Visitors...to the Worle mediascapes

Here's some beautiful creative feedback from the primary school children who visited to try out the Worle students' mediascapes....

Remapped, and remade...

Remapped again, this time to an area of Worle Community School at Weston-super-Mare. 6th & 7th July 2009.

This 2 day intensive workshop for student, staff, and visiting primaries, is the final part of the e-merge project.

e-merge remapped, as experience of the central London iconic sights here in Weston. Stimulus for discussion, and design of new content and a new format - 2 new mediascapes made with content created during the workshop by students from years 7, 8 and 9.

The second day visitors from 2 local primary schools joined us to experience 'Welcome to Worle' - a more conventional mscape with photos and sounds placed around the area. And 'e-merge Student Videos' - a filmmaking walk with the London videos replaced by 38 short videos of life at Worle.

e-merge, pervasive media and Dot.Biz

e-merge remapped again - this time to the playing fields at Chippenham for Dot.Biz: 'Last In, First Out?', an industry day for current and prospective digital media undergrads, organised by the Interactive Media Centre at Wiltshire College, yesterday. The day focused on how the creative industries can survive recession, positives of innovation, technologies and different ways of doing business; with a range of activities, talks, workshops, panel discussion and screenings. I gave a talk about pervasive media, Jane and I ran a drop-in session and mscape workshop, as well as the panel discussion (filmed for future student resources... well planned day, great!)

It was sunny, so the only obstacles for mediascaping were a football game and a barbeque, also on the fields!
I put a mixture of mscapes on the ipaqs, so there was something for everyone - narrative, drama, film, games - and the obligatory mole stamping, which entertained observers!
Some good feedback from the remapped e-merge, and interesting to hear people's responses to seeing the London footage in Wiltshire - with several people commenting on the similarity of shots - sky, trees, grass, seagulls on screen and off - whilst others noticed the contrasts more, the busy cityscape and roads.

Thanks to Jane for help throughout the day and sharing her experience as a musician and composer for e-merge. Also for her comments on experiencing e-merge live for the first time. Great!

And more music collaboration...

Soundlines, an educational pervasive landscape project with Strata Collective, has been simmering away in the background for the past 6-7 months, and last night we had our first sample audio-walk with music created by Russ and Jane in response to Sand Point, North Somerset.
Contact me if you'd like an invite to a Soundlines hilltop experience celebrating the launch of the Cultural Olympiad at the end of July....

e-merge SouthBank

Experimental re-mapping of 73 film regions from St James's Park to a small grid of backstreets in Southville.

e-merge SouthBank was available for people to try out on the South Bank Arts Trail last weekend, 9th, 10th May. Based at The Garage, Ashton Gate Terrace, along with other short film, mscape tasters, print, sculpture and photography - kindly hosted by Constance and Featherhouse (who do the BEST rice crispy cakes ever....)

Here's Sophia, composer and lead musician from Bristol-based Kukicha, whose music is featured in e-merge, finding new ways to walk and watch in Southville.

And venue no. 4...

e-merge reviewed

A review of e-merge by Alexander Starritt is published on the a-n website's Interface.

sandpit evening

e-merge was one of 8 events at the sandpit evening at the ICA last Wednesday.
It was a buzzing evening, and over 30 people took part in e-merge, with 62 new walks on the website (numbers 102-163).

Thanks to everyone that gave feedback - 64% of those commenting rated the overall experience of e-merge as good or excellent, and 76% said they'd consider playing e-merge again. Great! Good to hear too about the things that didn't work so well, and suggestions for improvement.

Just managed to squeeze in two short interviews - here's one, after dark, with a mystery walker...

Sarah Mosses helped me with ipaqs, forms etc throughout the evening. So I asked her how she'd found the evening - as co-composer of one of the music tracks, innovation programmer and commissioner from BEV ...

e-merge Workshop Plans

Part of the e-merge project is a workshop with school students in Somerset. I wanted to include this, to bring the project back into the SouthWest region and to share it within an educational context. It will be interesting to see how the content transfers to a very different space, and whether the iconic images of central landscape would have any significance or value to young people who may or may not have visited the capital. I anticipate that it may be a good strating point to consider their own environment, and what features of it they would highlight to share with others. It will also be interesting to potentially map the new journeys and films, and/or create new content for the same structure of filmmaking mediascape.

This is the workshop outline sent to the school I hope to work with.

news from BEV

Harriet's video reports are up on the BEV blog - read and watch more about the mscape workshop and e-merge walkers (with me explaining it to them!)

walks & films go live!

The walks and films from Friday, Saturday and Sunday are now live on the website!

