Haphazard Journey by Starlight

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The A13 is an arterial road that runs between Southend-on-sea, Essex and right into the City of London. It started its life in the late 18th century when there was a need to transport goods arriving at the London Docks from all over the world into the centre of town. It would have been dirty and congested then, and it's even worse now!

Driving along it last week on my way to visit Mum I realised how, for the majority of my life, I have have been reliant on this industrial, polluted stretch of concrete. In Essex as a child; travelling to school, to hospital, to saturday and evening classes, on the way to friends, boyfriends, art college. On returning to the south after 5 years at Edinburgh, I chose to live in London...just off the A13! I travel it every day. An arterial road in and out of London but also an "arterial" presence through my own life. I can't say I associate any signficant experiences with the road itself but I'd agree with Bill Hillier and theories of space syntax that it has probably had a life-long influence on my behaviour and I feel more at home travelling along it in any direction than I do standing still in any particular location.

How can we describe and think about our relationships to roads, routes and movements as opposed to places? Billy Bragg's song: A13 trunk road to the sea describes it as constant but always moving, always changing presence throughout his life. He uses lots of verbs; up, down, through - a fast, unstoppable motion....with places flashing by. How can we use virtual earths and other GIS tools that depend on tags and static hotspots to represent and record not just meaningful places and memories attached to location, but also our passages and journeys and routes in a meaningful way? What can we learn from Aboriginal Songlines?

Other representations of the A13

A portrait of the A13 by Bill Bragg.

Jock Mcfayden's paintings.

Tom de Paor future A13 Artscape

Ian Sinclaire's novel about he "semi-celestial" road

Photo Montage

Posted by Celinelj at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Something has been nagging at the back of my mind since I wrote about PerplexCity. A feeling of deja-vue. Now I've worked out why... When I was a kid I used to visit a friend who had a beautiful book called Masquerade, published in 1979. It was a children's book (but with a huge adult following), with fascinating illustrations containing clues to the location of a golden (18 carat) jeweled hare with a ruby eye created by Kit himself and buried "somewhere in Britain." The puzzle was solvd in 1981 but it sparked a huge number of further "armchair treasure hunts".

Searching for information about the book today I discovered, with pleasure, that PerplexCity was indeed inspired by Kit Williams' book. Bedtime reading then, for any budding Alternate Reality Game Designer!

Posted by Celinelj at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The website describes Perplex City as "a story, a game, and a real-life treasure hunt." It's an Alternative Reality Game with clues and information hidden in newspapers, websites, magazines, sky-writing, music CDs, phone calls, SMS messages, live events, videos, puzzles and games all over the planet.

A valuable artefact, the Receda Cube, has been stolen from Perplex City and buried somewhere on Earth. The Perplex City Academy has launched a worldwide hunt for the Cube, using puzzle cards to gather interest and spread clues. They've also put up a very real reward of £100,000/$200,000.

I like the idea that the virtual city and the game have some connection to the real world, but we aren't told how. Similar to my idea for a game where players must discover the relationship between the real world and virtual maps to win. It's not clear however if Perplex City requires visitors to explore real locations in order to solve puzzles.

The new game will launch in March this year. If you want to play - you can sign up here!

Posted by Celinelj at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

thanks to http://depts.washington.edu/dmachine/mschung/thesis/presentation/04-object.html

Reading Corporeal Experience: A Haptic Way of Knowing, felt like hitting the jackpot. Maire Eithne O'Neill pulls together all the threads of Learning Theory, Dance, Georgraphy, Ethnography, Urban planning, Human Cognition, Environmental Psychology and in particular; case studies of ranchers in rural Montana, to explore the importance of embodied experience to our understanding of space and place.

She is primarily trying to establish new pedagogic methods for design, and especially in architecture, however I'd argue the discussion can be extended to any discipline involving spatial or platial cognition.

Her argument is so clear it sounds more like common sense.

Physical work, movement, and intimate contact with the built and natural landscape give people the opportunity to formulate knowledge about places that cannot be gained by singularly visual means.
(...)
Design education in general has failed to establish pedagogic methods for appropriately exploring a range of topistic (place) experiences as tools for design. In formal design learning, we rarely address or explore culturally and individually developed topistic experiences because we do not understand these modes of learning very well, and perhaps because this kind of autonomous knowledge undermines authority.

She introduces (and even invents when there's a gap) a surprising number of terms to describe how we learn and create meaning during location-based experiences.

I'm reminded again that I haven't even scratched the surface when it comes to understanding the value of location-based learning and more specifically, it's place in education.

>Haptic
>Somatic
>Topistic
>Spatial
>Placial
>Corporeal knowledge
>Body-ballet
>Place-ballet
>Kinesthetic
>Pathic

and that's without even mentioning the old faithfuls:

>Experiential
>Action-based
>Embodied
>Situated

Posted by Celinelj at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

HARP is a new educational location-based game developed by MIT and Harvard. eSchoolNews have published a detailed article on the experience, reviewing game-play, what and how students learn. They call this kind of game "Augmented Reality". I've always see AR as involving expensive eyewear. I prefer to describe experiences where realities are not directly juxtaposed (e.g. using PDAs), as "location-based". Somehow it makes the experience sounds less "futuristic", more tenable, but when it comes to children, maybe that's the point!

My only regret is that neither the article, or the HARP website provide any detail as to why a location-based game was more appropriate than a desktop computer game for the kind of experience and learning that was intended. They only mention the now widely accepted notion that games in general can increase motivation. I'd love to have heard more about the benefits of real-world, embodied game-playing.

Posted by Celinelj at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)