22 Letters/Rider of the white horse

These books were recommended recently... anyone got a copy??
From wikipedia:
The 22 Letters is a children's novel by Clive King written in 1966.
In the Phoenician city state of Gebel the master builder Resh has three sons, Zayin, Nun and Aleph, and a daughter, Beth. The three sons go on three journeys: to Egypt (Sinai), to the court of King Minos (Crete) and north to Ugarit. They return and save the city from invasion with the help of the three inventions they find or discover: celestial navigation, horsemanship and alphabetic writing. Then Thera explodes. Gebel is now known as Byblos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Sutcliff
Rosemary Sutcliff was a British novelist, best known as a writer of highly acclaimed historical fiction. Although primarily a children's author, the quality and depth of her writing also appeals to adults, she herself once commenting that she wrote "for children of all ages from nine to ninety."
Due to her chronic sickness, she spent the majority of her time with her mother, a tireless storyteller, from whom she learned many of the Celtic and Saxon legends that she would later expand into works of historical fiction. She then worked as a painter of miniatures.

35 000 yr old Venus!

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/after-35000-years-erotic-art-for-cavemen-discovered-1684569.html

How time flies...

Wayfarer wanderings..

... are surely how we can be encouraged to walk with mediascape in the land.

"Wayfarers, by contrast, work out their trails as they go along, adjusting their movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of their surroundings, and invariably overshooting their destinations. It is in these thoughtful and improvisatory movements along ways of life that inhabitants' knowledge is forged. Though the traces left in the landscape by pedestrian movement may be long lasting, or alternatively may fade as quickly as they are made, these trails remain firmly etched in the memories of those who follow them. Thus locomotion and cognition are inseparable, and an account of the mind must be as concerned with the work of the feet as with that of the head and hands."

- from the abstract for Thinking on one's feet: walking as a way of knowing, presented by Tim Ingold, Dept of Anthropology, Aberdeen, UK

at A 3-day seminar on the sociality of walking, hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

Interesting : call for submissions

sound art, sound and images work and cross art work....
A call for submissions from EXPO Leeds

swirling seas, volcanoes

The green shelves of Sand Point were beaches once




















And some of these rocks are volcanic tuff - airborne material from a volcano. ....

media dancescape

Creating sound clips today, based on elemental themes - water, air, fire, earth. Polyrhthms.
Here's an idea: a dance mediascape ....

Dancers in an open landscape
interpreting soundlines through dance
(filmed, watched )

sand point

Looks like a good location for a soundlines experience!

Soundlines

A definition of a soundline :
a unique composition created by an audio based mediascape walk.

This composition is layered music which includes found sound, site specific sound, and improvised sounds inspired by engagement with the place in which the walk happens.

media box

Now here's another idea - new funding strands announced

time to look beyond

Commissions for projects? or should it be discovering places? time to establish links with the Cultural Olympiad....

Whitesheet PhotoMontageMovie

Just found this lovely sequence from my summer 2008 mediascape on Whitesheet Hill - 'Something More' and thought I'd put it up here as a reminder of things past and things to come...

I like this photo-montage-movie technique as a way to capture movement and snippets of attention within a panoramic landscape.

(No audio - make your own accompaniment!)

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!

snow reveals landscapes

Inspiring pictures of White Sheet - living up to its' name!
Snow reveals landscape features which can surprise. I remember seeing a rath (ring fort) from the top of the hill where we lived in West Cork. We'd looked at the view so many times, and never noticed this until the snow came.
The rath, an old homestead, was in fact perfectly sited, facing the southerly sweep of the mountainside, sheltered and with the most beautiful view.
No trace of pathway or trach or field was left, only the circular banks picked out by the snow.
Lives lived, forgotten.

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?

snowlines

We were exploring animal tracks on the snowy wood margin. Hare, deer, fox, badger. All seemed to do the same thing - meander - round and round - it's not just humans and dogs then!

The joy of being in the landscape, crunch of snow, just going from here - to there - with no sense of arriving. Another kind of journey.

Lots of human trods too, way away from anywhere, doing the same thing - meandering. Making snowlines.

Snowsounds, snowlines

We went to the sun temple at Stourhead in the snow and low-hanging mist today.
The atmosphere is so still, new and ancient. Just single bursts of birdsong, ducks, geese, the water, and two woodpeckers echoing eachother. Sounds became crisp and clear, individual and tangible. The snow and mist together held the land in a way that made me feel just a glimpse of what it might have been like for HER, travelling through the woods and over the hills, on her journey back then.

We found a perfect bowl of untrod snow, surrounded by beech, to make our snow lines running in circles and rolling on the ground.

