Ctrl-N/ journal: repository of texts, research and documents on cities, mapping, networks, psychogeography and the experience of places; Written and maintained by Olivier Ruellet.
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.
21st / 22nd August 2010
The Alleyway
219 Glyn Road
E5 0JP
The preview will feature projects and presentations from three artists whose work is currently engaged in the issues raised by Translocated, as well as some work in development and an open forum to discuss the boundaries of translocation.
// PROGRAMME ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Saturday 21st August
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4 – 5 pm
exhibition preview
5 – 6 pm
presentations
(curator’s introduction, artist talk, open forum)
7 – 8 pm
drinks reception
8 – 10pm
film screening
// Sunday 22nd August
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4 – 6pm
video actions
6 – 8pm
1-to-1 guided walks
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Please RSVP by email: olivier@ctrl-n.net
Join our Facebook Group
or RSVP to our Facebook Event
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.
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
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.
A couple of days ago my good friend Roberto invited me to take part in an ‘experiment’, in fact it was a sketch for a live art piece he will be presenting at the Rifrazioni Festival of Contemporary Art (Lazio, Italy), in which he and I will be participating in late July.
It was a hot summer night in Clapton. I was sat on a bench in Millfields Park, eyes closed, waiting for the moment to arrive. A presence behind me, someone walking in the grass. A blindfold on my eyes. Roberto sat next to me, opened my hands and took my keys. From now on, I could only follow him – I felt somewhat submitted, I had to listen. He was the only guide. The story he was recounting was shifting time and place: it was now winter and I was in Brooklyn.
Eyesight disabled, the first steps in the grass were a little intimidating. Because of this sensory deprivation, my way of perceiving the world had to be reconsidered, and the world itself was changed into a place full of challenges: my feet became sensors of the ground, every bump a potential hurdle, every kerb a threshold, every wall an insurmontable frontier. Despite being relatively familiar with the area we traversed, I was completely unable to tell where I was going.
Sound was the other point of reference I could rely upon, but again it was hugely transformed by the effect of the blindfold: Ambient sounds took a whole new significance; they became abstracted, almost as if they were part of a setup, akin to a film soundtrack. Street chatter and conversations strangely felt like they were ‘acted out’ by people.
This unique experience, reminiscent of a soundwalk like Subtlemob, if only better, placed me at the center of an invisible stage, where everything and everyone around me took up a new role, forcing me to focus both on my senses – to make sense of my surroundings, and on my imagination – to visually interpret the story I was listening to.
The Rifrazioni festival takes place on the 29th, 30th of July and 1st of August in Anzio e Nettuno (Italy).
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.
The summer season at Rivington Place proposes new artistic perspectives on mapping: bringing together nine contemporary international artists working in film, installation, print and audio, whose work challenge the authority of the map and question the underlying structures and hierarchies that inform traditional mapmaking and social and political issues surrounding it, or uses maps to examine self-positioning and global geographies.
Maps are often involved in debates around subjects such as resources, territoriality, identity and migration; but in a globalised, trans-national world infused by new technological advances and rapid changes, the two dimensional map has become less adequate.
The exhibition includes three new commissions by Gayle Chong Kwan, Susan Stockwell and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, alongside recent work by Milena Bonilla, Alexandra Handal, Bouchra Khalili, Otobong Nkanga, Esther Polak and Oraib Toukan.
‘Who Map is it?‘ runs at Rivington Place, from the 2nd June to the 24th July 2010.
Please visit the InIVA website for full listings of events (symposium, talks, panel discussion, tours and workshops) associated with the exhibition.
This spring, Somerset House Trust and Sound and Music will present River Sounding, a major new commission by sound artist Bill Fontana, which will invite visitors on a journey through the hidden sound worlds of the River Thames. Opening on 15 April 2010 at Somerset House, the work will create an imaginary acoustic map of the Thames, taking visitors through Somerset House’s atmospheric subterranean spaces, normally closed to the public, and out to the Great Arch on the Embankment, highlighting the building’s historical connection to the river.
