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,

Topic Idea 1: The Neo-Romantic landscape through Paul Nash.

Swanage, Wittenham Clumps, Uffington white horse, Dymchurch,
Megaliths.
Surrealism.

Britain From Above

                                     
Today was the launch of a new website, www.britainfromabove.org.uk, and as the name suggests, features thousands of aerial photographs of Britain taken between 1919 and 1953.
I've only had a browse today, but there are some really amazing and deliciously bland images to help with the project.

How Wonderfully English...

Swandown

Looking forward to this exhibition at Dilston Grove next week.
Another case of crazy coincidences; I was put on to Andrew Koetting by my tutor, John Wynne and have been exploring Sinclair's work just this past week, and now they have a joint exhibition in South London.

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.

Observed love

An interesting angle on Mass Observation found today. The social history of love. Ace! Then there is this, too.

Mass Observation

Now located at the University Of Sussex, and originally set up in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, this project set about recording, observing and documenting the ordinary lives of British Citizens.
Humphrey Spender was a member, photographically recording for them. Presently I have no information about sonic recordings.

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.

Intervention.

Intervention is an art practice I have a natural aversion towards. Why? I suppose it's a middle class politeness thing. I was brought up not to make a fuss, get in other people's way, cause a scene, disrupt the status quo, all that sort of thing.
I have been introduced to Allan Kaprow recently and read a few of his essays. I am very much liking the idea of whatever we do as being a kind of intervention. The practice of Everyday Life is by definition one huge intervention. It is the context and the reaction of others that make it outstanding or unremarkable.