Well that was a very interesting experience and not what I was expecting at all and initially numbers I was expecting eight and four turned up which began at the beginning it made it feel like it was going to be much more difficult because to get the quantity the sort of my shotgun approach needs lots of lots of people producing to get the quantity of recordings I was a little bit concerned and also when they first arrived two of them were very boisterous not wanting to join in racing all over the place disappearing eating biscuits by the ton getting very hyper lots of extraordinary language and the other two were very quiet one of them not wanting to look at you not wanting to tell their names not wanting to get involved at all so two complete sort of camps Michael was absolutely brilliant starting off with some games we went outside and we played a hat game a sort of competition game and then went off and explored some of the... in pairs we went off and found an object like a tree or a bench or something like that and made up a story made up a lie about it in our pairs and then we took the rest of the group round and we told them the stories that we had made up and that began to work and then we had a break and more biscuits more sugar and coffee and all that sort of stuff cigarette break and a the Cleo gave a talk and the whole way through her slideshow her PowerPoint the boy who does a lot of swearing was doing a lot of swearing and it was very difficult for her that formal educational situation they didn’t want to be involved with that at all and then Michael went and I got to map out and started talking about what we would do with this media scape how it would work and straight away the quiet girl had a fantastic set of ideas and got it right off knew exactly what it was about and started talking about making it into a competition for children so that we could take some photographs and places round the park and we could show the photographs and then they had to go off and find them so almost immediately we had the shape of the media scape and that got them going so I send those two the quieter two who I think are from one organisation and possibly know each other and they are a little bit older so I sent those two off to go finding places around the park with a couple of cameras that could be part of the competition while the younger more rowdy boys I was going to get them started on a starter media scape on the mole game but totally let down by the technology not one of the iPAQs wanted to work this morning they were just being very obnoxious I had managed to set up a wireless network and all these iPAQs wanted to do was to try and connect to the wireless they didn’t want to do anything else at all and it took me 20 minutes to discover that if I put them into aeroplane mode then the bluetooth would still work but by that time the boys not having succeeded had gone on to other things and in fact both of them in different ways and separately where completely and totally engaged one of them went off to record the sounds of the mowers and other ambient sounds and then got into taking photographs and he is fully engaged amazing transformation extraordinary transformation he took out a clipboard and he made a nice title about what he was doing and then he started noting down ideas a complete transformation the other guy was more interested in the technology and trying to work out why the machines weren’t working and I left him to get on with it he would have happily gone on trying to do that all night and then we all got back together at the end to upload the photographs and recordings onto the laptops and they started playing around with them in preview which to me is just a program that you look at images in but they found some menus in preview that I have never come across before particularly looking at altering the white balance and making spooky images which fitted really well with the stories about ghosts and sort of the idea of getting a layer of an idea of the layer of ghosts on top of the media scape so that you have got the physical realm and you have got to be ghostly other ghostly history stories sort of layer they had gotten onto that straight away which I think was brilliant so there is a bit of work to do tomorrow on the technical side of things and I’m going to need to download some maps and we are going to have to work very very fast if we are going to manage to do this in four days and is turning into a competition or quiz or a treasure hunt of some sort is beyond what I was planning to do so that is going to give me a lot more technical challenges to work on over the next couple of days but my little flash of inspiration at some point during the day was to get Charlotte and Mentoring plus and Emma and Cleo to actually do some of the evaluating of this week for me so I can simply add their input to the evaluation of how they think this project has gone in the context of these excluded teenagers and working with technology so hopefully that will make the evaluation at the end a little more useful

Tags:Sydney Gardens Project