Neighborhood Narratives London

moodmap.blogspot.com

My final wrapup is posted there.

Can’t wait to see the video! I had an incredible time this semester, and had a blast exploring our final projects. Best wishes to all!

This entire project for me was about being aware of time.  It was taking the idea of different kinds of time and ways of measuring time.  It was about being conscious of the many different uses as well. Below is an excert for Alan Lightman’s short piece about Einstein.  It is a piece designed to give you a better perspective and understanding about different kinds of time.  I took my class on location to Princess Diana’s Memorial Fountain because it maps out her life through water that bubbles over smooth granite and cascades over rough parts that represent her lifeline.  Essentially it was a location chosen with the way it uses time. The location was part of the exercise all together getting people to think about ways of mapping time as well. Time is more than just an intangible thing and this whole locative media project was supposed to illustrate that. The artistic part came in when I asked everybody to tie pieces of string to parts of their body they best think represents time. As you can see by the image there were similar areas such as the mid-regions representing “time to go to the bathroom”.  Other locations were not so obvious like around the ring finger on the left hand symbolizing the time to get married.

Anyway, the excerpt below. . .

24 April 1905In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist. When they pass the giant clock on the Kramgasse they do not see it; nor do they hear its chimes while sending packages on Postgasse or strolling between flowers in the Rosengarten. They wear watches on their wrists, but only as ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are hungry, go to their jobs at the millinery or the chemist’s whenever they wake from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. Such people laugh at the thought of mechanical time. They know that time moves in fits and starts. They know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbor wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover.Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

Taking the night air along the river Aare, one sees evidence for two worlds in one. A boatman gauges his position in the dark by counting seconds drifted in the water’s current. “One, three meters. Two, six meters. Three, nine meters.” His voice cuts through the black in clean and certain syllables. Beneath a lamppost on the Nydegg Bridge, two brothers who have not seen each other for a year stand and drink and laugh. The bell of St. Vincent’s Cathedral sings ten times. In seconds, lights in the apartments lining Schifflaube wink out, in a perfect mechanized response, like the deductions of Euclid’s geometry. Lying on the riverbank, two lovers look up lazily, awakened from a timeless sleep by the distant church bells, surprised to find that night has come.

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

---

Excerpted from Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman Copyright © 2004 by Alan Lightman. 

My project involved gathering opinions about what I think is an important global issue. What i wanted to do was see if other people cared about global warming like I do, or if it is not important to them. So what I did was set out to areas with a good concentration of people. I chose to go around to different pubs in order to gather the opinions that I needed. Using the bluetooth function on my cell phone, I took a poll in these different pubs. I asked “Poll: Is global warming an important issue to you?” I found it difficult to get responses, although I did get some. Some of the opinions that I mapped were of people that I actually spoke to. I think that gathering opinions through the bluetooth is effective because it is completely randomized. You do not know who it is you are communicating with. It is sort of like observing something from the outside, but not totally because you are directly communicating with a group of people. I think that completing this exercise from different pubs was a good idea. It is a relaxed atmosphere with a lot of people. I made my own opinion maps based on what types of responses I found at the pubs. The green circles represent people that think global warming is an important issue, and the red x’s represent people who do not. Here are the pictures of the maps that I made. Overall, I feel that this project ran smoothly in class. It was nice to have this at the end of the day. It gave us all a chance to relax after all of our projects.

During the course of my study abroad, I’ve had many new experiences; however, one long lasting experience truly sticks out. Until this semester, I never shared a bedroom with anyone and the most people I lived with was 3. This semester I was made to share a relatively small bedroom with 3 other guys and live with 5 other people altogether. Therefore, I decided that I would try to relate my experiences to my fellow classmates for my final project.

I created a game in Hyde Park that revolved around playing cards. First, I made a scaled down diagram of our flat out of orange string on the grass, with the bathroom, common area and kitchen separated. There were six sets of 3 playing cards and 1 index card, one for each person participating. On the index card, there were 3 activities that had to be completed in order and each person had a different order. The activities were to shower, watch tv, and cook and eat food. Once everyone was situated, I had everyone with the same activity go to the appropriate area of the flat. Once there, whoever had the highest card of the group held priority over the activities and there was always someone left out who had to do nothing while everyone else was showering, cooking and watching tv. To simulate cooking in a small space, I had two people kick a soccer ball the whole time and the goal was to keep the ball in the kitchen. To simulate watching tv, I had two people listen to an iPod, one headphone for each person, and the person with the highest card chose the music they both listened to. While showering, the person with the highest card went into the small shower space and listened to an iPod.

