Week Two Walk Two

For this walk I decided to use an avoidance technique of wearing sunglasses indoors. I went to the Tucson Mall because I wanted to be sure that I would be passing people and outdoors in the summer in Tucson that's never guaranteed.

As I walked into the mall wearing my sunglasses I felt like I was avoiding someone I knew but didn't want to see. There were crowds of people inside but no one was paying me any particular attention. I went into a store and started browsing the racks and this is when I started to feel weird, like people were staring at me. I left the store and started to walk in the mall again, I felt far more comfortable walking in the mall than I had felt browsing in the store. My sunglasses are dark and cover a good portion of my face so they truly feel like a barrier. Walking around inside with them on made everything a purplish hue and I really felt very disconnected from everything that was going on around me. I sat down on a bench for a while and watched the people going by, a little boy asked his mum if I was blind but she hurried him along. That was something unexpected, I know blind people sometimes wear sunglasses but I started to feel like I had wrongfully elicited someones sympathy for a condition I do not have. This made me feel the most uncomfortable of all and I decided to take my sunglasses off.

Repeating my walk of the mall without my sunglasses on I felt much more at ease and found myself actually trying to look people in the eye but unsurprisingly, no one really did - or if our eyes did connect they swiftly looked away. I went into a store again and started to browse the racks, I felt much more at ease this time and didn't feel like anyone was staring at me.

I think I learned that the expectations of society matter more to me now than I ever thought they would when I was a punk kid. I felt uncomfortable from wearing my sunglasses inside because I was worried about what other people would think, when really very few people either noticed or cared.

Week Two Walk One

I set out on my walk deciding that the first evidence I saw of any subculture would be the subculture I would focus on and catalog. At the first stop sign I came across I noticed that it had been tagged, so tagging it was. I continued walking for an hour (then turned around) and kept looking for tags. I was amazed at how many there were in my neighbourhood and at how oblivious I had been to their existence. The strangest thing was the lack of tagging on walls, the taggers kept to city property: trash cans, stop signs, other road signs, mail boxes, telegraph poles, side curbs and things like that. Does tagging connote ownership of something? In this case I don't think so because it seems like the taggers use city property as a kind of 'bulletin board', so they can see each others names and know who lives in what neighbourhood.

The most interesting thing for me was the erasure of tags, either through weathering or physically painted over because a lot of the time the paint used to paint over it did not match the original paint.

Assignment Two: Inside/Outside the Scene

This week I decided to do the second option, creating a 'tag' or 'burn' of my social scene into my site of investigation. I placed the tag in my neighbourhood (in my garden) because I investigated my neighbourhood for our first walk this week but I didn't see any evidence of tagging in personal gardens. It's my garden, my personal space and my social scene!

The scene I have chosen is Doctor Who. I have been watching Doctor Who since I was five years old, it was cancelled shortly afterwards but I collected books, vhs tapes and magazines of the show. I went to conventions and collected autographs from the stars. In short, Doctor Who is a science fiction show about a character called 'The Doctor' who travels through time and space in an old blue 60's police box (the box has a camouflage circuit which is stuck on police box) called the TARDIS. The box is dimensionally transcendental (bigger on the inside). The Doctor is a Time Lord which means that if he is ever mortally wounded his body can regenerate itself completely (which is handy because it means that the character of the Doctor has been played by 12 different men so far).

For me, Doctor Who was always my special secret escape from the world, very few people my age back then knew anything about it. Now it's a different story because Doctor Who came back in 2005 to critical acclaim.

I decided to do a burn of the TARDIS because it is such an integral part of the show (the actor who plays the Doctor may change but the TARDIS always stays the same) and a very iconic symbol.

I had a great time creating the outline for the TARDIS burn and spent a lot of it thinking about tonight's episode and how the story arc is progressing this series. I used a black sharpie (couldn't find the blue...) and drew the outline from memory.