Soundlines / Sightlines

The field matrix for Soundlines crosses over well to the Sightlines project.
Because Sightlines follows R and D, arrows could then become double ended, pointing both ways : elements informing the aims, aims informing elements.

My current definition of the mission statement of Sightlines is:
'The Strata Collective will provide a creative educational experience, backed by an interactive website and online resources, which introduces young people to a new slant on their landscape and heritage.'

principles and provocations

A quick sketch of initial thoughts, to add to, query and amend as the project develops.

The project crosses into several disciplines/ fields of work, so ethics & principles from those areas will need to be embraced along the way.
The intended aim of the project is central, the core. There needs to be a constant awareness and rebalancing of the matrix of different parts/context, appropriate parameters, (responses to ethics from other disciplines) so the aim doesn't 'drift' through external pressure.

Fields - principles and provocations include:
Landscape - countryside codes; respect SSI; access, landowner's permission etc.

Education - ethics of best practice, health & safety, child protection etc in education/youth arts practice. Need to adapt within these constraints, facilitating project aims of individual learning and freedom of experience, ease of access etc.

Technology - constraints and mechanisms of technologies (incl. web, mscape) eg. privacy, moderation, access and spam issues with website as feedback mechanism. Provocations around identity, observation, tracking of individuals.

Young people - respecting and valuing involvement. Fun, freedom, own time, recognition (accreditation/acknowledgement of participation etc), exit and progression strategies.

R&D - ability to maintain open-ended research; exploratory and emergent; freedom, focus, depth.

Documentation - balancing r&d needs, advocacy, potential evaluation and funding requirements, project ethos, strata manifesto ethos, young people's freedom and privacy, codes of best practice.

Ownership and Rights - balancing participants, artists, prospective funders, genre/sector development, IP, knowledge sharing, etc.

Artists, innovators, facilitators - 'fair trade facilitation', valuing creative exploration; roles, acknowledgement, sharing workloads and feeding own creativity.

- that's a few things to think about, just to get started!
Tracing and monitoring these looks like an additional strand (and field)...

Music for mediascape

Challenges! Today I think the music should not intrude, but sit lightly - or even float above. But it could drive you on, or make you turn, or turn with you: it could stop and wonder,  re-inforce a moment, and maybe linger long after.

ethics of pervasive media

I went to a discussion group on the ethics of pervasive media at the PMS recently, and started to think about some of the issues raised, in relation to soundlines and sightlines. One outcome was the usefulness of creating a 'Principles and Provocations' guide to use in (pervasive) media projects.

If an evolved contemporary media is made from, and an artefact of, cultural mileaeu; is that also true of pre-literate times? Are those artefacts carriers of the great thinking of the day? Do we really leave our mark in words, films, artefacts? More than by our actions, emotional release, passing on of hereditary tendencies? EMF would suggest otherwise - that on an electromagnetic level we contribute to the environment/humanity/universe more potently, more significantly, through the 'charge' we carry/accumulate/release. Is it possible to read this 'invisible' mileau? Is it the other side of the coin to artefacts and words? even images? Or is there a more complex interwoven relationship that is yet to be unravelled?

Whilst we heard about Bernard Stiegler's work, from Patrick Crogan I kept thinking of the Qaatsi trilogy. From time and space across the earth to peoples, patterns and rituals. And finally onto the virtual location - media as place and basis for relationship - which I found harsh and dysfunctional. For me the real strength is in the first part of the trilogy, the physical existence that is so easily overlooked as we get more 'sophisticated'. So I think I'm agreeing with Stiegler's ideas that the media industries are tied to an outdated, 'expert' driven "battery farming of attention" and that media needs to find ways to access and respect the majority mind (I'd call it collective consciousness) and the individual's critical faculty ('psychic and collective individuation' to quote wikipedia).
I think that is what excites me about the values of Sightlines - at the heart is the raw landscape through the passage of time. As people we are wrapped onto and into that passage. But the land sustains. And what we pass on in that place is not through words, artefacts or even music - they are just the tools to facilitate our awareness that our energy is part of the place, has a relationship with it, and perhaps lingers to communicate with future others in a way far beyond the substance of normal words and media.

It takes confidence to travel slowly in today's racing-car world.

It was good to be reminded of the strength of a personally-significant (media)art work. The Qaatsi films hold that role for me, consequently I can relate any issue back to them, and they become a 'personal truth map' to guide me in unravelling those other structures in a 'personally-significant' way too.