The goal of this exercise was to show how small spaces affect different people. I made it a point to have someone during each activity left with nothing to do because there are times in our flat that there is no room in the kitchen, someone is in the shower, and you have nothing to do until space becomes free. Hope everyone enjoyed it

Intro to THE EYE OF AWARENESS

        The name of my project is The Eye Of Awareness. 

The ultimate theme of my project is to bring awareness

of the different ways to think about the environment

around you.

I started out by making a list of the themes

I wanted my peers to get out of my project. They were,

How we move through it.

How it affects us/ how we affect it.

How we connect with others in our environment.

How we miss things as we move through it.

How we find things

Do themes change the way you move through space and certain

Environments.

THE PROJECT

A week before the actual presenting of my project

 I started my project.

I did this by making a movie clip about the

 environment I am using to do my project and

 asked the class to

come up with one word that represents the

 idea of environment to them.

I did this to have my peers start thinking

about this word and what it means.

        On the day I presented I brought my class to my location,

which is a path in Hyde Park.

 When we got there I had them get in a circle and

 I gave them Index cards which had on them

 a lay out of space to record what they feel, see, hear,

 examine, each time they walk though my chosen environment.

 I also drew the path on the card for them to use. I had them

 start by writing down the word they came up with

 for environment then we each went around, said our word

and had each member of the group think about the word

 they picked and

provide a hypothesis of why that person would be this word.

My point of this was to get my peers minds thinking about

different ways to think about the word environment and the

 different meanings it can have.

Then I had my peers walk six times through the path I had

picked for my project.

Each walk through related to one of the themes I had set

 out for my peers to become aware of.

Each walk through consisted of,       

1st walk through, it’s just a walk through. Then I will ask

them to make a list of the things they saw/heard/felt/examined

 on there card.

2nd walk through, is take a picture of something you find

interesting. (Then they will explain it and mark where they

saw it on there card.)

3rd walk through, Walk through and pick up an

object that you

find interesting on the path.

(Why they picked this object and

then they will have to carry it for the rest of the walk

through)

4th Walk through, with your object and you can talk

 but you have to run and play the game tag at the same time.

(for this I am goin to secretly change something

 obvious on the path and see

 if they miss it then I will show them)

5th Walk through, find a way to map your way around the path

with your Card by tracing your location on the path

 to your card as you walk.

 (I drew the path on each card and then walk it and

 used a pen to draw a line.) this is the mapping

 aspect and a different way to look at the path because

 you have to think about where you are exactly on the path,

where as before your location did not matter as much because

 you were looking at things along the path.

6th walk through, I am going to spit the group up,

some walking backwards through the path some walking in

the other direction then we had been.

(I will then ask them if they saw anything different

 in the path and the way they saw it)

I feel this worked very well because many of my peers

 felt like new things came out and they saw thinks

 much differently.

This also happened to me when I did it and though

 I was skeptical I really hope they experienced

 the same thing I did,

which they did.   

CONCLUSIONS

Then we related back to my purpose and the themes

of each of the walk throughs.

This is the deferent ways we think about Environment.

 Then I shared what I got from it and explain why it is

important to be aware of your environment

which is my world changing aspect while relating to the

 flanuer and taxonomy.

 Hopefully they will get something out this like a new

 way of thinking or a new mind set of the deferent

ways we can look at the space around us.

I feel this went very well and everyone seemed to

 be a bit more enlightened by the end.

I myself got a lot out of it, just from doing it

myself and seeing how our expediences differ.

Thank you everyone for having an open mind and

supporting attitude it made everything run very smooth.

 

Peter Mason, Bath Maine, 22yrs old

My locative media project is called “Jonny’s journey in London.”  It follows a fictional character through a set of events and on a specific path in order to create a particular story.  The aim of this project was to show different interpretations of identity, to show how location can change ideas and perspectives, and to compare these findings.

 

I presented a back full of evidence to two groups, which contained scraps of paper, receipts, trash, sound clips, hyperlinks, and an iPod.  The goal was to see how each group took these small piece of evidence and examine how they put each piece into the big picture of the story and how they used these pieces of evidence to construct an identity.

