Ways to Wander: Walk No. 19 - City Centre Walk

'City Centre' is the latest instalment of Dr. Blake Morris' long-term project, an interpretation and enactment of the book 'Ways to Wander' by Clare Qualmann and Clair Hind.

For this edition Blake received an incredible response to his call for participants, with almost 50 walkers replying from 15 countries on 6 continents.

On the planned date (12 May 2018) I had relocated to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in Vietnam and so my participatory walk would be conducted here.

'City Centre' by Tom Hall is the 19th detailed walk in the book and entails walking away from a city centre, noticing changes in the environment, buildings, traffic, skyline and so on. At a certain point a decision will be made to turn around and head back in the opposite direction, looking for similar clues to the changes made as the centre of a city is approached.

I had arrived in the city the day before and decided to explore an area of the city to the south east, in District 7 of Saigon. I was interested in the changes to be seen in the urban landscape in this area as it is currently under redevelopment.
New developments are noticeable as islands separated by areas of wasteland. Some of these areas appear to have some beginnings of construction which have for some reason been abandoned. Areas around new developments are manicured while elsewhere there is evidence of fly-tipping.

The walk: From Vivo City to Happy Valley and back again.

Outward:

The start - Vivo City, air-conditioned shopping mall

Initial boulevard-type road system

National insignia greets the in-coming traffic

The Sky Garden development provides welcome shade

Wide road junction with alarming traffic behaviour 

Motorbike vendor, modest load compared to many!

About to cross the road, pedestrians do NOT have sole right of way!

Area of wasteland, Happy Valley development in the distance

Vertical road marker

Road marker set into the pavement

Happy Valley development, no obvious facilities

Return:

Walking back along Happy Valley

Areas of wasteland on all sides

Panorama of a wide road junction

Raw materials headed into the city centre

National insignia more visible on the return walk

Colour palette collected during the walk

Capturing street details

Traffic behaviour study

(tele)consequences - Drawing Collaboration, 13th March 2018

In the latter part of February this year I received an email from the UK Drawing Research Network, conveying news of an upcoming exhibition and symposium, entitled 'Marks Make Meaning: drawing across disciplines' to be held at the Brighton Grand Parade Gallery in the UK.

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/whats-on/gallery/gallery-exhibitions-2018/marks-make-meaning-drawing-across-disciplines

Part of this event comprised a collaborative drawing performance organised by Professor Paul Sermon and Jeremy Radvan of Brighton University, and this drew my attention immediately as it pulled together two of my major current interests, namely: drawing & performance.

http://www.paulsermon.org

Subsequently, through email and Skype conversations with Paul I was able to arrange to be the collaborative partner for the performance which was scheduled to occur just prior to the exhibition symposium in the Gallery on the afternoon of Tuesday 13th March.

Paul has been working on this project for some time and he explained to me how it works. Two locations are connected via Skype and this link is used to visually connect two sheets of paper through the use of mobile phones, computers and a projector. In each location participants begin to make  a drawing and the resulting images are combined by projection.

On the evening of Tuesday 13th (at around 9:00pm) we established a connection and spent around 45 minutes setting up and checking the system, this was done in the form of a workshop with the help of students from Brighton University.

In the UK a large sheet of paper was fixed vertically to a surface in the Gallery and the image of this was beamed back to Hong Kong via Skype. In HK, Nina Yiu and I had a sheet of paper taped to the floor and a mobile phone set-up directly above it so that any resulting image would be beamed back to the UK and projected onto the vertical sheet of paper in the UK.

Whatever was drawn on the paper in the UK and also in HK, the two sets of images would be combined by the projector, with only a fraction of a delay experienced by both participants.

Set-up showing mobile phone fixed above the working area

At 2:00pm GMT (10:00pm HK time), we began working on the first of three 20 minute sessions entitled: 'Connected Cities', 'Water Body' and 'Eternal Migration'. Guests and attendees of the drawing symposium were invited to draw on the paper, either instigating a new image or reacting to something we had drawn.

In HK we had assembled a range of mark-making materials and other materials such as string, yarn, ribbon, coloured paper & scissors, which could be laid onto our horizontal sheet of paper. At the end of each 20 minute session, we simply cleared away the loose items and taped a new sheet of paper directly on top of the previous one, taking care not to disturb the mobile phone positioning.

Image development 

Mobile phone split-screen during the workshop

'Connected Cities', split-screen showing both 

Hong Kong / Brighton participants working on the image

'Water Bodies'

 'Eternal Migration'

Documentation of the whole event can be found here: 

http://www.paulsermon.org/(tele)consequences/

Vimeo link here:  https://vimeo.com/261028255

Part of the 2 hour event, seen from the Hong Kong side, was edited into a short video:

Ways to Wander: Walk No. 9 - Walk With Me

I recently contacted Dr. Blake Morris of the Walking Artist Network (WAN) who is investigating the walks featured in the wonderful book 'Ways to Wander' by Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind as part of his practice-based research (Blake also contributed one of the walks in the book - No.28). He plans to walk all of the 54 various walks in the book, one each week and I expressed my interest in participating in one of them.