The other strong re-membering I had during the discussion was a story related to Community Building. I was quite into Scott Peck's work and experiential community building a while back.
It was a story of story of a community building leader who had just returned from 6 months living on and reconnecting with ancestral land, and drumming. In a group meeting where noone could understand anyone else and there really seemed no way out of conflict (as the story goes), this man quietly picked up his drum and began a simple heartbeat rhythm. Before long everyone was moved to stillness, tears in eyes, the spirit of community awakened from deep within.
I love that story, and often remember it when words just don't quite seem to reach the spot.

(In Peck's model of community, any group will go through stages from finding superficial common ground, to the clash of chaos, silence of emptiness in which any barrier to community 'comes up', to community - a tangible state in which people respect eachother's differences and work collectively towards a common goal. If you're like me and sometimes find it hard to talk in groups, this is the enjoyable state where there's always a pause when you need it and people literally feel moved to speak.)

unusually similar but strangely different

http://www.ralphhoyte.net/
has asked us to come and play music for his Cristabel event at Halsway Manor.
significant?

magical....mistily....tor

You are meant to keep your eyes on the road whilst driving.
Its the landmarks that break the journey though isn't it?

Most westward journeys take me down the A 361, so I'm lucky - its things like
- mistleltoe orchard
- starlings in trees
- Quantock Hills maybe Dunkery Beacon on a clear day
- and of course, Glasotnbury Tor.

Yesterday it wasn't there! Strange. Even from close up, it was completely invisible in its own pod of freezing fog. Everything else was bright and pretty normal.

Just enough to be slightly unsettling .... it reminded me of this picture, anyway. (Same place, different weather)
You never know what is on the other side - unless you float above it.
Don't rely always on your sightlines. Even a bird may be confused.

magical, mistily - tor

Sightlines...
I know you're meant to keep your eyes on the road whilst driving but those landmarks do break up the tedium don't they?
I'm always off to Taunton Bridgwater Langport or somewhere, so I measure the journey by
flocks of starlings
mistletoe orchard
glimpse of Quantocks
and of course G;asotnbury tor.

Well yesterday in the freezy mists it wasn't there! Completely vanished, in its own dimension of fog. Everything else all bright all around.
which reminds me of a picture....

Squiggles

I am excited by the idea of the trace unfolding as the music plays.

Sometimes I use a music workshop warm up called 'squiggles'. Players pair up, and both draw a squiggle. (- these look very similar to the traces.)

The idea is that you then play your friends' squiggle on your instrument - it's another way of writing music. Responses and interpretation vary a bit as you can imagine.

The traces of our significant journeys across ritual landscapes could be close to geomancy.

It also opens questions of how landscape affects our culture, our language, our vernacular architecture, our music..... perhaps less now than before : time to reconnect?

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.

circles of sound

Round and round and round.....

I think we have all done this at some point (usually as a kid!) to make ourselves dizzy and dazed?

(I was remembering how as teenagers we used to sit on a roundabout in the playground and go round and round and round whilst reading poetry out loud.... hmmm)

Dervishes of course use this as a short cut to altered states of being.

My Sightlines thought is the bullroarer. Round and round it goes. The sound is not unlike the video clip in Jackies' post below. Plus the rushing hot heartbeat in the ears.

http://9waysmysteryschool.tripod.com/sacredsoundtools/id9.html

also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullroarer_(music))

- (especially : the sound that the bullroarer makes is sacred to the Apaches, within their culture it is not to be displayed or whirled outside of sacred circles)

Hilltop circles, acoustic temples of stone? What was the acoustic significance of stone circles? Wind and space on highest points? East south west north east south west north

zenith

earth

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

Soundlines and timelines...

The proposal's written up and submitted for Soundlines R&D.

Coloured flowcharts are a nice complement/ alternative to text boxes in forms, so here's the bones of the proposal in pictorial form:

http://www.stratacollective.org/soundlines.htm

Time to look beyond!!!

'The power of being outside, sound, silence, non-linear movement, opens the door to time travel!'

tools for learning

Our friendly visiting German psychologist is interested in tools for learning, for hyperactive children. Scope for future research... would need to be geared around specific learning objectives/curriculum content, and she could design a suitable scenario/test methodology around it. Exciting stuff...

sand point - looking to the atlantic

If you were here, would you want music? or silence?

awakening mind - primal knowledge

"...The knower is transformed in a dynamic process; the knower and the known become unified through immediate mutual participation.
Primal knowledge belongs to the Buddhist traditions as well. Here, too, the primary challenge is moving beyond the egocentric mind. In letting go of the "object of knowledge," genuine knowledge is realized; in letting go of the ego–knower, primal knowledge is realized. Knowledge blossoms with the awakening mind that participates in the boundless interplay of things.

