Jen Southern

Half way through the second year of my PhD and this is the network of practice based work that I’ve done. Although there is not much that has resolved into ‘final’ pieces of work there is a lot of research material and fieldwork, a lot of process, and there are key moments where it comes together as both locative art work and mobilities social research. I prepared these images for a supervision meeting yesterday which was really useful, both to get feedback but also to look at it as a body of work. I was struck by the way that the black and white linear image,  which is a still from the comob software while I was walking from Huddersfield to Lancaster, works together with the photograph of a dead bird by the side of the road. In this work ‘Walking to Work’ I struggled with the tension between the abstraction of the comob image and the narrative of photographs and twitter posts. The work was never intended to be a travelogue, however compelling they are when they’re live. It was about a kind of virtual proximity, what I call ‘co-mobility’, feeling the presence of other people even when they are at a distance and on the move. What emerged in a discussion as I arrived in Lancaster on the last day was that the abstract images suggested a set of connections that could be imagined running between specific points up and down the country and across the world, like a visualisation of satellites, footpaths, pylons, wifi connections, friendships, mobile networks and acquaintances. During the walk these images had only ever been shown superimposed on top of a map. I’m considering using just the abstract connections next time, perhaps with live updating photographic fragments, like this dead bird by the side of the road. The connection between the fragment and the network, detail and abstraction suggests the tension between two visual perspectives that googlemaps doesn’t.

a re-blog from earth observatory’s siberia field work

“Western Siberia is, in places, remote.  However, much of the region can be accessed by a system of roads and rivers.  When planning this expedition, the scientists needed to find the location of GLAS footprints – measurements taken by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System aboard the ICESat Satellite - in the area as well as find routes to enter those footprints.  The goal of the expedition is to measure by hand, on location, as many GLAS footprints as possible in the study area. This is called ground-truth validation, and is an essential part of understanding data acquired by remote sensing instruments.  “

Need to find out more about this relationship between remote sensing and on the ground measurements.

Co-mobility can refer to many different practices including passengers in a car ( Brown,  Laurier,  Lorimer), exchanges of email on the move, skype, SMS, phone calls etc. We travel and communicate with people both near and far on a regular basis, but something different is going on when the locations that those mobile connections are made from begin to matter.

When I hear and see a small aircraft flying overhead in a clear blue sky I imagine a pilot free to go where they wish. In reality they are always suspended in a net of air traffic controllers via their radio. Beginning with the ATZ (Aerodrome Traffic Zone) as they take off, they then talk to ATC (air traffic control) for each zone they pass through. (This image is of ATC and ATZ zones in North West England.) Each new ATC needs to know call-sign, aircraft type, route, destination and altitude via a one-to-one radio call in order to ensure that collisions don’t happen. The impression for the pilot is that they are always in contact with and being spatially monitored by those air traffic controllers, almost passed from one to the next, each of whom has to keep track of many planes and their spatial locations.

This spatial aspect to co-mobility also happens with the traditional postcard.

‘I, or we, send our greetings from here to you who cannot be present, cannot be with us at the moment.’ Through the past one-hundred years of postcard mediatisation of our lives, all such ‘greetings from’ formulae may be read into the picture even if the actual sentences are not present. Or vice versa, when the text is glaringly written on the postcard the picture itself may be relegated to an almost secondary status because it is the greeting – conveying the idea that the people involved actually think of each other sensing both a presence and absence – that matters the most. This way most postcards are about the commonality of experiences and the knowledge of being together.

Kurti, L., 2004. Picture perfect: community and commemoration in postcards. In: Pink, S., Kurti, L., Afonso, A.I. (Eds.), Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. Routledge, New York, pp. 47–71.

