On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

Mythogeography takes the form of a documentary-fictional collection of the internal documents, diary fragments, letters, emails, narratives, notebooks and handbooks of a loose coalition of artists, performers, ‘alternative’ walkers and pedestrian geographers. All Illustrated in full colour by Tony Weaver, who designed the Wrights & Sites’ Mis-Guide books.

The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. ‘Mythogeography’ celebrates that interweaving, its contradictions and complementarities, and is an attempt at a handbook for those who want to be part of it.

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways by Phil Smith is out on 26th January 2010.
Paperback (244 x 170mm), 256 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9562631-3-1

Mythogeography: The Book at Triarchy Press

http://www.mythogeography.com

The retrospective of arguably the best-known contemporary British artist/walker concludes this weekend at the Tate Britain. Richard Long’s practice has consistently placed primitive mark-making at the centre of the work, exploring relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement in the simplest way: by instigating walking as a means of marking, sensing and measuring the vastness and eternity of the world. Long explains with disarming simplicity:

“my work really is just about being a human being living on this planet and using nature at its source. [...] It’s about the intellectual pleasure of original ideas and the physical pleasure of realising them. I enjoy the simple pleasures of wellbeing, independence, eating, dreaming, and sometimes leaving (memorable) traces.”

Long instituted walking as an act of mark-making on possibly the vastest scale possible, freeing sculpture from the constraints of exhibition: the only remains of the artist’s peregrinations in the land are those pictures and diagrams, strangely similar to strategy maps: photographs of deserted landscapes or plans printed with geometrical figures showing the whereabouts of the artist/walker. His trajectory and purpose are often driven by natural forces: gravity, wind, water flow, magnetism, geology – or by his interest in transference (physics) – the idea of a certain equivalence of places and events on different sides of the world.

Using his foot as instrument for art, expressive and perceptive, the footprint as a testimony of his journey and presence in time and space, Long’s walks become an act of inscription; a reminder that the verb “to write” originates from the practice of incising, as in the inscription of running letters in stone or the furrowing of a track.

Richard Long – Heaven And Earth at Tate Britain until 6th September 2009.

Un: Place – A curation by Beatrice Jarvis, exhibition opens 3 June – 20 July at the Jerwood café

Alys Williams / Benjamin Bailey / Seecum Cheung / Ilona Sagar / Dana Macpherson / Inzajeano Latif

An exhibition of personal cartographies and urban responses

Six artists have each created a piece of work that responds directly to the landscape of Jerwood Space, an iconic building situated in the heart of bustling Bankside. This reclaimed area between London Bridge and Waterloo is steeped in fragmented traces of lingering history, where passages of time are lost in hidden corners and marked histories are glimpsed on decaying facades.

The city has and will always remain a myriad of inspiration, This exhibition explores the creative relationship between the city and the individual to develop unique personal cartographies ; relearning mapping as an intricate interaction of the imagination in a diversity of forms and media.

Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London
SE1 OLN

www.jerwoodspace.co.uk or www.jerwoodvisualarts.org

A new book exploring the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.

“The Bio Mapping tool is therefore a unique device linking the personal and intimate with the outer space of satellites orbiting around the earth.”

A collection of essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van der Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford brought together and edited by Christian Nold.

Book launch, with talks by the editor Christian Nold as well as Dr Tom Stafford and Sophie Hope, Friday 24th April 2009 6.30 -9pm at SPACE, Hackney.

SPACE, 129-131 Mare St, London E8 3RH

Jeremy Wood, The World's biggest 'IF'

Last week-end saw one the busiest day at the Kinetica Artfair in London, featuring over 150 exhibiting artists working at the cross-roads of sound / light art, computer art and interactive sculpture, and an extensive programme of related talks. One of them was given by Jeremy Wood, whose work I saw for the first time last year in the V&A Mapping the imagination exhibition. Wood had been working with GPS technology for over 8 years, and started from a disconcertingly simple idea: he noticed the aesthetic qualities of the paths formed on a map by geo-tagged photographs taken during a flight from Berlin to London. From there he has pushed the practice of flying, driving, cycling, walking (and even dog-walking) with a GPS attached, expecting some meaningful shape or pattern to emerge.
It’s interesting to note that while some of this ‘always-on’ recording process may be totally random (and pretty similar to Dan Belasco Rogers‘ work), Wood has also taken a keen interest in plotting routes to achieve a specific – and often funny – purpose (e.g. writing the world’s biggest ‘IF’, or drawing a ship sailing on the shoreline by cycling around the streets of Brighton – amusingly dropping its anchor where it had the most space to draw it in all details: in a park).

