Living Landscapes

I went to the rather sumptuous Living Landscapes AHRC conference at Aberystwyth last week - packed with interesting performances, installations, papers and plenarys.. and a performance workshop (7am in the woods - nice weather, phew!) Ideas emerging, areas of interest re-inforced, met a few old friends, and many more new.

There's a bit more about it on the Strata blog

Descending Angel on National Library Sounds, forest art and simultaneous intercontinental performance - documented in the summary session!

View from above...

Simon Whitehead performance...another inter-continental collaboration...magical

In the woods, ideas for a future piece of work...

101 walks on the web

Saturday was lovely and sunny - and time for a leisurely walk around the park! After taking all the remaining logs off the ipaqs, checking them all for software and storage files, and packing up at the ICA, it was great to just go out for a walk and explore parts of the park that other walkers hadn't visited so much.

So the final 4 films of 101 walks on the web are from my walks. There's one walk I have yet to do - a walk avoiding the film regions, to see if I can make a film-less film with the film-making mediascape whilst walking in the park!! (My sense of subversion, pushing the boundaries... or simply bending the rules!) Anyway, that's for next time...

There's lots more documentation, video interviews, and more on the ideas behind the mediascape that I'd like to add to this blog.. so do come back and visit after the festival!

Oh, and if you tried the mediascape (or just watched films on the web), please take a couple of minutes to answer the survey about your experiences, thanks! (You could even win a copy of the limited edition print!)

Thanks to everyone who helped, took part, and told friends...

And watch this space for news of our plans for an e-merge day in the Park in late spring/early summer.

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...

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!

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!