River Sounding at Somerset House features a series of different sound sequences, recorded by Bill Fontana along a one-hundred-mile section of the Thames stretching from Richmond to Southend. Projected through loudspeakers installed at river level, in the hidden pathways beneath the courtyard, visitors will be immersed in the rich musical vocabulary of the Thames, from whistling buoys and steam pumps to hidden underwater sounds and rushing water at river locks. The sounds will be played alongside his video images of the recording locations, which include Tower Bridge, HMS Belfast, the Thames Barrier and the historic Teddington Lock.
As well as revealing the rich and varied sound worlds of the Thames, River Sounding will pay homage to Somerset House’s historical connection to the river. Somerset House was originally built as a grand riverside palace in the sixteenth century and in the eighteenth century became the home of Admiral Nelson’s Navy Office, with boats entering through the building’s Great Arch. River Sounding will return the sounds of the river to Somerset House, highlighting the forgotten shared history of one of London’s most iconic buildings and the Thames.
River Sounding demonstrates the communicative power of sound art, and the commission launches Sound and Music’s new programme, dedicated to championing and developing audiences for new and innovative music and sound. It will be complemented by a series of film screenings and talks by prominent cultural figures including Iain Sinclair and Romesh Gunesekera, Writer in Residence at Somerset House, engaging with River Sounding’s themes, which will take place in and around Somerset House.
Trained as a composer, Bill Fontana (born 1947, USA) is internationally known for his pioneering works in sound, which examine the nature of our acoustic environment. He has presented his “sound sculptures” at leading museums around the world, as well as at iconic locations in many of the world’s great cities, including London’s Millennium Bridge and Big Ben, San Francisco’s Golden Gate and Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. He has received numerous fellowships for his work, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1986. He lives and works in San Francisco and is represented in the UK by Haunch of Venison.
15 April – 31 May 2010
Somerset House
The Strand
London WC2R 1LA
Opening hours:
Monday – Sunday: 10:00am– 6:00pm,
Thursdays: late night opening until 8:00pm
Admission Free
‘Holding Time’ is a survey of still, object-based works derived out of ‘Time-based’ practices by artists. An opportunity to dialogue, debate and share how artists extend their practice from Performance, Moving Image and Time-based concerns into recording, documenting, interventions and object-making. The exhibition has been curated by Darshana Vora from an open call.
Participating Artists:
Arantxa Echarte, Beatrice Jarvis, Bettina John, Bill Leslie, Cinzia Cremona, Cos Ahmet, Daniel Somerville, Darshana Vora, David Theobald, Elaina Arkeooll &Tim Flitcroft, Ella Golt, Helena Eflerová, Herve Constant, Laura Davidson, Mat Chivers, Nicola Mccartney, Peter Nutley, Rachel Gomme, Sam Holden, Sebastian Edge, Daniel Belasco Rogers & Sophia New, Teresa Paiva, Tory Smith, Wiracha Daochai and Yaron Lapid.
Opening Preview: Thursday, April 8, 2010. 6pm-8pm
Exhibition Dates: April 8-14, 11am-7pm.
Special Events: Sat & Sun, April 10 & 11, 3pm-5pm: Performances and artist’s talks
Online catalogue
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, UK Centre
4a Castletown Road
London W14 9HE
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 207 381 3086/4608
“Part city symphony and part visual poem, this award-winning film explores the invisible life of London, its patterns and its hidden secrets, through the eyes of crane drivers working high above its streets.
The result is a lyrical meditation about how our existence is shaped through the environment we inhabit, both for the drivers and the people they are watching far down on the ground below them.”
You will be slightly disappointed if you expect to see here a deep reflection on psychology and alter-urbanism, to go by the over-stated description above – the film monologues consists for the best part of mundane platitudes narrated by the crane drivers themselves, though this doesn’t remove any of the visual beauty of this peaceful string of panning shots featuring highly unusual sights of London. Overall, an enjoyably conemplative film I would highly recommend for lovers of the city skyline, its buildings and its cranes.
The Solitary Life of Cranes Dir. Eva Weber (UK), 2008, 28 min.
The Solitary Life of Cranes / City of Cranes [Director Eva Weber's website]
This documentary is available to watch on 4OD until the 8th of January.
“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.
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