Here's the opening scene and trace of the walk by the ladies pictured below.
So, what's the connection with this image - any guesses to what's being planted, why, and how it relates to the park?....

Wo-manning the event

I had to pop back to Somerset & Bristol for a day, missing a couple of sessions. So time to set out a brief for the BEV volunteers wo-manning the table & equipment, who have been great. Over the weekend it was essential for me to be going out with walkers, making sure they were happy with the equipment and seeing how they (and the technology) behaved with e-merge - and therefore what information people need to be given when they first come to the event.

This was the emergent brief...

mscape workshop at Birds Eye View

Yesterday about 22 people, all new to mediascapes, came along to Constance's mscape workshop at the festival. One woman I recognised from e-merge the day before, who took lots of notes and seemed very interested to make her own mediascapes. It was great to have people from different backgrounds there - filmmakers, music composers, directors, editors... And interesting for me to sit in on the workshop and see people go through a rapid learning curve with fun, total engagement and innovation in just 2 hours!

After a great introduction from Constance, and an experience of a basic mscape outside the ICA, I showed a bit of the 'behind the scenes' workings of e-merge.

Harriet's got some video interviews that should be up on the BEV blog shortly, and Constance has written a post on the PMStudio blog too.

inside and out, Sunday

The BEV info stand at the ICA box office (spot the e-merge poster in the background!). It's near the cinema entrances, which is difficult when there's a huge queue waiting to go in (as for the premiere of wonderful The Time of Their Lives today - with Wiltshire guests!); but also great to catch people who've come out after other films - like the lovely ladies below!

How was your walk?

The mediascape goes live today...
add comments here to tell us how you got on, what you thought of e-merge, how you heard about it, development ideas and all your feedback!

creativite consultation & synchronicities...

Today was fun - I went to visit 2nd year digital media students who are making interpretation for a local museum. They've already filmed some beautiful footage of the Wiltshire landscape - Stonehenge, Avebury in the snow - as well as using images of artefacts and other info on finds from our rich heritage.

And we got onto talking about mediascapes as a tool to take the content back out into the location... bluetooth downloads, podcasts & all sorts of fun ideas. (Sounds a familiar connection...)

Afterwards I went to the Wiltshire Community Arts Network meeting in Devizes, to get the latest on the changes to Unitary authority, and what that means for the arts. I spoke about thevery successful Dads Matter Too film and media arts project, as one of several examples of the arts in Wiltshire. The host for the evening told us about a great film showing this Sunday by a Wiltshire colleague at the ICA for Birds Eye View.... small world!!

for the walls...

Part of the funding from the Arts Council covers my design & printing of the postcards and some large format print - to entice people new to mscape to have a go!

The poster's to put up in the ICA during e-merge sessions and encourage new audiences to book out an ipaq and try the walks.

Tracing the Park

'Tests and traces' was yesterday's theme in the park... look out for some video snippets of the first e-merge walkers at http://www.e-merge-walks.com/ when the festival starts. It was great to see the images playing in the location they're made for, and some useful feedback from the Zeph & Alex, thanks.




Pretty quickly the walks were up on a test-site on the web (with wifi & hot chocolate at the ICA cafe), so thankyou to Ben who is busy on the web side of the film-making, right now!

The Royal Parks have kindly agreed to use of their illustrated map in e-merge, so the first task was to walk around the park marking where I was on the map at various points, so mscape could turn the image into a 'real' map.. clever stuff.. 50 points later, and there's a bit of give, but pretty accurate for the central area of the park, so walkers will be able to view their journey on the map if they want to.

Then checking precise location of 'no-go' areas (like the new dredging site, and the park police station) so that the content regions will be in just the right places.

Interesting observation: mscape logs a trace for every map in the mediascape, so as I had Bristol still in there from Friday, as well as the illustrated map I was testing out, it recorded 3 traces...

creating a 5.5mb file for a 95 minute walk, and a trace overlay that made me gasp for a moment!!

Fortunately it was all salvageable with a few tweaks in excel (thanks for the tips, Zeph!) - so my legs didn't ache in vain!

testing time

... there's a lot about time in e-merge, but that's for another post.


Postcard 2 is ready for print.

How do you get one?

Come and try the mediascape!

Today was test-time for e-merge at the Pervasive Media Studio, with a rough version mapped into the pedestrian area at the head of the waterside and horseshoe area. Several people from UWE and the studio tried it out and gave useful feedback from their perspectives of games designers, interactive arts, IT, photography and media. Thanks!

Tomorrow's test-time in the park with a trip to London to finalise maps, regions, active areas and where the content will be 'hidden' as well as test out and document a few other bits & pieces.

print

postcard design 1