Am I old fashioned? Why does it not occur to me to do this at an exhibition of paintings?
Perhaps I don’t have as much confidence in the camera in my phone as these people clearly do?
Or perhaps I don’t think I’ll get as good results as the person they employed to make the photographs for the catalogue?
Or maybe I wanted to see them first with the wet things in my head and remember them in that old grey matter?
No, only me then, carry on.
The other day I had a strange and intense browsing experience that tied together
Is the Internet one of the few remaining places in which getting lost is easy?
I’ve been going through our database of GPS tracks in a sort of spring-cleaning mode, partly prompted by thoughts of tracing our paths onto clay in an attempt to produce what has stumped us so far: a 3D map of our old neighbourhood where each time we traverse the local street it cuts a deeper groove (or makes a higher ridge) and partly by the prospect of sending some of this stuff to our pen plotter.
What I’m always looking for is a way of reducing noise in our maps and some sort of track smoother is what I really want but is eluding me. In the short term, however, I’ve discovered some things to drastically reduce the amount of unnecessary track sections without impacting on the look too much at all, especially at city-wide zoom levels. These are all tricks to be used in QuantumGIS (QGIS), my GIS of choice (and multi-platform too, for all of you hanging on to proprietary operating systems).
"points" > 3This is apparently a Douglas–Peucker algorithm implemented in QGIS. Just go to Vector > Geometry Tools > Simplify Geometries. I found that a tolerance of 2.0 is perfectly acceptable for my needs and cuts down the shapefile size by between a third and a half. Again, save the shapefile as something else.
Shrewsbury Tumulus
A hidden relic of the Bronze Age in a suburban street. While I was staying with my Mum in the house I grew up in in South East London (I once made a project about this house as it has been occupied by my family since it was built in 1936), my Dad came over and we decided to have a little excursion.
My Dad had mentioned a tumulus he visited as a child walking his friends dog on the other side of Shooter’s Hill and he directed us there. Sure enough, as we drove down Shrewsbury Lane, a street very typical of the suburbs around where I grew up, there was an empty plot with no houses on, a fenced low mound with the sign below.
It was an amazing and surreal find, in the middle of suburbia. The man opposite was clearing his garden and there was an old oak tree between the low front garden wall and the street. All very normal, apart from this remnant from 3-4 thousand years ago, before Sunday afternoons were invented.
Shrewsbury Tumulus Sign
Oh you lucky people of Kortrijk, to have had such a fantastic festival of experimental music, sound and installation as the Happy New Ears festival for many years and now for the creator of that festival to be running the Kortrijk edition of the Festival of Flanders. You have one of the only contexts to experience the sort of work that the Happy New Festival shows in this part of Europe, let alone Belgium.
Listening to Chris Watson's After the Flood
I’ve been lucky enough to know Joost Fonteyne, said creator of Happy New Ears and now Festival of Flanders for over a decade. Sophia introduced me and Mole Wetherell to him last millennium when we were all in Reckless Sleepers and Joost programmed us at his theatre, the Limelight. It was also Joost who initially commissioned ‘Into the Light of the Night‘ on the strength of experiencing ‘Peninsula Voices’.
It appeals to my perverse nature to take pictures at a sound event, so I collected some impressions of the guided tour which took place in very persistent, Flemish rain. This was a great pity, not just because we got very wet (the tour was over an hour long with 11 stations) but because the sound of the rain, being like white noise and saturating all frequencies, made some of the subtler pieces hard to hear.
I was there with the wonderful sound artist Els Viaene, who collaborated with us on ‘Into the Light…’ and bumped into the equally superb Duncan Speakman. We were especially looking forward to a concert given by Chris Watson, the BBC wildlife sound recordist but unfortunately he was unable to come to Kortrijk due to family issues.
Garden, site of Christoph De Boeck and Patricia Portela' piece Hortus
This garden of the Nunnery behind the hospital on Buda Island was the location of Christoph De Boeck & Patricia Portela’s work of text and sound responding to sap flow and plant information.
Terrasse, Budastraat
This was a funny sight on the way up Budastraat which as you can see is being re-surfaced. An enterprising cafe hadn’t let the mud dampen it’s spirits and Duncan and I joked that it is like a ‘Cafe in the Somme’ and fantasised about a soundtrack of mortar shells to go with dainty dunking of speculoos biscuits.
Speakers in Yew - Dawn Scarfe's Tree Music
Dawn Scarfe had made a nice piece called ‘tree music’, manipulated sound taken from the site and played through small, light speakers that hung discreetly in the yew tree copse.
Sounds from a Latvian Forest, Evelina Deicmane
By now the party was thoroughly wet as this was almost the last station. It is to attest to Joost’s powers of description and curation as well as the dedication of his core audience that so many people were still with the tour by this stage. The group had by now taken on that quality of cameraderie as we were all feeling the drips down the backs of our necks and the cold creeping into our bones.
The Latvian artist Evelina Deicmane had recorded her father chopping wood in the forest and installed these wooden structures around the trees in the square which played the sound.
After the concert at Budascoop