The idea of postcards as ways in which people think of each other, of absence and presence, reminded me of the way that I’ve been talking about comob and Running Stitch. The walker is imagining someone else at a distance seeing their GPS track, and that other person imagines the walker out in the landscape or city. In the same way, but more slowly, sending a postcard involves imagining it being received at the location its addressed to, and the receiver imagining the sender on holiday in a particular place. I think this is somehow linked to the live GPS because the postcard specifies two locations, the picture on the card referring to the sender, the address to the receiver. Part of the purpose of the card is to show one place to someone who is not there. This differs from the comobility we might experience through emails or phone calls in which the mobility of the medium matters more than the location that its sent from, or from out co-passengers who share our current location rather than imagine it. The specific location, and its status as an imagined place matters with postcards, as it does with live GPS signals.

Sometimes skpe can facilitate a similar co-mobility when participants in the conversation are ‘on the move’. At the Contemoprary Nomadism symposium at Canada House last week there was a live skype with the Arctic Perspective Initiative out in a remote cabin in Nunavut, northern Canada. This remote connection will allow the local Inuit users to access their own communication networks, weather forecasts and environmental data, but for this discussion was bringing that remote location into a board room at Canada House in central London, not only facilitating a conversation between the ‘academic’ gathering with those participating on the ground in the  project but also suggesting a closeness and a connectedness of that environment and community.

The second walk to make a track for the silk escape map I’m making, from Christ church to Sugar Lane near Bollington. About 5 miles one way.

Thinking mostly about different modes of knowing a place. Earlier this week I traced all the water from a map of this area in the process of making the main map on the silk scarf, so walking this route I recognised sections of the canal from tracing them carefully, and the water in the field near Long Lane. Walking changed my perception of the area;  in trying to recognise where a forced landing might have happened, I was seeing flat fields and wondering if they were the right ones. I’m now doubtful whether this really was the field, the account says that it happened off Long Lane, but the field I walked through was too steep for a forced landing at the Long Lane end, so the account would have said Sugar Lane if it was the site I was looking at. My understanding of the topography changed a lot when I walked, even though I grew up nearby and have walked there before, and have spent hours looking at this map. I had remembered the holly hedge, and the steep field, but not the bottom end of that path. Thinking about the differences between memory and walking reminds me of Simon Pope‘s work with walking and memory too.

I made a few blog posts, which in retrospect are not as interesting as the 30 minutes of voice memos I recorded which develop arguements and follow thoughts in a way that the blog posts don’t.

Just passing Adelphi mill, I’m coming back here later to get my map drawing scanned for the silk map. Both this mill and Clarence mill produced silk during WW2. Just down the road here there is still a place that prints on silk and produces jacquard silk for ties.

Just consulted a satellite map on my phone to see how far i’d gone, then saw a stone saying marple 8 miles. Which would have done a similar job. On the canal it shielded in some parts from other parts of the place, like motorways are, it would be good if the bridges said which roads they were.

Before I set off I was looking at a large scale map of the canal and realised that the canal narrows for the bridges in a way that I hadn’t noticed on the bigger map tracing. I wonder how the scale and width of the water on the map matches up to it’s width on the ground. Remembering the Tanya Kovats piece at Kielder, where she made the map symbol for a beauty spot as a sculpture,  at the size it would be if it was a geographical feature on the map.

The beginning of another walk and moblogging. The top of the 108 steps in Macclesfield. This walk is from Christ church where the exhibition will take place in June, along the canal to a 1942 plane crash site near Bollington.

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.

Reaching Christ Church again and noticing that the gravestones often start “Here”  and “beneath”. The marking of a spot, an actual place to be used for remembrance. So maybe this walk is about using a place and a walk for thinking and remembering, for contemplating what it means for the ground to be beneath your flight and beneath your feet.

The solidity of the church and it’s architecture demand certain kinds of behaviour, silent, still contemplation, not reflection in action. A place sanctified for particular kinds of thought, I would say a removal from the world, the day to day, but the way the pews echo a class structure and the word “empty” on the back row of pews suggesting fullness everywhere else actually feels like the community in all it’s everyday relations would have been here historically.

The solidity of the canal bridges and the sets of pews both so clearly suggest very specific actions.