In Zen experience, the interplay between the knower and the known is so profound that egocentric language is totally inadequate. The connection is like that in archer, where archer, bow, arrow, the action of taking aim, and the target all merge to become a holistic process. Knowledge is more about the process of awakening mind than about "content" of thought or "object" of knowledge. This is the Zen way of knowing. "

From:
"The Awakening of Primal Knowledge"
by Dr. Ashok K. Gangadean
from Parabola, The Magazine of Myth & Tradition
Spring 1997
http://www.awakeningmind.org/pages/pkarticle.php

coincidence? - from the Guardian : discuss!

Have a look at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/20/ipod-instinct

Extract:
"Instinct acts as a kind of behavioural satnav. It's a quiet and reassuring inner voice that will always give you guidance, provided you can be bothered to tune into it. However, humans are always suspicious of inner voices, especially if there's more than one of them.

Instinct is the accumulated wisdom of a thousand generations of human beings hard-wired into our little heads. Sadly, this is then very quickly obscured by the formal process of education. Instinct is a mixture of the common sense that tells you when something supposedly good is actually a load of cobblers, and also of the uncommon sense that warns you of things that normally come without warning.

Seeing things with your own eyes is generally held to be a good way of verifying things. But eyes are screens, and like any screen they don't tell the whole story. Getting a feel for things is much more effective because it lets your sixth sense have a sniff around. As a French philosopher once said, instinct is the nose of the mind. It sounds slightly odd, but instinctively you know it's right. "

By Guy Browning
The Guardian, Saturday 20 December 2008

Strata at Sandbox

Thought it'd be good to post a reminder from Jane & Jackie's visit to the media sandbox launch at Watershed on Monday, of some of the things that may be relevent to prototyping Sightlines....

The top 5 golden rules (we preferred to call them 'platinum TIPS') to consider when setting out on your innovative multi-platform pervasive media project..... (as voted by attendees)

• What’s the point?
• Know your target audience
• Know your platforms and their features and constraints
• Identify a desire/need that this product is filling
• A single/simple idea

Some of our favourites were also:

• Innovate or improve
• Consider potentials, adaptability, flexibility, extendability of your concept
• There are no rules
• Expect the unexpected
• Keep communication simple
• Develop/have a strong idea and stick to it (we thought: stay flexible & responsive at the same time as not being sucked into other agendas/doing things just because you could!)
• Interdependence of platform, content, audience

We also found these 'scenario' questions interesting..

• What dimensions are valuable to people as they go about their everyday lives? How can those dimensions be sensed and presented?
• How would we go about engaging with Bristol people to start re-using public drinking fountains instead of buying YAPB (yet another plastic bottle)?

And we realised that innovative multi-platform projects have 90% same requirements as any other creative/arts/education project, so we've already got a lot to give!
- oh yes, and it's great to have different coloured pens when writing on a flip-pad. And much easier to draw/spatialise/visualise as you talk (for Jackie, anyway!).
- aha, and very important to illuminate the stereotype that grannies don't get out mapping on their bike with their pda - they DO!

a good place to trail an Mscape living landscape journey

You look out west straight into the Atlantic ,,,,, lots of history, lots of light, lots of ... topography

smoke

This is this view from our kitchen window on a December morning.

This morning there was woodsmoke coming up from the valley and failing to rise in the cold still air.

It's not a place I've seen smoke before. There's no house there but there are some very old coke ovens by two ponds  which were once associated with a small coal mine. I suppose someone is coppicing and clearing and keeping warm with a fire.

I want to add smoke in the landscape as another sightline. Smoke is people, a fire, a focus. 

If we are aligning journeys by topographical features, then smoke would once have indicated the way between the hilltops and landmarks : hearths, warmth, welcome.

In a sparsely populated and wooded landscape, imagine the spicy smell of a bright blackthorn or hazel fire, smelt, seen, heard: refuge and company.

Trees and open space in the neolithic landscape : the need for sightlines

Oliver Rackham ( Woodlands; Collins, 2006) is interesting and persuasive on neolithic woodland. He sees any concept as 'wildwood' as belonging to the mesolithic and open to interpretation.  Anything post-mesolithic in the British isles would not be classifable as wildwood.

In the neolithic 'pollen diagrams show a great expansion of non-tree pollens' - coppice and open spaces make room for more pollen bearing species.

'The 'obvious explanation' of the elm decline in the early neolithic period is Dutch Elm disease.

'Monuments such as henges and long barrows involved precise alignments and called for a distant unobstructed horizon.Wide areas of what was later to be chalk downland and heath were already open country.

