Wrong-footed - Progress update

Despite a very disheartening trial run, during which I lost the will to live somewhere in the middle of a puddle in Hackney, I am going to continue with this concept. I will also continue to research the Situationists because the writings I have been reading are genuinely interesting and I think they will inform my observations and the conclusions I'll draw from what I will see.

Quote: Raoul Veneigem

All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And beyond the illusion of permitted anodynes there is only the collective desire to destroy isolation... By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs its own death-sentence.
The Revolution of Everyday Life:
Impossible Participation or Power as the Sum of Constraints

Where to start

I spread the map out on the floor, held nine coloured pins in one hand, shut my eyes, and randomly distributed the pins across the map. That's it, that's final. I'll start from those locations.

1) Harts Lane, New Cross Gate
2) Warner Road, Camberwell
3) Thames Street, Blackfriars
4) Mare Street, Hackney
5) Hyde Park
6) Wandsworth Bridge Road, Walham Green
7) Grove End Road, St Johns Wood
8) Cromwell Road, South Kensington
9) Westferry Road, Limehouse

This could be quite an interesting project. I have a wide variety of starting points. Today I will make my first journey, taking with me a camera, sketchbook/notepad and a sadly much-needed umbrella. It'll be interesting to see if this actually works.

Three Hours

I don't want to regiment this project to the extent of its predecessor. This investigation into observation and documentation should focus on those things without being bogged down by the details of how I reach the places I end up in. However I should develop some rules to ensure a common structure to the journeys I make.

I was listening to Nick Drake's Three Hours, a song about escape and the eternal seeker. I thought how far one could travel in three hours, then decided this could be the guiding principle to this project.

Electing at random a number of different starting points, I will travel away from each one for three hours. I'll employ similar but less stringent practices to decide how to move away from those places, to maintain the element of 'the unknown', but essentially the concern in each case will be observation.

Three hours is needed
To leave from them all
Three hours to wonder
And three hours to fall.

Next step: select the random starting points
Following this: get moving.

Oh, to wander free...

Faced with the opportunity of effectively doing whatever I wanted for the final few weeks of term, I toyed with a variety of ideas that probably wouldn't have been sustainable/possible for that length of time - illustration & art direction for the band Hush the Many (Heed the Few), a photographic series based on the depressingly repetitive interiors of chain fast food restaurants, even the construction of a ghost ride.

A recurrent theme in my work is making observations of the world around me and my recordings of those observations. In the first term I designed a game of chance based around travel in London, allowing chance to dictate my route and developing a complicated system by which to document my movements.

During these prescribed journeys I saw and heard and experienced a huge amount that was not possible or appropriate to document within the confines of the brief. This always frustrated me.

Therefore I propose to revisit the concept from which I allowed myself to deviate, the concept that interested me the most - the idea of setting out on a journey at the mercy of the unknown and learning from the environments in which I end up. The proposed outcome will be a boxed collection of short documents, taking various forms including illustrative, photographic, typographic and perhaps even filmic. The structure will be inspired by the Sagmeister 'Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far' publication.

Researching:
- Hamish Fulton
- Richard Long
- John Cage
- Fluxus
- Situationism (in more depth than before)

Think on.

Film: TRANSIENT PROJECTIONS

So this is the finished film, Transient Projections, by me and Gemma Rhead. In the end, it all went a bit 'differently' to The Plan, but I think we created an interesting piece of work.
Music: 'Violet Tree' by M83

Building blocks

For one week only we had full run of the biggest workspace at Chelsea, so we wanted to make the most of it. Our strongest idea for the motion graphics project involved building a miniature city so we started with that in mind and decided to see where it took us.

We collected a large number of cardboard boxes which we subsequently assembled into some form of representative city.


The next stage was to play with projecting imagery onto the boxes to see what effects we could achieve. One successful test involved hooking up a camcorder to feed back live the image of the 'city' against the plain background, to give the impression of it being endless.



We decided to see if it was possible to project a different film onto each of the different surfaces - to resize video clips and have many playing simultaneously, through the same projector, from the same master file. This way, we could create a moving miniature city.

We collected over 35 individual minute-long clips of London scenes, featuring both moving or static subjects. Having connected the projector to a laptop, we used Final Cut to create a composite video file with most of the clips arranged in sizes and positions that allowed each one to marry up with particular boxes. This was painstaking but by the end we had 25 clips projecting onto 25 boxes.