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

“Things… made truly Musicall with Art by my correction, and yet plaine, and capable with ease, by my direction.” Composer Thomas Ravenscroft, from Deutoromelia, 1609

At the weekends an eerie quiet descends on the City of London, in offices, squares, churchyards and streets, broken by the occasional sound of traffic and church bells. The silence of the city has inspired artist Susan Philipsz’s first commission in the capital. Her unaccompanied voice resonates through empty streets around the Bank of England, across postwar walkways and medieval alleyways and along the banks of the River Thames.

SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London takes inspiration from the heightened presence of the human voice in Elizabethan London. To be heard over one another a natural order and harmony evolved in the cries of the street traders which enthused composers of popular song such as Thomas Ravenscroft to write canons where one voice follows the other in a round. Another popular song form for several voices, the madrigal emerged in Italy in the 16th Century and soon travelled to England where it flowered as the English Madrigal School.

SURROUND ME embraces the vocal traditions of the City of London connecting themes of love and loss with those of fluidity, circulation and immersion; the flood of tears, the swelling tide and the ebb and flow of the river, to convey a poignant sense of absence and loss in the contemporary City of London.

Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2010 for Lowlands, a work installed under three bridges beside the River Clyde in Glasgow. Her work is in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, 5 October 2010 – 3 January 2011.

This project is supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.

Saturdays & Sundays only, 10am – 5pm
9 October 2010 – 2 January 2011

Change Alley / London Bridge / Mark Lane / Milk Street / Moorfields Highwalk / Tokenhouse Yard

Surround Me is an Artangel commission.

Site-specific map plotting the location of FM commercial and pirate radio stations within London. Power lines are drawn in pencil on the back of the map which conduct the electricity from the radio to the front of poster. Placing a metal pushpin onto each station then allows us to listen to the sound broadcast live from that location.

— from the artist’s statement

mappiness is a research project created by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), designed to gain a better understanding of how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces.

To that end, a free iPhone app has been developed, regularly pinging its users to ask them how they’re feeling, as well as a few other things: who they are with, where they are, what they are doing. The anonymous data gets sent back to a server, along with the user’s approximate location from the iPhone’s GPS, and a noise-level measure.

The project being in its early stages, the map displayed on the website doesn’t really give an acurate picture of the spread of happiness in the country – a huge proportion of respondants being in situated in London! – though interestingly the real-time hedonimeter shows that London people are slightly happier than the rest of the UK. I’m pretty sure this could easily be challenged, but I’ll leave that to the academic paper that will come out of the survey…

http://www.mappiness.org.uk/

A new outdoor mobile phone game is to be piloted in London on Saturday July 24th 2010.

Exploding Places takes you on a journey through time and space. You arrive in a fictional Woolwich in South East London, create your own community and place them in the real world Woolwich. Over the space of an hour you and your community travel through 120 years of local and global history. The First World War passes in just a few minutes as you play the game to ensure your survival.

You play on the phone screen and through headphones, as you walk the town’s real streets. You can interact with other players, join together and respond to conflict or difficulties in each other’s communities. The ultimate goal is to build a thriving community that grows and creates a new generation, based on health, wealth, knowledge, participation and your contribution to the game. The game will be broadcast on the BBC Big Screen in central Woolwich giving public audiences the chance to watch the games unfold.

Exploding Places is a real world SIM city or Monopoly, played live on the streets of Woolwich. The game offers participants a playful way to engage with London, engaging with its social, community and
regeneration issues. It will explores how new communities come to live in new areas, what happens to them, how they grow, whether they thrive and settle, whether they move on, etc.

Exploding Places is part of the exciting new area of creative endeavour called locative or pervasive gaming, bringing new and emerging technologies into the public realm. It sits alongside the critically acclaimed work of companies such as Blast Theory whose games have received major international awards and BAFTA nominations.

Be the first to play Exploding Places

To play you must first register a place:
Go online: www.explodingplaces.org
or call 020 8858 2825
or Email anna@streamarts.org.uk

Once registered, come to the launch and play:
When: Saturday 24th July 2010, 11am – 5pm
Where: The Tramshed, 51 – 53 Woolwich New Road, London SE18 6ES
Directions: British Rail / DLR: Woolwich Arsenal, then 2 minute walk to The Tramshed

Exploding Places www.explodingplaces.org

Created by Active Ingredient www.i-am-ai.net in collaboration with Greenwich Heritage Centre, Woolwich Polytechnic and Woolwich residents. Active Ingredients locative game Heartlands won the UK and Ireland Satellite Navigation Competition and the Nokia Ubimedia Mindtrek Award in 2007.

Commissioned by Stream www.streamarts.org.uk, the Greenwich based producer of public and collaborative art.
In 2005 Stream produced the Greenwich Emotion Map using bio-mapping technology with artist Christian Nold.
Funded by Arts Council London and Greenwich Council.
Produced in collaboration with Horizon Digital Economy Research, funded through grant EP/G065802/1 from Research Councils UK.