 

The book can be purchased here:  https://www.triarchypress.net/waystowander.html

Blake invited me to join him for walk No. 9 - 'Walk with me' by Helen Frosi (soundfjord) on March 3, 2018. The plan was for Blake and Marina White Raven to walk in London while simultaneous walks were taking place in Spain (by Elia Cervera Bravo and Amery Kessler) and Hong Kong (which is where I come in). 

As we walked, we would be able to write comments and poetic reflections that follow the theme of the original walk, and post them onto twitter, tagging the others so that there would be an exchange of comments during the walk.. 

The time difference between London and Hong Kong is 8 hours so in order for this to work I conducted my walk earlier in the day and scheduled my posts using the hootsuite app. Each of my posts were scheduled to be online later in the day, during the period when the others were walking.

The event lasted around 90 minutes and as I walked, besides posting photographs with accompanying comments, I also made sound recordings and collected colours using the citypalette app.

Once all data from the day had been collected by Blake, he consolidated much of it into the next episode of his overall project. Walk No. 9 had been written in the form of a poem and in response Blake managed to combine several of the exchanged comments into another poem. 

The two poems are seen here, the pink background (named by Blake 'Sickly Sky') was one of the colours collected by him during the walk.

  

   Blake's walk poem

                                        Walk with me by                                   

    Helen Frosi (SoundFjord)

(text distorted due to the photograph)

 As Blake investigates each walk, he completes a card reference for each one and posts it on his blog (links here and here)

Blake's reference card for the walk

Here are the photographs I posted onto Twitter along with the accompanying comments:

1/11 'A good beginning, the delayed Chinese New year peach blossom blooms today'

2/11 'Gateway leads to a desolate house, I move on...'

3/11 'These days even the trees are restless, some of them uproot themselves and leave...'

4/11 'Passing the little Temple, from now on I will try to stay within sight of the sea, the sound of the waves is comforting.'

5/11 'The line between the sea and the land, why do I feel so comfortable being close to the edge of something?...'

6/11 'The raised pathway makes me feel as though I am on a catwalk, but the only audience I see are birds...'

7/11 'An entrance to a seminary. Inside, nature is groomed into formal rows while outside lies chaos, and beauty.'

8/11 'A fallen tree but this is not an end. For nature this is another beginning.'

9/11 'A gentle slope, not a climb...an inclination!'

10/11 'Returning now to the streets where I began my walk I find a painting created by nature - the finest, most honest artist.'

I also made four sound recordings during the walk:

1. Cantonese radio playing outside the Temple, birds singing in the background. 

2. Birds singing, radio faintly heard in the background.

3. Soloist bird along with bird chorus accompaniment.

4. Young boy playing basketball alone in a playground at the end of my walk.

Sound files here:






Sounds edited together with accompanying images here:

...and the colour palette I compiled during the 90 minutes:

11/11 'Colours collected during my walk.' 3 March 2018.

Collecting Colours

While working on the planning of a performative walk in collaboration with the UK-based artist Blake Morris, he introduced an interesting and useful app to me that had been developed by friends of his: Taylor and Bob Snead and Chloe Bass - City Palette.

City Palette

As my work often involves aspects of recording experiences in outdoor locations, this app was attractive and so I tried it out at two locations: Tung Wan and Nam Tam Wan on Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong. For these tests I restricted myself to 8 colours.

It quickly became apparent that it is important to set rules for its usage if colours captured in different locations are to be compared. The palette can be manipulated somewhat if the user focuses in too much on selected colours rather than recording the 'ambient' colours encountered at each place visited. However, several different ways of using it have become clear to me and I'm sure that this app will prove useful in some of my on-going projects.

The palettes recorded at the two locations are as follows:

Nam Tam Wan palette - February 2018

Tung Wan palette - February 2018

International Drawing Dialogue Phase 2, second stage - 2018

To begin the second stage of this collaborative drawing project (see here), 4 drawings by UK artist Jane Kennington arrived in the post.

I unwrapped her drawings and left them out so I could get to know them and, hopefully, strike up a conversation with them.

After a while the drawings began to suggest a way forward and following that I started to construct a response. The drawings evolved as a conversation might, initial introductions, politeness at first, becoming more relaxed as the conversation developed and familiar topics were touched upon.

Jane's opening drawings were generous and left me at least half the page to work with, sometimes more and so the dialogue within the drawings remained polite and respectful.

The resulting drawings were sent on to Georgia Boukla in the UK. I am now awaiting the third stage of the project in which I will be the third artist to work on the set of drawings.

My responses are as follows, in the order I made them:

New project - Work in progress

While rearranging old notebooks I found an outline for idea that I hadn't previously found time to initiate, so this being the holiday period I spent a morning to kick-start the project and move it along a little bit.

The final incarnation of the piece depends entirely upon what I find on the beach and so this process of selection may take a while. For this particular piece I am in no hurry so I can take my time and ensure that the selection of the elements is appropriate.

The underlying aim is an attempt to push my landscape drawing into a more physical, sculptural manifestation.

Below I have attached two photos of the selection process on the beach:

31.12.2017 - Tai Kwan Wan, Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong

31.12.2017 - Tai Kwan Wan, Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong