- result in a pamphlet/chapbook of poetry; a companion journal in the form of a blog; a website giving contextual information concerning the locations including photographs, video and audio readings of the poems; a virtual installation of a reading of the poems within the landscape through the use of QR coded markers (voceti).
I am pleased to report that I am making good progress; more than half the locations have been visited, photographs taken, video shot; I have designed the website, noted my progress with the research in this blog, and started to write-up my field notes in another; I have written a few of the sonnets and sketched out ideas for others....but, how exactly am I going to achieve 'the virtual installation' of the poems within the landscape?
My first idea was to design some 'voceti' vinyl stickers, have sheets printed with QL codes on them and place them on street furniture at each location. The QL code would link directly to a short video clip on Youtube which contained footage of the location and a reading of the poem; the same QL codes would be placed beneath the poems in the book, tying together text, utterance and landscape. I had even gone as far as sketching out an idea of what the vinyl stickers might look like, using traffic signs as inspiration.
All of this would work. The issue is, placing branded signs anywhere is 'fly-posting' and, as all 47 pages of the following HMSO 'good practice guide makes clear, it is both illegal, and to a greater or lesser extent, depending where you live,actively discouraged by our much beloved municipal authorities tasked with keeping Britain tidy. You do not need to leaf through much of the guide to realise that any plan to drop a friendly note to the local environmental department to seek permission to place stickers on some lamp-post or other is going to result in either a resounding silence, a definite 'no', or a bewildered shrug. Furthermore, my early forays into the landscape have proven to me just how much so called 'public space' is controlled by warning notices, local bye-laws and watched over by CCTV.
The Control of Fly-Posting: a Good Practice Guide Date published: November 2000 ISBN: 0 11 753569 9
The other problem, is if I do place the voceti stickers out there, who is going to know? I could link them to the book, but realistically, experience has shown, that in terms of sales from a small press, few poetry books ever make it to three figures, if you sell a few score books of your heartfelt verse, you've done well.
While I was mulling over these matters, I was thinking about the work of Anthony Gormley, not just 'Another Place' but some of the other installations detailed on his web-site. In particular I was taken by his work from 1990, Room III.
My first idea was to design some 'voceti' vinyl stickers, have sheets printed with QL codes on them and place them on street furniture at each location. The QL code would link directly to a short video clip on Youtube which contained footage of the location and a reading of the poem; the same QL codes would be placed beneath the poems in the book, tying together text, utterance and landscape. I had even gone as far as sketching out an idea of what the vinyl stickers might look like, using traffic signs as inspiration.
The Control of Fly-Posting: a Good Practice Guide Date published: November 2000 ISBN: 0 11 753569 9
The other problem, is if I do place the voceti stickers out there, who is going to know? I could link them to the book, but realistically, experience has shown, that in terms of sales from a small press, few poetry books ever make it to three figures, if you sell a few score books of your heartfelt verse, you've done well.
While I was mulling over these matters, I was thinking about the work of Anthony Gormley, not just 'Another Place' but some of the other installations detailed on his web-site. In particular I was taken by his work from 1990, Room III.
Gormley describes this work as follows
ROOM III is the minimum space the human body can occupy. I was measured in a tight crouching position, and as with ROOM II, two concrete volumes were made, one for the body and one for the head. I wanted this work to be exposed to the most extreme environment possible, positioned with the horizon visible from 360 degrees. I found that environment in the centre of Australia, and placed the sculpture at an undisclosed location, where the work is still sited today. This is a work that cannot be experienced palpably; no one is invited to see it but people are invited to think about it.
Taking Gormley's position as a starting point, then the fact that my sonnets may be doomed to invisibility could be developed as a tactic. The line of reasoning might go something like: 'poetry is utterance framed within form, the form is shaped by the surrounding silence in which they are spoken, and the white spaces of the page when they are written down. Losing the poems within landscape celebrates the sacred silent space in which poetry is uttered; it celebrates their potentiality not their potency'. This would place voceti firmly in the realm of conceptual art relating it to issues of epistemology and ontology.
