Hilltop event coming up

Next Tuesday sees the 'live event' of the Soundlines project, with participating students spending a day on the hill experiencing the Soundlines mediascape experience in situ.
Students will be encouraged to record their thoughts after the walks. This feedback will be worked up later into comments for their webpages, which will also reveal the traces of their walks, the animations, and their soundscapes.
They will also work with Tim from eShed to document the event, whilst others will be photographing the landscape for a slideshow to be shown on April 27th at Worle School.
During the day Russ will be working on a hilltop panorama with visual and personal landmarks.
We expect the students to:
• Investigate sources of inspiration
• Use those to develop creative outcomes
• Develop ideas and present them to an audience
• Keep a record of investigations into sources of inspiration used for generating creative ideas

The only thing we're not so sure of is the weather!

Warm and well-fed in the tea-room, with the beautiful view of Sand Point out of the windows!

And out onto the hilltop for more testing... amazing light, icy cold wind!

Triple Traces and Rainbows

Mapping Sand Point.

3 traces by 3 walkers.

All the colours of the rainbow...

absence and presence

Almost a month has gone by since the snow.. daffs are out and I heard a cuckoo yesterday morning, early.



I've spent the last 3 weeks working round the clock on my mediascape for the London film festival Birds Eye View, that opens on Thursday. It's been great, and there's a lot of useful things we've learned and developed that will feed into Soundlines and later Sightlines.
The e-merge blog tracks the development of the project. A dedicated website will track the traces of walks and the resulting films made by people taking the mediascape for a walk in St James's Park during the festival. There's more about the background of the project on the BEV blog. And if anyone reading this is in London between 7-13 March, come along and try it out at the ICA!

Whitesheet snowlines

In the snow the earthworks stand out prominently - dark lines on the white hill.

Closer up and there are new lines revealed - a diagonal path of higher land.

The ditches have dark tops where the snow has blown clear, and white white fills where one step can take you from a crispy smudge of snow on grass to a couple of feet deep, the wind has evened out the contours of the land!

The round barrow has no snow, and fiery heat emanating from it.
And the centre ring - a nectar like silky soft honeylike feeling of energy swirling, spinning clockwise, rising up and down with rainbows lighting the air.

Close your eyes, listen inside your body - what does the land whisper to you?

traces in the wind and rain

Here are a couple of gps traces from Whitesheet Hill - the bottom one was yesterday's visit, you can see the centre circular ditches as I walked round them a couple of times.
This top trace was today, in a storm, with 3 short films made through walking. The trace to the left is driving back down the track afterwards...

One of the idea's we want to explore through Soundlines is having the trace appear (animation) whilst the soundscape composition plays, as re-presentation on the web. I imagine those traces will be very different as the incentive to move around the landscape will be very different too.

Magic moments?

I went up Whitesheet Hill to try my Something More mediascape out in the blustery winter weather today. When I got to the very centre of the ring fort ditches the music made a perfect 2 second loop and the ipaq displayed a message about low memory (but failed to respond to my input) and then a perfect white square (above!).

Standing in the middle of the centre camp, wind gusting, beat reverberating, screen displaying this 'alien' communication, was an incredible experience! Way beyond linear time the beats were perfect, looping as though designed just for this experience; emotions powerful - excitement, fear, curiosity, stunned, compassion, interest, confusion, mystery, infinite, stunned, earth-body-sky connection, transpotative, awakened. I was fascinated enough to try and film it - but you had to be there to feel the full effect! (And the sound doesn't capture on the video at all...)

As I left the centre circle and walked back around it, a double-take, exactly the same piece of bird-like plastic was making exactly the same shape as it landed in exactly the same place as some unmeasurable time earlier when I'd first entered the circle... Circles within circles within wheels of time.

Perhaps we could use deliberate audio loops for centres of significance in the Soundlines landscape?

A breath of fresh air

..is the theme of the spring 09 magazine of the National Trust that came through my letterbox today. Lots about getting kids (and adults) outside to connect with nature, walk and be healthy!
Their article 'Natural Health Service' (pp.20-23) by Dr William Bird, Strategic Health Adviser to Natural England, says:

'Children develop a lifelong ability to connect with nature but only if they are allowed to play freely in streams and woods before the age of twelve.

...Have we drifted away from how we were designed to live?
We need to be restored to our factory settings.

...The Department of health has launched a physical activity plan in which the opprtunities offered by the natural environment are central to getting the whole nation more active. A new scheme has been piloted by london GPs whereby patients are referred to parks and places for outside exercise that may well include Trust properties.'


Another article in the same magazine is about a family of 4 who set out to see 50 of Britain's 100+ mammals, in the wild, in a year. Mammal Magic, by Dominic Couzens (pp. 72-74):

'There was a serious side to our quest too. In the last few years the poverty of Britains' children's relationship to the natural world has become a matter for heightened public concrn. In the summer of 2008 the NT published a survey showing that children, as a whole, are becoming more and more detached from their environment. Only 53% can recognise an oak leaf, and similar numbers fail to recognise common butterflies and birds. Many parents lament this loss.'


The magazine doesn't seem to be online, but here's part of a different NT report
'Nature’s Capital: Investing in the nation’s natural assets'
that has an interesting chapter, page 10, titled:
'The nation needs... access to green space for health'
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-natures_capital.pdf