An open landscape on Down Farm - looking across the cursus towards the place of the midwinter sunset

.

Working At The Cutting Edge

binary systems fast and slow

I wanted to record today's passing thought about binary systems.

I was amused by a link between the incredibly complex possibilities of modern technology, driven by a fast binary system of ON  and OFF, and slow 'stone age' technologies - under, over, up, down : weaving - warp, weft; basketry -  wand, rod: or more simply, breathing, in, out.

What would you put in your pit ?

Reading last night about the abundance of pits in the Down Farm ritual landscape. These pits belong to the same era as, and are adjacent to, the burial of our Mendip woman.

The pits all have objects in them. Bits of pottery. In one zone, most have antlers or tines from an antler ; plus bones, broken stone axes, whatever. In another zone, lots of cow bones. Odd things too - a dog skull with a worked flint ball : a large flint nodule which looked exactly like a cow skull ; a cow skull with a toad skeleton in its eye socket; a beautiful flint all shiny and stripy like a mint humbug.

What would you put in your pit?

Why?

sandbox profiles

landscape interpreter!

musician!

Landscape interpreter meets musician

Creative Consultant explores interactivity

The other end - up Mendip

You get twice as much sky land and air when you are up the top

cursus

I drove across Cranborne Chase and back yesterday on a frosty misty day. The  December yew trees are dense  black and the old mans' beard fluffy and white.

It's definitely the sunset behind the cursus, I saw it smearing the sky with an apricot and yellow splodge. The firs of Down Farm were standing in misty shrouds.

Interestingly, the ritual landscape looked more powerful and obvious heading west (home) in the evening than it did entering it from the west in the morning. - a vast spread of undulating countryside, falling away towards the winter evening. Sightlines all mapped out, crescent moon, venus, jupiter.

Only 17 days to the darkest night.

midwinter sunset

I think the cursus was aligned on the midwinter sunset.It seems even more powerful to think of them all standing there in a stinking blizzard staring down into the longest night and willing that sun to come back. Brrrrrrr!

goalposts

Russ wants to add an item to the manifesto.

Jumpers for goalposts. We prefer the whirl of the kickabout above the straitjacket of the competitive league. Adaptive tools need adaptive thinking.

manifesto of the Strata Collective

Chicken, egg : We believe a vital ingredient for high quality as we lead and create inspirational arts and events, is to regularly and sustainably address our own inspirational needs.

Caring, sharing : As freelance artists and facilitators we value opportunities for peer support, sharing ideas and creative growth.

Access : We assert our right to roam.

Clarity : We value clear thought and clear processes.

Curiosity : If there is a hole, we will look into it.

Pragmatism : We claim the right to travel from A to B by the route that reveals itself. 

Keep connected : We aim to investigate innovative new approaches to project planning and evaluation :

●       We strive to be paper free wherever possible .We value sound, image, experience.

●       We believe that ideas grow on trees. To follow this, we intend whenever possible to hold our meetings al fresco, preferably in a environment linked to the subject of the meeting, on the hoof, or- in the nearest pub

●       We aim to record events and gather outputs as they happen and produce outcome based evaluations. Words may be optional.

●       We believe funded work should be recorded and celebrated in a way that is accessible and exciting to all members of the public.

Thought of the Day

We need to really think about how we can make sense of the link between ancient and modern technologies.

And journeys too. 

I remember seeing my first ever satellite, out on a winter night walk with my Dad. We used to go out every night and walk in the dark lanes, stargazing - learning the names of stars and constellations. The first satellite was pretty exciting, a smart new thing nipping between the hoary ancient stars. 

In 3300 BC a journey would be led by star nav rather than sat nav! Or a combination of sun and topography - time and place . 

The cursus on Down Farm demarks the point of midwinter sunrise

Sightline

Star line

Sunrise

Season

Midheaven

Moonrise

Occultation

Movement of planets

Look up!

Blogging

We need Russ's email address to invite him?
Be great to have lots of blogging going along.. hilltop reveries r us!
I'll change your status to be an administrator too, then you can invite Russ. Just promise not to click on the 'delete blog' button please!!
xx

collective

Hello!

yes we should invite Russ - can I do this?

I think , later, we may invite more people to join this collective, and then they can post stuff here.

Ideally, one day, everyone who attends our hilltop extravaganzas can join too!

For now, here's this :

a clandestine landscape? well - it's been a long time since the end of her last journey.....

First thoughts

Currently by invite only - just you & me!
Does Russ ever use email/want to join blog?
Suggest we use this as a discussion place for ideas?
Or we could make it public and then post developments to the project...??
What d'you reckon?