 

I then sent out each group with an iPod loaded with photos that guided them along a path which Jonny followed.  The goal of this part was to see if the groups could map the area based on photos of specific locations and landmarks.  The secondary goal was to see if following the path changed how each group interpreted the evidence.

 

Results:

Each group had in depth interpretations into Jonny’s life and character.  Each group understood that he was frustrated, depressed, and from California.  Both groups, however ignored the piece of evidence that stated he had been expelled, which was one of the biggest details about his journey.  One group was able to follow all of the photos to the location, the other group followed the path partially.  Both groups however, changed their interpretation of Jonny and the evidence as the progressed along the path.

 Media used: flickr, sound recordings, internet, paper, maps, iPod, photographs, cameras.
Pictures used to recreate Jonny’s path can be found online here.

One of the interesting things I took away from our last class is that there is no ONE right way to map; there are MANY different ways to map.  As we made our way to Soho, we used the map provided on the GPS system to navigate along the roads. Along the way, we referred to our handheld maps to find names  of landmarks.  The video we made for the other NN students, though it didn’t tell them how to get from point A to point B, was still a map of our journey, personalized through the introductions and commentary. John Snow used yet another method of mapping to research the trend in cholera outbreaks.  Even during our lunch break, we used a form of “mental mapping” (getting and following directions) to find our way to the museum, where the exhibit we saw displayed a map of the journey through life using photos and narratives of many different people. It had not occurred to me until the end of our class that we are constantly surrounded by maps in various forms and that virtually anything can be mapped.  Kinda neat!

Last week, I was really impressed with the GLobe theater. The theater has played an important role in the history and development of the British theater and most of all, it was home to exhibitions of the works of Billy Shakespeare. The one aspect of the Globe that really fascinated me was the spacial environment of the theater. Three thousand spectators was the norm for Shakespeare’s plays and in a relatively small theater, this large amount of people could have a major effect on the actors because they were just footsteps away from the crowd.

The concept of traditional and non – traditional narrative was definitely on display throughout the course of the day last week, in that a traditional narrative like one of Shakespeare’s plays, required people to physically travel to a theater and sit in their seats for over 3 hours and watch a performance. I would say that our narrative was spacious, in that viewers from different parts of the world will be able to view it without much effort and our narrative was comprised out of a wide variety of topics and locations.

I liked how we used the plague of cholera to expose the importance of networking and how networks are communicated. In this case it was communicated by a central location: the dreadful water pump. The idea of networking was tied together with mapping very nicely, in that mapping and networking come from the same family of concepts. For example, people map their way through cities when sightseeing to find their way and also to find the best and most meaningful locations possible. Networking is a term commonly used in the job field and business world, commonly known as the practice of getting to know people that know people that can help you in some way. So both ideas can be interwined in that when you are networking in the business world, you are actually mapping your way through and instead of mapping your way through the city, you are networking your way in and around the city.

I really liked the Cradle to the Grave exhibit and I feel like it really represented the notion of a “Changing World.” I liked the way the exhibit was presented, using a wide variety of different pills and family photographs to display the effort people make to live longer and the many different changes people undergo at different stages of their life.

I thought that we had a great class last time. Our trip to the Globe theater was very worthwhile. I felt like I learned a lot about Shakespeare and about the British people in general. Theater has always been a large part of society here, and I think it was very important to get an up close view of the Globe. Our walk to Soho was interesting. The spots that we each stopped at to film our videoblogs were all significant places. Learning about John Snow  and the evolution of disease and how the waterpump affected so many people were all of great value to me.  This type of map, along with the cradle to grave exhibit were two examples of simple maps that can provide a great deal of information. By looking at these, and other types of maps we can learn so much about individuals and society. I thought that the activities that we did were very relevant to our class.

I had very few items inside my bag. They were:

1. A notebook

2. A journal

3. A Sharpie

4. A pen

5. Flight Itinerary

From these items, I do not think that one could tell a whole lot about me. In general, I think that looking at items from someone’s bag can help to identify that person, but it would be an incomplete discription. However, I do feel that you could tell that I am a simple person from looking at my bag. I had only a few items that were necessities to me. After thinking about this exercise, I realized that it holds no long-term impact for me.