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head to toe for ross phillips at the design museum
Head To Toe is a site specific installation by Ross Phillips for Super Contemporary at The Design Museum, featuring a network of kiosks capturing video clips of eitehr head, body, and legs which are then sent to a pod at the Design Museum where they can be viewed in the style of the classic children's book, flipping through the videos to see each clip.
We're happy to have built much of the software for this installation, including the video processing infrastructure, data synchronisation, moderation and web and kiosk interactives.
Visit the pods at the Design Museum, Selfridges, Covent Garden or Ideas Store and get yourself in on the action.
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colchester inn website
Completed earlier this year, but only just put live, is a new website for public works project Colchester Inn. This is the first stage of a project with First Site in Colchester, working with local communities to create works for the new First Site building.
The website is part blog, part mapping tool, part documentation of process, designed to show how the network of people involved in the projects grows and ideas are formed. To deal with this it switches from the standard blog format to something a bit more dynamic.
Whilst it uses horizontal navigation which is something I don't usually agree with - it goes against usability norms - here I am using it because it best represents a timeline, and more clearly delineates the entires. JavaScript is used to make the interface work more dynamically.
With any luck this will turn into a more full mapping project in the future, with more cross linking and different visualisations of the underlying structures and relationships created throughout the process.
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Part 6: myvillages.org/public works: Village Produce Films
Exploring the stories behind comunity produced goods, alternative channels of distribution and the value of goods we have now added the Village Produce Films produced by myvillages.org and public works to the growing body of work that was Agrifashionista.TV and is now ToadBall.TV
These films are part of an ongoing body of work, which has crossed over with Somewhere, Grizedale Arts and Nomad as they start create a network of Village Kiosks selling local produce, a network that anyone can join and evolve over time.
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Part 5: William Pope L., The Convenience Store Project
The fifth episode on Agrifashionista has just launched, William Pope L.'s take on Convenience Store culture in modern society, at times bemusing but generally thought provoking.
The Convenience Store Project by William Pope L., 2008
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Part 4: Iron Man by Jen Liu
I've just put live the 4th installment of Agrifashionista.tv, Iron Man by Jen Liu.
A story of Party Monks, Rock Guitars, Brass Bands, a Princess and Salvation.
Watch, think, and leave your comments below. -
Mapping your Stories
work in progress, aligning the maps. Not all maps are equal ... and some maps are less equal than others.
I've just uploaded our first set of visual maps to the site... a map is now generated for each of your Stories... here is my story. Simple, isn't it?
(By the way, if you can't see the map you probably need to install the latest version of Flash Player. It's freee, and it will only take a minute or two)
At the top of the map you can see my 'portrait': which shows who I am, where I'm from, and what I do.
Across the map are spread the locations in Folkestone I have a connection with. Or in my case the Location - the Folkestonomy Float (I admit, I have more connections than this, but Andreas was hurrying me back to London, and I got flustered doing my mapping...).
On the bottom right are the 'reasons' that people connect to their stories. Some of these are connected to locations, and some are not connected to locations. You can identify which story an item is in by it's colour.
So there you go, have a look, and see what you think.
In the coming weeks we'll be adding more maps onto the site, which show different sets of connections, which will allow you to see how folkestone, and the triennial, are connected out into the rest of the world, and how the spaces we've identified within folkestone are connected to each other (other than by roads and pavement...)
At the moment we are cleaning up a lot of the data we've gathered. Due to the larger than expected number of failures of our 'add-ons'* we've had problems with data being getting corrupted upon import, and so we're going through looking at all of your story photos and making sure the stories we have are correct, and trying to tie up any missing photographs to the stories... but pleae let us know if you spot any problems with your stories.
*word of advice, don't use cheap 1/4" jack plugs!
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They're maps, but not as you know them.
Regular visitors to the site may notice that we've added a couple of sections to the left hand navigation: Map Items and Stories. These are my first steps in visualising all of the data we have, and the connections between them, so that we can create further maps over time.
The map items are all the plug-in items we have on the float. Browsing through the lists of items you can see how each item is connected to others, through connections Kathrin mapped out prior to the start of the Triennial.
On top of all the relations between the plug-in's there are your stories. These are the connections that are inferred by the mapping we make at the float. Each story is split up into a 'portrait' and a number of stories. The portrait reflects where the visitor we've mapped have come from and how they ended up at the triennial, the stories are how they are connected to the cultural spaces in Folkestone.
It's taken a while to get these up due to a number of teething difficulties with the whole setup - it's quite a complex system and this is the first version of it. We will now be uploading new stories onto the site each day, along with photographs, and if you've already come and told us your story you can search for yourself if you know your story ID, or if you gave us a name you can search by your name (or your friend's names).
Please let us know if you see anything wrong with your mapping: there are quite a few issues with some of them from the early days, and we've not been able to attach images to mappings as reliably as we'd like to, so there may be some missing or some attached incorrectly. A quick email letting us know the Story ID ( eg m48625ab2 ) and what's wrong and we'll get on with updating it.
This might not look like a map, in the traditional sense, at the moment, but if you start browsing through the links you'll start to see how places are interconnected by people's stories, how certain places are more fundamental to stories than others. These connections are a map, albeit represented like a text based adventure game on an 80's computer. My ability to see the map in my head probably comes from too many hours spent playing them as a kid.
My task now is to start to gather all of the data we have hear into some form of visualisation. The first step of this is for me to start visualising each of the stories we've been given. Once I can see the spread of those I'll be able to see how we can clearly map the relationships between the stories.
So, please keep checking back to see new bit's appear, and if you want to be kept updated of changes subscribe to out mailing list or our blog's RSS feed.
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Powerline.... offline
For those avid viewers of the webcam who are wondering why it's not updating, the power to Lawson Park has been turned off whilst they run it underground, meaning no power to do anything on the farm. Normal service will resume next week.
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Tag It!
I picked up one of the final collector signs from Public Works today, and brought it home along with some strange looks I got as I carried it past the the hordes outside of various pubs. The final part in place and it's all working well, save for the circuit being wired anti-clockwise, though that's easily solved.
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Putting it all together
It's neater than it looks, honest guv.
After a long block soldering, unsolder, re-soldering, I've finally managed to get all of the data collector box together, and this is what it looks like before it's boxed up. I've soldered the extra components and controllers onto an Arduino 'ProtoShield'. I made a few silly mistakes, but they were easily fixed.
The protoshield means I can easily replace the various components if there is a failure, especially as the cables are all attached via screw down terminal blocks. The code for the Arduino board is pretty much complete, but I want to do some thorough testing before I finally load it onto the microcontroller without the Arduino Bootloader.