Jeremy Wood, Brighton Boat

I would describe Wood’s practice as negotiating around the possibilities offered by space to enable a drawing to take place, diverting and using wearable GPS technology as a mark-making tool. Initially a method for the military to record spatial activity, the technology has also become in the hands of Wood an ‘alibi’ to find out what’s going on where – a reminder of Situationist strategies for the Dérive (He has applied psychogeographic principles to a few drawings). In a different strand of works, he also explored the assumed precision level of GPS and has interrogated how accurate and reliable the technology actually is.
His work has obvious parallels with art movements of the last century: GPS drawings by animals echo the surrealists’ use of snails to paint. The special relationship to the territory established through walking as a creative act is also found in the work of many land artists, including Richard Long and the Stalker collective.
I was curious to figure out how much importance real-time feedback takes in this kind of work – I guess a lot of the fun is about experiencing it for yourself. Good, because Wood actually happens to run regular GPS drawing workshops with schools, local authorities and art galleries.

http://gpsdrawing.com/

From Rhizome News:

Creative Time curator Nato Thompson will lead a discussion of Experimental Geography with Lize Mogel and Damon Rich, two artists who participated in his exhibition (for Independent Curators International) and book (Melville House) of the same name.

Saturday, March 21st, at 3pm
$8 General/ $6 Members
the New Museum, New York, NY

A new Turbulence commission by Jeff Crouse, Andrew Mahon, and Steve Lambert.

http://turbulence.org/works/absml/

From Turbulence.org:

“ABSML is a new markup language that enables the creation of complex sentence formulas for 21st century automatic writing. ABSML tags replace parts of speech and sentence components using sophisticated semantic analysis, regular expressions, and web-based resources. In the right combination, the tags create prose that — while based on formulas and code — do not appear formulaic. ABSML is free and open for others to use, both through an online editor and an API (application programming interface).

“ABSML” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.”

BIOGRAPHIES

JEFF CROUSE creates software and installations that highlight the absurdity of technology in culture. Jeff’s previous works include YouThreebe, a YouTube triptych creator; Invisible Threads, a virtual jeans factory in Second Life; and James Chimpton, a robotic monkey that interviewed the artists of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is currently developing BoozBot, a bar tending robot/puppet; and DeleteCity, a Wordpress plug-in that finds and republishes content that has been removed from sites such as Flickr and YouTube. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Futuresonic festival in Manchester, UK, the DC FilmFest, and the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam. Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a production fellow in 2007. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, an adjunct professor at the IMA program at Hunter College, and a freelance programmer.

STEVE LAMBERT recently made international news with the The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the war and other good news. A Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, Lambert also teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. While he never graduated from high school, Steve went on to study sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a MFA at UC Davis in 2006. He founded the Budget Gallery, an outdoor guerilla art gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004 and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Yes Men. Steve?s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at galleries, art spaces, and museums both nationally and internationally, and was recentl!
y collected by the Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on in multiple outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Punk Planet, and Newsweek.

ANDREW MAHON is currently an undergraduate student at Parsons School of Design studying Design + Technology. His interests lie in the architecture of virtual space. Andrew has worked on numerous projects at Eyebeam since 2007, many with Jeff Crouse, including Invisible Threads, a virtual sweatshop, and You3b, a YouTube Triptych maker. Andrew has also worked with Natalie Jeremijenko at the Environmental Health Clinic, creating visualizations of threatened ecosystems. Over the summer of 2008, Andrew participated in Interactivos@Eyebeam, where his interactive installation was later show. Andrew is currently working on algorithmic music visualizations, freelance web programming, and has recently started interning at Area/Code, helping to develop compelling game situations using GPS tracking.

art [espace] public est un cycle de rencontres-débats rassemblant chaque année à la Sorbonne plusieurs centaines de participants : artistes oeuvrant dans l’espace public, acteurs et penseurs de l’urbain, opérateurs culturels, professionnels, étudiants et chercheurs attentifs à ce que font les artistes dans (et de) l’espace public, curieux de la manière dont peuvent se nouer les liens entre création, cultures, populations et territoires. art [espace] public est proposé par le Master professionnel Projets Culturels dans l’Espace Public (université Paris 1), en partenariat avec Stradda, magazine de la création hors les murs.

Parce que les espaces publics sont de plus en plus normalisés, privatisés, surveillés, parce que les récits formatés du storytelling saturent les imaginaires de manières et de matières souvent insignifiantes, parce que la « misère symbolique » croît, il nous semble nécessaire de suivre ces tentatives d’invention d’autres récits, d’autres images, d’autres lieux de rencontre et de partage, ici et ailleurs, qui essaient d’activer ou de réactiver la dimension publique de l’espace public, son caractère poétique et/ou politique.

Première rencontre-débat le 30 janvier à 19h à la Sorbonne : “La fabrique de l’urbanité”, avec Alexandre Chemetoff, architecte et paysagiste, grand prix de l’urbanisme (2000), et François Delarozière, concepteur de machines de spectacle, notamment des Machines de l’Île à Nantes (http://www.lesmachines-nantes.fr).

