Jen Southern

first step in the production of new work, a tracing of all the water. Thinking about partial forms of maps, maps that don’t give a panopticon perspective, but only allow partial and situated perspectives.

I’m standing on the aqueduct. In all my tracing and imagining this walk I’d completely forgotten that I would cross it, even though from the road it is such a feature of Bollington. When I geotagged this note even the map shows the road on top of the water. It wasn’t until I was describing Adelphi mill next to the canal that I realised that Clarence mill is also on the canal but on the other side of the valley, then it dawned on me that the aquaduct was coming up. Feels like its over familiarity that made me forget.

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.

Walking out of town thinking about Christ Church, Charles Roe, silk, WW2, flying and maps, and the war memorial in the church. Churches as sites of memorial. Silk maps will be so small in the church, will anyone come for a walk? Will it appear sentimental? Out here is where the work really makes sense, in relation to the town, the ground and the movement. The church is so full. Guided walks?

I spent Friday helpping Sorrel Muggridge to install a new art work called ‘A Curious Meander’. We met on the Banff Walking and Art residency in 2007, and by co-incidence we are both making work about water at the moment.

The work ‘A Curious Meander’ is based on walks made beside the River Wensum in Norwich accompanied by people associated with the water. During each walk Sorrel recorded their conversations about associations with water and collected water from the river. Vials of water from these walks are displayed in the drawers of an old collectors cabinet, labeled with key words or phrases from those walks that tell of events, actions, histories and feelings associated with rivers. ‘Water Vole headbutt’, floods, eels, boats all make appearances. Longer quotes from the walks are stenciled onto upturned white umbrellas floating in the water, as the river itself is used as the site for the installation. The work is also installed at ‘Pull’s Ferry’, the Girl Guides Headquarters, an old flint building on a bridge over the a canal that used to lead from the river up to the Cathedral.

Sorrel’s method of walking and talking has developed in her practice over many years. It allows the act of walking and movement through specific places to provoke and remind participants of their associations with water. Her thoughtful editing of these fluid dialogues leaves us with statements that invite an audience to imagine further narratives and to add their own walk and thoughts to the series.

The installation for the Norwich festival will continue to collect stories of water, and the installation will grow throughout the project as visitors take up the question ‘Where does the river take you?’ and the invitation to “join me at Pull’s Ferry to retell your walk, where your unique journey will become part of the artwork”

This printed invitation to make a walk was hand set using traditional processes and printed on old printing presses at a museum beside the river. The green of the ink was mixed to match the colour of the water seen outside the museum.

Another silk escape map arrived yesterday – this one is of Helsinki and Trondheim and from 1953, showing lots of water in the landscape. The nearest thing perhaps to the silk maps I’m making for the Macclesfield show.

I expected silk escape maps to feel smooth and silky, but instead they feel like a combination of waxy and chalky somehow. I was expecting them to be printed like a silk scarf would be, dying the fabric, but instead they have a surface on the silk that the map is printed onto so that it can be double sided.

The ex-military white silk parachute that I ordered also arrived…

proposal written for Easst conference

In 1983/4 the artists Linda Montana and Tehching Hsieh made ‘Rope Piece’, a performative artwork in which they spent an entire year joined together by an 8ft rope. For Easst 2010 we will invite conference delegates to be joined to each other throughout the conference, using ‘comob’ software on their own iphones/Nokia’s rather than an 8ft rope. (Participants are free to continue participating in the research by linking to each other over an entire year).

At the centre of this research is the artists project ‘comob’, an iphone app and Nokia N96 software made to explore what happens if you can see a link between your own location and other participants in a group. These relationships are visible as nodes and lines on a google map seen on the phone screen, and move as participants move about the city. How might it be used to negotiate co-location? How is it used in workshops to explore the negotiation of social understandings of action on the ground? How does it feel to be tethered to another person? This work uses social processes of art making (Kester, Southworth, Lacy) as a method of creating participatory experiences for an audience in which meaning is produced through non-representational practices of movement or action (Thrift), that also become parts of a network of practice (Suchman) in which art work, design work and field work are entangled together.

During the conference participants movements will be projected onto a wall and traced in reflective paint. The amount of light that is seen reflecting off this silver drawing is dependant on the viewers spatial relationship to the light source, so only partial and situated views (Haraway) of this mapping will ever be available as it seems to shimmer in the light. In past work (e.g. ‘Running Stitch’ 2006-2009, Hamilton, Southern & St Amand www.satellitebureau.net) the live transposing of GPS data from a participants walk was a catalyst for participants to imagine what was happening at the exhibition. In imagining their walk as a line as well as a path participants combined plan view and situated action (Suchman) as they added their walk to a collaborative map, performing their own relationship to place through the live GPS technology, simultaneously both reading and writing the city (De Certeau).

The work will culminate in a short workshop at the end of the conference when participants will be invited to relfect on their use and awareness of the comob connection, and how social links might be performed through GPS.

Comob is a digital arts project that explores the potential for collaborative mapping with GPS technology. Comob was developed as a research tool to explore social and spatial relationships between people in motion. Comob has been used in workshops throughout 2009/10 at Futuresonic 09, ISEA 09, Edinburgh College of Art and Designing Environments for Life exhibition, Dundee .

www.comob.org.uk (project website)

Liquid City
Media iphone/Nokia application, processing application, data projector, liquid silver leaf.
Dimensions approx 8ft x 8ft – adaptable.
Keywords Locative, GPS, walking, iphone, water, environment, place.

Project outline

Mapping the water footprint of the city: an experiment in walking and talking.

The city is not just the streets it is also the invisible infrastructure stretching miles beyond
the city limits; reservoirs, pipes, water treatment works.  Through the act of walking from
reservoir to tap we will trace the scale of the watershed with a symbolic process of
walking with of water. This experimental social process investigates how locative media
might facilitate a distributed and discursive reflection in action.

In consultation with United Utilities we will identify a notional watershed for Manchester.
Five walkers will set out from seperate reservoirs at the limits of the watershed carrying a
bottle of water back to the exhibition space. (e.g. from Woodhead reservoir 15 miles from
the centre of Manchester).  Their progress will be tracked using our comob software that
tracks and links groups rather than individuals. The boundary of the watershed will be
delineated by their linked locations, slowly diminishing as they home in on the exhibition
space. As they walk each participant will reflect on the act of carrying water in text
messages sent within comob to each other and the gallery.

A map of all the water in the Manchester city area will be painted in liquid silver leaf on
the gallery wall. The slowly diminishing watershed boundary made by the walkers,
alongside their text conversation, will be projected from a custom visualisation application
onto this wall.

“Its quite funny on the navigation side of life that one of the things people can see quite easily are lakes but often they don’t put some lakes on the chart, I wonder why, who knows, the other thing is, as far as we’re concerned we’re not bothered because nowdays farmers put so many poly tunnels all over the place that when you look in the distance you think you can see lakes all over the place but they’re plastic fields.” from in flight conversation.