social tool, the main question I left with was how dynamic processes of mapping can fit into social map making.

The CarTac group, represented by Ana Mendez, Sabina Habegger and Eduardo Serrano talked about a participatory mapping project ‘otra malaga’, in which collaborative maps were made describing or articularling different concerns to do with conflicts and resistance in the region. The described their practice as ‘Tactical Cartography’, that is as much a means of through production as map making and is developed by a transdicsiplinary team. Sabine particularly emphasised their participatory process involving the subject of the map in the process of making the map. As a form for generating dialogue but also to facilitate self-diagnosis of problems and solutions. They aim to map the social networks into the physical territories. She talked about sessions in the field to ‘get into the territory’ and see what is being talked about in the workshops. describing a very involved workshop, but that something extra is added by being ‘on the ground’ seeing the location.

Edouardo described how architecture is a form of knowledge and perhaps surveillance. Street plans that make it easier to see people, house sizes that produce specific family arrangements. He also described the thresholds and borders that are produced between public and private space, the technologies of architecture create specific territories, as to other technologies such as wiki’s etc used in workshops. In these hybridizations of person and machine, how can people represent themselves instead of being represented by other people, and this has repercussions in peoples quality of life.

Jose Perez de Luna talked about Hackitectura.net, using Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome to discuss maps as non-heirarchical, performative media, that create very specific narratives, as opposed to the trace or copy which have more of a  referent to ‘the real’ through descriptions of mapping processes in the globalization demo’s in the 1990’s he asks whether the social ‘machine’ (guattari) can be reconfigured to enable sustainable cities.

Nancy Hamad and Mansour Azziz presented ‘Solidarity maps’ produced in war times as tools of resistance. Very controlled data visualizations, these maps were made to have fast visual impact to communicate specific aspects of the war(s`0 that were not being seen in global media. Simple, printable, using skills at hand. Maps with very specific stories to tell.

Each of these talks centred around specific issues that were to be communicated, discussed and explored and used maps to tell very different stories, all of them were about describing a situation as experienced on the ground, in a way that communicated that to the outside. CarTac, most of all, described the process of mapping as an en in itself, that many media were used, and it seemed to me that in effect, the map was  a format to have discussions around, to assist in an internal understanding of issues, rather than the external communication of groups like solidarity maps.

Thinking about ‘every map telling a story’, each map maker is like a pilot using both the view from above and the ground in order to tell that story. What was missing though from all these talks is the idea of a map that is USED on the ground. All of them are made to represent data geographically not in order to read the map in situ as a navigator. They navigate the issues and the data, but not necessarily the territory itself.

In thinking about hybrid machines, the gps user could be thought of as a ‘person-map’, embodying the ‘machine’ or system of mapping in themselves as they take on both perspectives and tell both stories. If maps are always subjective then the mapper could be thought of as a pilot, looking as if from above, yet still embodied and subjective.

The second section, the afternoon was about tools and opensource. The first presentation from Open Street Map talked about the need for a map that is not constricuted by the licensing laws that organisations like google have, the need to see data that underlies the map led to open street map, which is created by the input of users and contributers and can be used openly by other applications. One of the more powerful aspects seems to be open layers, I think as a method of filtering data. e.g. it is possible to make a processing app using open street map data. They are also looking at making ‘open sea’ and ‘open sky’. there is also an app called x-plane that is going to use OSM data to genereate views in flight.

Meipi is an open source mapping tool that allows map annotation, superimposing photographs as views within the map. It evolved from a project to allow local people to annotate a map with things that were happening locally, e.g. local news, and to enourage web users to facilitate conversations not only between distant people but also with neighbours. Although there are many applications like this around, this one is specifically aimed at local groups and communities, and because it arose out of a very specific local project rather than a general idea its functionality echoes that local and social purpose. It is now being released as an open-source application.

Metamap does something similar but from a more arts based background. One of the many things they have done is working with GPS and arduino. these were followed by really interesting discussions including Q’s about who makes the maps, (this whole session is run by men!). At there last  Open Street Map conference there were  5 women and 220 men. This led on to a discussion of the drive for objectivity in mapping, despite the fact that we all know maps are inevitably subjective. Questions about whether thre are maps that are participatory that allow for design modification, led to comments about not being able to facilitate that flexibility and still have things work, there are e.g.s of platforms that do this but in reality don’t work.

http://scotland.sicamp.org/

This is really cool, i wonder if any of the ideas actually get off the ground.
If I was still teaching I’d be be setting this as a project.

Thinking Allowed

BBC Radio 4

Wednesday 21 Jan 09

Victorian Light

TA: Hole in the wall and Gaslight When gaslight first brought illumination to Britain’s city streets people said night had been turned into day, but after the initial hyperbole had died down did it lead to a new type of social control? Laurie discusses the politics of gaslight with Chris Otter and Lynda Nead

“Imagine the impact of gaslight on the once dark nights of Victorian Britain..“As I walk about the streets by night, endless and always suggestive intercommunings take place between me and the trusty, silent, ever watchful gas.  Gas to teach me; gas to counsel me; gas to guide my footsteps, not over London flags, but through the crooked ways of unseen life and death”, that was George Augustus Sala in 1859.”

“we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”
Could mean many things….. but reminded me of the arguements about surveillance and safety, and freedom & privacy.