Penguin books has so far published 3 stories based on maps, with 3 coming up in the next three weeks. The first one is “The 21 Steps”, by Charles Cummings. Try it out: http://wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/
I find it to be interesting, I’m on chapter 8 so far. It might be more relevant if I had been to the locations themselves, but my imagination has put me into the story, so that whatever the medium, it is still enjoyable.
Many things ran through my head while experiencing these hunts and observing other people take our hunt on, much of which is echoed in Phyllis’ post. Another take-home lesson I learned from the whole experience was that everyone in the whole class has their strengths. I’m very interested to see a whole class project come together in the future. Each one of us has a strength or skill set that they are proficient at, and in a team effort, I think could be fully realized.
I also realized while on these hunts how unadventurous we can be. Are we really that domesticated so as to completely avoid having to trespass, and clamor through an overgrown pathway, or to even fathom that yes, you might have to duck under those bushes in order to get where you’re going? I reflect on this often living in the city, how fearsome I’ve become of what I step on, lean against, or what my long skirts are dragging through on the sidewalk. People, I used to walk BAREFOOT in the forest all summer long, the soles of my feet thick with protective callouses and stickled with pitch and leaves. I’m reminded of the summer I spent in Oakland attending classes at CCoA (formerly CCAC). I remember walking a block and a half down the street from my apartment to Safeway with my RA Gauri. We needed fresh ginger for the chai she was making for all of us girls at the apartment. I went with her, barefoot, all the way down the street, into the store, and right as we were about to leave, the security man came up to me and reprimanded me for going barefoot in the store, spouting lawyer rhetoric about people suing stores they get hurt in. I told him that the store should keep their floors swept and clean so that it wouldn’t be a problem. “You might slip on the floor without shoes on,” he said. I remember telling him, “I might slip with them on.” and scooting out of the store left perplexed at how domesticated we have become.
Now I can’t even imagine walking on the cleanest flattest concrete in my new environment. I need my callouses back! This was a big point in two of the scavenger hunts for me: the domestication of mankind, how far removed and sometimes fearful we are of nature and natural things. Overall things could have improved with the waypoints, devices, and satellite drift issues, but that’s what the future is for. I think everyone made a great effort in their own ways.
PS - Arosh, is the remix ready?
Here is a project that uses community to find the lines between the upper and lower classes as evidenced by the presence of surveillance cameras. Lower classes feel alienated by the security cameras which seem to exist just to keep them under control. People go out into the city and document the locations of any cameras they encounter. There is also an audio component that tells them when they are approaching a previously marked camera.
It is a sort of way of finding public spaces that aren’t really public because they exclude certain types of people and private spaces that aren’t private because they are being watched. It offers people another way to experience and hopefully gain control of public/private spaces.
Net_Dérive
“Their work sets up social interactions, supported by mobile phones and internet technologies, within a loose network of people that are exploring a city, in this particular case the urban environment around the exhibition space near the Bastille in Paris. From the paths they take and the experiences they have, a collective narrative emerges which is fed back through audiovisual means to each participant and thus shapes their evolving experience.”
I couldn’t get their video to work, but got a sense of their goals achieved through the description and accompanying photos on the article about this piece at We Make Money Not Art dot com. I feel this project may be a new way to collect personal experiential information to publish to other media such as websites and blogs. To have a map created, photos taken, and audio recorded, and uploaded instantly to the web might be a fun way for people to share their experiences online fairly effortlessly. Quality of recorded media–mainly the photos and the audio–is my only concern since the devices just kind of “hang” in the scarf piece and really aren’t totally directed by the person wearing them at anything in particular.
Perhaps the software coupled to a GPS enabled cell phone with a built in camera would be more approachable and useful on a consumer level. Some kind of all-in-one device that would automatically import to a blog entry would be a smooth way to make entries, without the hassle of uploading photos and audio via internet connection at a computer–not to mention creating a kml or kmz file–to a server host such as Flickr from a camera. And with the jump from Alphanumeric key pads to full alphabet key pads on mobile phones, text entries could also be attached to the blog file. An early precursor to this potential sort of real-time blogging service is my friend’s blog that he started not too long ago. http://www.espressoandmilk.com He has it set up so that he can take and send pictures with his camera phone along with a text entry to the blog from cafes in order to post his personal reviews of cafes and the coffee that they serve. I like the model a lot, seeing as there’s always time to take on my commute or anywhere I am in public to think and journal, but I never have the time at home, nor do I want to sit in front of the computer anymore than I already have to. There was discussion in our readings of the land line being replaced by the mobile phone, to which I agree; personally, I don’t have a land line, only my cell phone. I imagine that our computers at home may someday be replaced at least in a large part by these all-in-one phones, as far as communication goes.
Cabspotting is a project sponsored by the Exploratorium and created by Stamen Design in San Francisco. Cabspotting uses GPS devices put in Yellow Cabs around The City. These units track their location, and also the cab’s velocity and direction they are moving in. This is all charted in real-time on the Exploratorium sponsored website: cabspotting.org
I thought this project was different, because the ‘map’ has been taken away and replaced with black. Contrails are left where the cabs have been, and this phenomenological effect creates the map; showing us location through their path.
Another project that I thought was really neat is Trulia Hindsight, also by Stamen Design. This project charts the growth of citys, towns and streets over time. I found it interesting to go back to my old neighborhood and watch its history unfold. These maps are annotative and are just static markers of an event over time at a location.