Puis :

• Les nouvelles écritures du graffiti – Vendredi 6 février 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Richelieu.
• Comment produire des espaces publics ? Projets d’artistes et expériences culturelles – Vendredi 13 février 2009, 19h-21h. Lieu indiqué par mail après inscription.
• La ville mobile à l’oeuvre – Vendredi 20 février 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Richelieu.
• L’espace public, espace des possibles – Vendredi 27 février 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Richelieu.
• La fabrique de l’urbanité – Vendredi 6 mars 2009, 19h-21h. La Sorbonne, amphi Descartes.
• Le Grand Paris nous appartient, ou la culture métropolitaine partagée – Vendredi 13 mars 2009, 19h-21h. Lieu indiqué par mail après inscription.

Pour découvrir le programme détaillé (trente invités, sept rendez-vous) : http://www.art-espace-public.c.la

On the subject of “the ability of sound to instil even the most mundane images with beauty or new meaning” and matching mood with space, I remember visiting a show appropriately entitled “Shhh… Sounds in Spaces” at the Victoria and Albert museum back in the summer 2004.

The rather unusual aspect of this show was that the museum displays hadn’t been altered in any way; Instead, the museum-goer was given headphones connected to a player containing a set of pre-recorded tracks that was triggered as you crossed specific doorways. The portable technology used (IR sensors and a lightweight headset) was transparently integrated, giving way to the stunning experience of entering a room just to be surprised and self-conscious of our own presence and motion into the space, revealing the hidden aural dimensions of architecture. This ‘invisible exhibition’ was actually turning the experience of visiting a gallery upside-down while engaging visitors with the space in an unparalleled way: the wandering visitor was the focus-point of the art, rather than being simply an external observer of it, by creating their very own audio-cinematic display in (and from) their head as they moved along the rooms and corridors of the museum.

Ten sound artists and musicians were commissioned to create aural pieces re-defining specific rooms and spaces of the museum from their own perspective. The results encompassed a wide variety of approaches to making sound, through a game of contrasts and comparisons between sound and space: compositional, concrete, conceptual, in response either to the architecture, to the objects, to activity, or associations of meaning: from Roots Manuva’s outspoken social commentary in the Norfolk Room to Cornelius’ work which was particularly moving – It was almost as if you felt the music was a direct echo of the light twinkling on the glass and ceramics objects you were looking at.

We all use maps in our daily lives, as sources of information about places, routes, networks or boundaries. Fundamentally, they are simplified schematic diagrams that employ a universal visual language through which we codify and comprehend our world. They offer us means of describing and understanding the untangible too – This exhibition looks at ways artists have used the language and the iconography of maps to express their ideas and experiences of place.
Although mapping is a method for gathering, ordering and exploiting information, the show reminds us that all maps are to some extend the product of the imagination: no map is truly the objective description of a place that it purports to represent. Every map is shaped, coloured, framed by political and social conditions and by personal experience or imaginative projections of its maker.

Journeys made visible

Through his ‘GPS drawing’ practice, Jeremy Wood has over time amassed a considerable amount of data about his personal displacements. His work All London Tracks features all his journeys, by car, foot or air, in and over London. The tiny dark threads that represent these journeys go round buildings or through parks, along roads, to give shape to his practice of the city. The practice of walking as an image-making process is also found in Richard Long’s work A six hour run from Exmoor to Dartmoor (1975) where the artist’s footprints has marked the landscape of a continuous line.
Langland & Bell’s Air Routes of the World (2001) offers an alternative view of the world map, where land masses are omitted and instead air travel defines the important locations.
London’s Kerning (N:B Studio, 2006) is a map of the capital stripped of every line, fill and symbol, leaving only the text to represent the layout and crossings of streets (In the art of typography, kerning refers to the adjustment of space between pairs of letters).

Colours and lines

The show featured a collection of pocket tube maps commissioned by Platform for Art, playfully subverting the map itself which has become over time an icon for London.
John Dilnot’s Map draw together colours from paint charts, which often bear evocative names: Here, those colour names are arranged on a map of Britain around the places after which they are named.

Revisiting the history of map-making, exploring the mind

George Andre’s Draughtsman’s Handbook (1874) is a large volume with a very utilitarian purpose: it was aimed at encouraging best-practice in map drawing. Stephen Walter Similands humorously imitates the iconography of 16-17th century maps in his condensed sketches of the geography of Britain.

During her time as an artist-in-residence in the neuro-radiology department at the Royal London Hospital, Susan Aldworth has questioned the possibility of our inner geography, culminating in her work Birth of a thought (2007).
Michael Drucks’s Druckland Physical and Social (1974) is a self-portrait exploring personal and political identity using the idiom of mapping.

Richard Dadd, 'Sketch to Illustrate The Passions: Patriotism', 1857

Mapping the Imagination – Victoria and Albert Museum