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

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/

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

www.somersethouse.org.uk

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

http://www.bhavan.net

“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.

http://www.subtlemob.com/

Stunning large-scale photographs of what was once the third largest energy generating site in the UK and the most thermally efficient power station in the world are currently on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects until 29 Sept.

The building’s exterior was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (responsible amongst other things for the red letterbox, phonebox and Bankside Power Station  a.k.a. Tate Modern) and was built and opened in two phases, respectively in 1936 and 1956. It was decommissioned in 1983.

Having visited the derelict building a couple of years ago, I was already taken aback by its sheer scale (It is said that the boiler house could contain St Paul’s cathedral) and the poignant remains of heavy machinery scattered around the storeys. Michael Collins’ photographs succeeded particularly well in conveying the vastness of indoor spaces; He applied the technique of ‘record picture’ photography to capture the experience of the site, extensively used by the government and institutions for the purpose of official visual documentation, and used some traditional equipment to produce the shots, resulting in a somewhat bizarre timeless feel particularly visible in the shots of the control rooms.

The site now faces uncertain prospects after several failed attempts at re-development spanning over two decades, which only succeeded in removing the roof of this brick cathedral, now open to the elements.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)

66 Portland Place
London, W1B 1AD
020 7580 5533

http://www.architecture.com

http://www.recordpictures.com Michael Collins Photography

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