Michael Bull. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos & the Management of Everyday Life

Bull's article is about the use of personal stereo equipment to alter ones perception of time, travel and each other in the modern world. I found the interview segments particularly interesting because of how important the interviewees made their walkmans in their lives. I remember when walkmans first came out in the UK; they were the must have accessory for anyone (and insanely expensive!). I didn't experience owning a walkman until I was around 14 and portable CD players were the new big thing. It is true that the novelty of being able to listen to music while you are going about your daily business makes it all more tolerable somehow. Bull talks about how people tend to 'zone out' of their actual environment, especially when traveling. Having worked in London I know that's true. However, while I was reading the interviews with the people who ride the tube everyday I couldn't help wondering if this activity is as prevalent now after the 2005 bombings as it was then. I lived in London in 2006-7 and rode on the tube often, I noticed more people doing things that didn't involve headphones (reading, playing on a ds or phone) than a carriage full of people listening to personal stereos. I feel like a lot of the novelty of owning a portable music device has worn off. I understand that Bull wanted to interview people that use their walkmans often but I feel like he's looking at a one-sided sample. All the people he interviewed seemed to be crazy about their walkmans; needing the music to wake them up and put them to sleep. Certainly, I went through a phase in my teenage years where I was plugged into some kind of device 24/7 but no longer. I wish that Bull had included some interviews with people who own walkmans but don't use them all the time. I feel that he would have gathered some interesting insights into how people view their days when they use them compared to when they forget them at home.

The interviews with 'Mandy' from page 31 onwards were particularly interesting because she seemed to use her walkman as a device to shape the world around her. Mandy felt that by listening to her walkman while she was travelling that she was never really alone and she used the landscape of what she saw (or did not see) and the soundscape of her stereo to create her own world. This personal anecdotal evidence was far more interesting to me than most of what Bull said because the personal interviews give me a way to connect to the article. I started to think about my own use of walkmans in the past and why I don't really use one anymore but when I did use one it was used as a tool to shield me from others and as a way to pass the time on boring commutes. Examining my past through this one lens makes me think about the choices I made back then in how I chose to spend my time. It makes me nostalgic on the one hand and annoyed on the other because in a way I never really interacted with what was around me. In short, I think the interview segments within Bull's article are what really made it work for me because it provided an emotional link which led me to analyse my own use of personal stereo devices.

Mapping Senses Analysis

Before I listened to this article when I thought of a map, I did think of a road map or some kind of cartography map and I always thought that those maps included everything because I wasn't really thinking about what 'everything' meant. I never thought of power lines or sewer lines as a map, yet they are mapped for the companies that service them. I wonder what a true map of a city would look like, would we even be able to look through it? I find myself imagining some kind of 3-d hologram like you see in sci-fi films.

The idea that any map leaves out details is interesting to me. When you focus only on one sense then you are missing out on the others, yet, when you do focus on one sense that sense becomes stronger. There's a trade-off, you're able to notice more when you're just listening to the things around you yet you lose the experience of seeing them with your eyes.

I found Deb Monroe's piece particularly compelling. She is mapping her own body through her sense of touch but her map is all wrong. She is not really feeling the truth of her own body, just want her brain thinks she feels, or rather, what her hypochondria is telling her she finds. I started to feel sorry for Deb, thinking that she was obsessing over tiny details and driving herself crazy thinking she's got some kind of terrible illness every time she comes across a new freckle or gets a headache.

I started thinking about the kinds of maps I keep and my mind went immediately to the restroom. Wherever I am, I need to know where the nearest restroom is and I chart in my mind the quickest way to get there. If I have been to a restroom before and know that it is frequently empty I keep it in my mind, building a map of the abandoned restrooms so that if I ever need them, I can find them quickly. There's one on the top floor of the Drama building that is usually empty and one on the top floor of the Student Union that is usually clear of people. The reason I do this is because I have a chronic illness called Ulcerative Colitis which can make me need to rush to the bathroom. The reason for wanting an empty one is if I am ill, I'm likely to have diarrhea which can be very embarrassing if you're in a bathroom full of people waiting to use the stall. Before I got UC I never noticed restrooms, never really cared about them but since I was diagnosed I keep a list in my head of the memorable (clean, usually empty, soft toilet paper) restrooms I've been to so that if I'm ever in that place again - I know where to go. The restroom is such a pinnacle of my illness; it's the place where I spend the most time when I am ill. It has become a much more important place to me than I'm sure it is to most people.

Assignment One: Ephemeral/Site

I've been thinking about desire lines and other lines created in the landscape and I wanted to create some kind of line. I'm spending the weekend at my in-laws and I noticed that they pruned a tree from their front garden and left it to dry out in their back garden. I started thinking about the twig fences I would see back home and I started breaking twigs off the tree and creating a line in the back garden. I wanted this to be evocative of a desire line in an unexpected place. The back garden works for this idea as it is not the kind of place you usually find a well trodden pathway like a desire line.

Walk #2, Desire Lines

I grew up in a town called Basingstoke in the north of Hampshire in England. There's a village near us called Micheldelver and by that is Micheldelver wood where we would go walking after Sunday lunch. My parents have always viewed footpaths as optional and there were many times when we would begin walking the condoned path only for my Dad to veer off into the woods, following a 'desire line'. I used to insist that we would get lost that way but my Dad kept following the paths. One time, in the middle of winter, we had gone out walking and my Dad had followed a path down into a deep, dark, wood. The temperature suddenly plummeted and the sky, already an opalescent white started spitting out snowflakes. The flurry turned into a blizzard and my parents started to panic, my brother ran on ahead and found a woodsmans hut. We sheltered under their garage as the hut was empty. Finally the snow let up and we followed a trail made by a jeep out and back onto the path.
Desire lines are different in Tucson, unless you're up on Mount Lemmon. They are still there but not as obviously so. I was walking in Reid Park, hopeful of finding some when I came across a hill near one of the child parks, two sides of the hill were stripped bare of grass. Children must come racing up here and then barreling down the other side, maybe even on bikes. There were some children in the park and I didn't want anyone to freak out about me taking photographs so I concentrated on the desire line. Once I found one I started seeing more but then I started to wonder if these were true desire lines or just dead grass. They seemed to start but then peter out, not really going anywhere.

Tuesday 5.17.11 Walking

Sense One: Touch

Foot over foot stumble with

gravel uneven beneath feet

touching acrylic soles suffocated

by cotton fibers

this is walking

The uncomfortable raw rubbing

of my thighs as I place foot

in front of foot skin collide

with gelatinous layer of fat

beneath skin

Wind whipping across ears

filled with cotton wool and

I place foot in front of foot

over uneven surfaces

pavement disappearing

into gravel

a litany of textures beneath

my thin soles sites me in

only this place where gravel is

shaped like devils tears

and just as red.

Sense Two: Smell

There's this place down the road

using some kind of wood

that smells like holidays in France on the cheap

a barbeque smell

searing animal flesh to a charcoal grill

My Dad holding a Kronenbourg

with a case in the fridge

of the caravan we're renting

I slept on the couch

My brother claimed the room

two beds pushed together each

night and coming apart by the morning

Someone nearby is smoking and

fags make me think of my mother

sitting in the kitchen endlessly

chainsmoking cigarette after

cigarette finally I have an answer

for why I was born pre-term

I asked her to quit so many times

My three brothers smoke

a terrible gift passed down

to unthinking children

Sense Three: Hearing

air conditioner whining clicking on

clicking off and still whining from across

the street tap tap tapping of heels clicking

a woman late for work and jogging in inappropriate shoes

across the parking lot asphalt

car door slamming ignition firing engine starting to turn over and over and over

while the wind whistles down the street and children are playing

they should be at school? Their parents not watching as they splash in the pool

a woman was shot here at this complex, a shot rang out in the night

but I didn't hear it then, even though I hear it now

someone is humming as they clank open their mailbox

dry metal chafing and creaking

burned brittle by the desert sun

a startled wren flies out of its hole and admonishes me from the safety of the telegraph pole

go away it seems to chirp bobbing its head up and down

it rustles its wings and flaps further away

while I walk silently on.

