Poetics Of The Motorway

Went to quite an interesting post-launch of In the Company of Ghosts: the Poetics of the Motorway, 2012, edited by Andrew Corkish at Beakonsfield yesterday evening.
I find it interestigg as I attend more and more of these, that very often it is a way for panelists to indulge themselves and enthuse about a subject about which they are passionate, without, what I would argue, ios the important thing to include us, the audience, who do not know as much, but by being there could easily be enthused and informed more.
No sonic references!

Isle Of Dogs Skip Hire

Had a great day today at the Isle Of Dogs Skip Hire depot in East London.
I was given permission to record and film for a couple of hours. It is amazing the amount of rubbish they receive and distribute from there every day. Hundreds of tons of Tower Hamlets' rubbish was there today as the borough cannot cope with all the extra pressure from the Olympics.
A wonderfully noisy, hectic and stinky day indeed.

Project

Began filming and recording for some experimental pieces this week around industrial parks, scrap yards and edgelands.

Of Time and The City

Got some great ideas from watching Of Time and The City by Terence Davies yesterday.
It's amazing when one gets into something, how there is already an established practice.

Edgelands

Marion Shoard was the inspiration for the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts to write Edgelands. Here is a link to her 2002 essay.

Topic Idea 3: The Edgelands

This book and its ideas were very useful to me for the BA project. It looks at the strange areas at the edges of urban sprawls.

Topic Idea 2: The New Towns of England

Basildon, Harlow,

Non-Place 2

An example of what I do not want to do.
I like the fact that the topic interests them, but this is pretty superficial and tabloid in its use of banal questions and a non-conclusion. I'm sure they could have made something of this if they'd narrowed down the focus a bit and worried at that for an answer. I hope they continue with their work.

London Orbital

I found a lot of connections to my research in this film by Christopher Petit and Iain Sinclair. It is a documentary, connected to but not of Sinclair's book of the same name.
Working similarly to Kieller's Robinson films, this is great film commenting upon contemporary culture and politics through topographical movement and history.
Filmed without a crew, it has a very personal feel to it and creates a believable and intriguing narrative.
A real must for repeated viewing.

London Sound Survey

An article in this month's Wire magazine reminded me of this great site that I hadn't visited for months.
Geographically it is ideally suited to one part of my project.
http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/

The Individual.

Reading this week to keep my presentation work up-to-date, I realized several occurrences of the idea of the way in which many of us are becoming less social animals and more individual.
I relate this particularly to my research on personal smart media. Gone for many, are the days of interaction on a journey, for example. Sealed up with in-ear headphones, a mobile that cuts into your music, a personal playlist and GPS to help you when you get a bit lost and don't want tho have to look at landmarks.

Personal Stereos.

Personal stereos interest me, as well as other personal media, because of the detachment the user begins to have with their surroundings. Heralded as one of life's most influential gadgets, the personal stereo is often said to provide us with our own sound tract to our life. Maybe it does, but at what cost to the community and surroundings of the user? If the user is detached from their surroundings and sonically elsewhere, what can their relationship to a location, situation, society actually be?
As smartphone owners, tracked by GPS use their hand-helds to find a location, what omission from their actual surroundings are they experiencing, and to what cost?

Cartography

Having made a few maps for small projects recently and beginning to use Mind Maps more regularly, I have been drawn to the idea of using maps as a documentary device for this project.
Black Dog Publishing's excellent book Atlas and The Map As Art by Katharine Harmon have been quite an inspiration, too.
Visual references are obvious, but a more conceptual idea about the charting of place may be an intriguing direction.

Involvement.

I wonder how much people like the woman above are becoming detached from their  environment.

What impact will be felt as people like here occupy one space, but exist in and communicate in another? Do the locations cease to have any meaning beyond the physical?

Non-Place.

Thinking today about this idea of the Non-Place and spaces where the human investment in the location is so diminished that it struggles to be a place or exhibit any sense of place. Can that ever happen to a location?
I am thinking about such violently unpleasant locations like supermarket self-check-out areas with their incessant multi-phonic instructions of how to do the real employees job while they, presumably look for work elsewhere.