UK DATA

Essex Uni has a data store -https://www.esds.ac.uk/- which has relevant datasets from social and economic sphere's. We've just downloaded the Acorn types (with CACI's permission) but there is much more to be explored.

This ties in neatly with my PHD area of study, in that I have been making the point that public data can form the material for public artworks, and using these datasets, as part of my studio practice, allows me to be reconstitute the datasets in various ways, underpinning various interactions that might occur.

CACI The Home of Demographics

I had an interesting conversation with CACI today about using Landscape-Portrait content within their own marketing strategy. Obviously this would require consent from participants and it does feel inappropriate and slightly unnerving. Landscape-Portrait was conceived as a critique of market driven demographics, however I always imagined the the outcome of the project, perhaps the legacy of the work, would be an online resource/artwork that would sit next to commercial services offered by companies using acorn data; such as UpMyStreet.

What is more interesting is the idea of a seperate project, which uses the sampling tools developed by Landscape-Portrait and creates a project directly for CACI. I'm thinking here of an artist in residence type of opportunity; It would be interesting to have an artist working alongside statisticians in the creation of public data, "who ever designs the data defines the public" .

Newsletters

As a means of letting people know about the project we are placing adverts in local newsletters. These will include (hopefully) Heathlands primary school newsletter (West Howe) , the Rev Dick Saunders newsletter to parishioners (West Howe), not sure about Kinson, haven't as yet managed to find an equivalent there, and the funday poster in Townsend.

We've just produced some promotional material for Townsend childrens centre where we plan to have the Media Bus parked for their fun day on the 20th of March. The initial design here:

The text was based on this design:

After a chat with the center manager it was agreed that this design was not appropriate for the Townsend community poster, so it's been revised here:

Community Facillitator

As well as Diane Humphries we have also talked with Craig Gilbert who runs the
townsend community website.

With Craig and Diane and Richard Jeffery (who is a local education worker) we are starting to put together a decent team.

Bournemouth visit 14-18 2-10

Just returned from Bournemouth after a week of meeting members of the three communities
we are working in - Kinson, Townsend and West Howe. We've got good support in all areas and met some good people who are committed to their community, and have shown good interest in the project.

On thing that comes up quite often is the thought that we are from the council, and the distrust of the council after years of being let down, and therefore there is a distrust of us as council representatives. This takes some discussion and hopefully is resolved. This has happened before, and much more deeply in Burnley.

Another thought, which is outside of the budget of this project, is the idea of visiting others towns that have the same Demographic types as the areas we are working in, in Bournemouth. So that might be parts of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee.


Spent some time walking around each neighborhood taking photos, to be reminded what a potentially loaded activity this is, obviously taking photos around children's playgrounds, but the just the idea of what you might and might not do with the image, and who and for who the images are being taken. Anyways images from Kinson, West Howe and Townsend can be viewed. These images will be used for publicity for the work. We've also engaged Diane Humphries, an local photographer to work on the project.

FIlm As Data

Whilst sitting through a film by Joram ten Brink, Professor of Film and Director of the AHRC Arts on Film Archive, MAD . I kept thinking of this project in terms of film as data. He was talking about his film 'The Man Who Couldn’t Feel’, which he described as as a film as essay. This leads me towards the file formats that contain data about an object, OGG, ITL etc - as well as Apples new format 'Cocktail'. The idea of hacking media files is somewhat different to seeing film as a container of data, but its related (in my head).



This also lead to a memory of microfiche, from my uncles garage, where the size of the card was related to the amount of data that could be stored.

Mmmm - is there a public art file type, that requires certain paramaeters to be filled in order to become viable (funding, engagement, legacy )

I must have a look at hacking some files, soon.