ROOM III is the minimum space the human body can occupy. I was measured in a tight crouching position, and as with ROOM II, two concrete volumes were made, one for the body and one for the head. I wanted this work to be exposed to the most extreme environment possible, positioned with the horizon visible from 360 degrees. I found that environment in the centre of Australia, and placed the sculpture at an undisclosed location, where the work is still sited today. This is a work that cannot be experienced palpably; no one is invited to see it but people are invited to think about it.
Taking Gormley's position as a starting point, then the fact that my sonnets may be doomed to invisibility could be developed as a tactic. The line of reasoning might go something like: 'poetry is utterance framed within form, the form is shaped by the surrounding silence in which they are spoken, and the white spaces of the page when they are written down. Losing the poems within landscape celebrates the sacred silent space in which poetry is uttered; it celebrates their potentiality not their potency'. This would place voceti firmly in the realm of conceptual art relating it to issues of epistemology and ontology.
But this is not my intention. The 'strap-line' that I have invented for the back cover of the book and the web portal homepage is "...like graffiti, but poetry"; this signals that my intention is towards human interaction, not subjective reflection - poetry as a performed act in virtual and actual space engaged with social and political matters. It was suggested that I might look into 'geocaching' and that got me thinking about linking 'voceti' to cyber-gaming.
Geocaching began as a slightly nerdy outdoor activity with a certain 'trainspotter' ambiance. Participants would hide 'treasure' is small waterproof containers, post their GPS co-ordinates on a web-site then other players would track the 'treasure' down, replace it with something else, and record their find on a small journal card at the site, or on-line. It merged orienteering with a treasure hunt. What started as an outdoor specialist sport began to grow into a mass movement when GPS handheld devices, costing hundreds of pounds, suddenly became available as smartphone apps available for a few pence. The process of massification has not been without its issues. Urban geocachers, hiding their containers in wasteland, have been mistaken for terrorists prompting whole streets to be 'locked-down'. Guidelines then were drawn up - concerning recommended distances between caches and places of worship, advice about making containers 'non-hazardous' to wildlife, pointing out that caches near children's playgrounds are inappropriate and so on. All good common sense, but regulating geocaching inevitably reduced its spontaneity. As might be expected institutions and authorities have got in on the act. Some seeing an opportunity - The National Trust has set-up geocaching trails on some of its properties. Conversely, Bristol city council, in an attempt to control geocaching have designated certain parks as geocache friendly, and banned the activity from the rest of the city.
As Geocaching becames mainstream, then a slightly more 'edgy' variant emerged. Munzee dispenses with all of the canister malarkey. The game is simple. It involves placing inch square QL stickers on street furniture, 'deploying' them by scanning the sticker using the munzee app on your smart phone then giving it a silly name. Other players with the same app hunt them down and score points. Simple as that. It's not clear just how many people are actively playing this, but it's not a niche activity: "14,890,085 captures since July 1st 2011, the website boasts", notching-up five more in the space of time it took to note down the total. Scanning the munzee map I discovered the nearest munzee had been placed less than 60 yards from my front door on a lamppost, by someone with the unlikely name of 'MossleyMuppets'. Here it is:
It is hardly normal to spend time staring at lampposts, but the munzee sticker drew my attention to it. The first thing that strikes you is the stencilled number. Some database somewhere must have the location and number of every single lamppost recorded. Sometimes the extent to which the world is mapped, enumerated and quantified just takes you aback. Above it is a municipal homily encouraging responsible dog ownership; below is 230 volt current warning sign.
The latter sign is a fake, actually it's a munzee code disguised too look as official as possible in the hope of discouraging vigilant municipal workers removing lllegal fly posts. Munzee headquaters has a delightfully ambivalent attitude towards officialdom. On the one hand there are statements on the site warning participants to be law-abiding at all times, on the other, its store sells stickers designed to hoodwink over- vigilant officials. There's nothing like a healthy doze of moral relativism to assist you in a quest for world domination. This is what the munzee map of London looks like:
Each green, blue or white sticker represents a place where someone has deployed a munzee. Each munzee has a small webspace attached where players can leave instructions, notes or other information. There are hundreds of people out there in the city, interacting with each other, 'playing out' in the urban space, re-defining it and re-occupying it sticker by sticker. It amounts to a kind of mass-participatory, tabloid psychogeography.
Talking of pyschogeography, yesterday I watched London Orbital, The distributors, Illumination Media, describe the film as follows.
London Orbital is an extraordinary and visionary film by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair about the world's largest by-pass, the M25. London Orbital is a road movie, a cinematic excursion into the futuristic literature of a century past, and a film dialogue between two writers who are also filmmakers (and vice versa).
London Orbital is, among other things, a meditation on the difference between driving and walking. On Bram Stoker's "undead", on H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard. On time and memory. On the difference between film and tape, sound and image. On trance states and the terror that lies beyond boredom; on shopping and terrorism; on Kabul and the leisure mall. On the invisible triangle of Thatcherism (covert arms deals, Essex gangsters, and drug dealing). On Pinochet and Thatcher as vampire lovers.
Iain Sinclair is the author of London Orbital, a book about his walk around the 120-mile road. Chris Petit elected not to make 'the film of the book' and chose instead to drive, and to capture in images the peculiar hallucinatory state that driving provokes.
The protagonist of London Orbital is a flaneur modernised, a lone, alienated explorer of urban spaces, haunted by a dystopian vision of the mind-numbing effects of consumerism. The style of the film is 'video installation Art School' shot hand held with a camcorder, featuring a spacey, electro-technic soundtrack and a voice-over which, by turns, is pretentiously literary, then sermonising, ending with a sycophantic interview with the 'seer of Shepperton', J. G. Ballard. Though less than 10 years old, London Orbital looks dated. Its critique of late twentieth century consumerism, typified by Bluewater Mall, shares with commentators such as Adam Curtis an apocalyptic vision of recent social history which flirts with conspiracy theory. At the time of the making of London Orbital and Century of the Self, the extraordinary explosion of social media - Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube - was not really foreseen. There has been mass engagement with these 'personalised' media; even though concerns have been raised about surveillance culture and the eradication of privacy, individuals have not heeded this, the majority of us now have an 'electronic footprint' that reveals, not just our whereabouts, but our desires, interests and predilections. What should we now do - feel alienated, or engage with it?
The Munzee app is a new type of cyber-toy, not social-media but spatial-media. The speed with which these technologies are taken-up is more in line with the view that Amber Case put forward in her TED talk from 2010, called We are all cyborgs now. Case argues, from her stance as a 'cyborg anthropologist', that social technologies give us the opportunity to be 'more human' - that their existence is a fact of life, and we need to learn to live with them. This represents a more positive response than the dystopian visions of Sinclair or Curtis, and one I suppose I have more sympathy with. I understand the point, however, that Case is American, and 'she would be positive wouldn't she'; after most social media is a varient of the same business proposition - driven by US dominated global capitalism and a tools of hyper-consumerism.
What do we do, stand on the sidelines and protest, head for the hills and withdraw into some techno-phobic Walden? Instead. as an artist, I might regard cyber-space as a perforance space, an auditorium without walls. Its purpose may be commercial, but you don't have to shop within it, its communicative instincts leaves it open to much more creative uses that reach into new audiences and invite playful, creative or subversive behaviours.
So, back to my original question..."how exactly am I going to achieve 'the virtual installation' of the poems within the landscape?" Simple: I'm going to utilize the munzee global map; its well designed 'deploy and capture' tools, its web-based journal function, make it a ready-made means to place poems in the landscape. Before I start peppering the length of the A38 with munzees I intend to test the technology out by enhancing a local country park - Grin Low Woods - with a few pithy haiku. I'll report back on my progress.
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