River and Tides

Although I have seen "River and Tides" a few times before I am always struck how, each time I view it, I discover something new that I didn't notice before. This is rather like Andy Goldworthy's approach to making art; experiencing something you think you know but discovering something unknown.

It feels to me as if Goldsworthy is always waiting for the perfect 'time', whether it be the right season for him to collect the materials he uses or knowing when to stop something he is building, bringing it right to the edge of collapse.

When Goldsworthy is travelling, he feels like he needs to go to work as soon as he arrives in a strange place. He sees the form he is obsessed with (the river) all over the world yet it is not 'his' river, it is familiar but foreign to him. Goldsworthy says that the tide is repeated all around the world yet working on the shores of Canada he feels disconnected from his home place and is a stranger there. I feel like Goldsworthy has to make work somewhere in order for him to understand the place that he is in. While he is working on the shore he discovers that the place he has built his sculpture just happens to catch the early morning light, making the icicles glow beautifully. This element of serendipity seems to be ever present in his work but I am not convinced that he does not know how things are going to turn out. Goldsworthy uses the warmth from his hands to melt the ice just enough for it to stick to another piece of ice but ultimately it is the warmth from the morning sun which will destroy his sculpture. There's really nothing I can think of in my own life at this time to compare to this situation as it feels very unique to me.

At times Goldsworthy seems content with the destruction of his work but at other times it seems to infuriate him. The 'salmon hole' floating away from him makes me feel content yet the bracken sculpture collapsing on him frustrates him. Perhaps this has something to do with his ability to take something to the edge of collapse and then step back from it. When Goldsworthy feels he has completed something he is happy to let the elements take it away from it.

Goldsworthy's education at an Art college stifled him creatively, it felt wrong for him to be secluded inside when what he was attracted to was happening outside in the elements, particularly Morecambe Bay. What's interesting to me is that this is one of the first creative things I did when I went to Art college in England. We took a trip to St. Ives and spent two days working on the beach. Much like Goldsworthy trying to finish his seed form before the tide came in us students all tried to finish our ceramic pieces before the tide came in and I literally ran away from the roaring sea with my hands dripping in clay, my piece sucked into the tide.

Something about being secure in a place can mean that you aren't really looking at what's around you, it is so known to you that you don't bother to look for the unknown.

Each time you fail at doing something, you learn more about how to do whatever is it you were trying to do so that the next time you try, you have a head-start. I feel this way about the work I did in my project for Advanced Photography last year. Every time I tried to photograph these gummy army men I didn't quite get it right but towards the end of the project I was close to achieving what I had set out to do. I spent each weekend holed up in the light studio trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong and each experiment brought me closer to figuring it out.

Goldsworthy makes pieces that are out on site but also his work can be inside, like the work in the Museum. Although his work seems connected to the places he creates it in, the work in the museum feels disconnected from those places. The use of the clay helps this disconnect because it is a substance taken out of its place.

The land of the British Isles looks the way it does because of a thousand years of farming, some of that due to sheep-herding but mostly from agrarian activity. What I found interesting is that (I'm fairly sure he didn't mention this) the stonewalling method found in the north of Britain is the same method he uses to make his seed form and also the wall in New York. This method of wall building came from the north of England and was used more or less exclusively to keep sheep in. This is another connection from Goldsworthy's home place to his work sites and it's interesting that he didn't mention it. These walls really mark the absence of the herds that were once there and the families that herded them. I have some family that live in and around Rochdale in the north of England. When we would visit up there we often drove around the countryside and I spent endless hours staring out of the car window. There are falling down houses in those abandoned fields, traces that mark the place where a history was once made. It is sad but also gratifying that those who took from the earth are able to give back to it. The earth always reclaims. It seems to me that Goldsworthy is interested in the inbetween state of things, always returning to the earth but existing in one moment outside of that erosion.