Comme chaque année en juillet, “la plus grande course cycliste au monde” déroule sa pseudo-intrigue le long des routes nationales. L’intérêt sportif de l’évènement se ternit d’année en année, mais pas son succès populaire. Néanmoins, pour celui qui sait regarder derrière le peloton et au-delà du classement, le sport y est vite relayé au second plan, remplacé par un travelogue d’images, un vrai documentaire de voyage, qui plus est filmé en temps réel. Enfilades de lacets, survol de chateaux et de villages pittoresques, particulatités géologiques… on y montre le paysage sous toutes ses coutures.

Il est d’ailleurs fascinant de remarquer la place donnée a la géographie dans la couverture médiatique, du moins en France: les commentaires de chaque étape incluent systématiquement des références à l’histoire et à l’économie locales. La moissoneuse-batteuse médiatique active les noms de lieux sur son passage, dresse un portrait-robot de chaque ville, et transmet à distance une image du territoire.

This map shows all trains (yellow pins) on the London Underground network in approximately real time.

Fetching live departure data from the TfL API, and placing it onto a Google map, this live map project was realised in only a short amount of time at Science Hackday on 19/20th June 2010. A small number of stations are misplaced or missing; occasional trains behave oddly…; some H&C and Circle stations are missing in the TfL feed.

The author of the project is Matthew Somerville (with helpful hinderances from Frances Berriman and James Aylett). Station icon by Tim Diggins. Source code.

http://traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/

“imagine walking through a film, but it’s happening on the streets you walk down everyday.”

‘As if it were the last time’ is a series of street actions/soundwalks which took place in London, Bristol and Liverpool on the 12th, 13th and 14th of November. After signing-up, participants were able to download one of two soundtracks and gather along a location that was kept secret up to the beginning of the event, in order to take part in an impromptu public performance. On a rainy Thursday evening, the mob started to congregate in the area around Seven Dials, and at 6pm sharp, mp3 players began to unravel their story:

As an atmospheric soundscape started to resonate in my headphones, the heavy drops of rain were giving the situation a sense of heightened drama. The first couple of words whispered in my ear coincidentally seemed to be echoing what was going on around me: someone looking over their shoulder, readjusting their coat, putting their hand in their pocket… Everything that was said seemed to predict what was going to happen, as if the street suddenly became the scene of a theater that was directly responding to the soundtrack, as if seemingly random passers-by were all part of an orchestrated setup, their choreographed moves obeying a pre-determined script.

The result of taking part in subtlemob: the schizophrenic feeling of being both a spectator and actor, an insider and an onlooker. Above all, the inexplicably intense sensation of belonging to the street, of being here and now in the city.

http://www.subtlemob.com/

While we may think of geographic maps as amongst the more objective graphics, Stephen Boyd David reminds us of the subjective nature of mapping in this essay published in Emotional Cartography (Ed. Christian Nold). There is always some degree of subjectivity in an image. The way we see the world is channelled by language (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and linguistics have taught us that maps, like pictures and words, do not represent things, but shared ideas of things.

In contrast with the perspective, which needs a viewpoint, the map doesn’t need an onlooker – it is the first panopticon.
However maps do distort and select – because they are made for a purpose: they carry place-names, or indicate a hierarchy of importance. Whereas aerial photography shows the “raw stuff”, a well-made and usable map must be clear and legible, serving its purpose precisely through its selectivity. But some profound distortions go unnoticed because they are embedded in a shared cultural perspective: as the terrestrial globe is unwrapped on a flat surface, Europe is conveniently located in the middle of most Mercator projections. Yet even a globe, considered to be the most direct model of the Earth, has its northern hemisphere “up”, still dominating the under-developed world.
The first level of subjectivity arises from who we are and what we are trying to represent; on top of this is always overlaid our belonging to a wider cultural group: “dominant groups often assume that the shape of their world is the shape of the world.”

Oskar Karlin, Elephant & Castle-centred tube map.

Where you start a journey is sometimes as important as where you are: Time and space has already been compressed by ever faster mechanised travel, and increased ease of access makes the territory a different shape and size, experienced differently in different places. This is evidenced by Oskar Karlin’s time travel map, showing travel times from Elephant & Castle station, distorting Beck’s original underground map which is itself a heavily deformed representation of the topography giving much greater importance to the central area at the expense of the periphery. The emphasis on connections (or absence of them), the relative proximity of places is reminiscent of space syntax diagrams showing the connections between adjacent rooms in a building, rather than their relative layout as shown in a plan view.

Perspective is another way of prioritising and organising importance: The introduction of perspective in the BBC broadcast weather maps attracted much criticism, not least because it was thought to breach the corporation’s duty of impartiality. The same effect was exaggeratingly used by Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker’s view of the world to a humorous end.

Tom Carden’s Travel Time Tube Map expands on Karlin’s work by allowing any user to dynamically reorganise the map in order to represent travel times from any station:

Tom Carden, Travel Time Tube Map

A new generation of web-enabled interactive devices has enabled dynamic and on-demand maps to be produced, customised by users to fit their interests, altering the role of map-maker and opening up a map to new expressions, re-introducing objectivity into an object that has become more universal. Portable GPS technologies have further changed the stakes by adding the here and now, making maps inherently personal and embedded in the present.

Download the book (Ed. Christian Nold) from Emotional Cartography.

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