Saturday the 24th of May. This may be a long one this morning as there are lots of thoughts starting with an interesting bit of serendipity which is getting to the end of Bob Hughes book eventually 10 minutes each morning I managed to finish it starting at Christmas and right at the end of it has a photograph of the gate in the Mendips and this is where I’m at a gate in the Mendips and this gate is made out of rough wooden planks hammered on to a post and it’s good enough if it does its job so it is all about context in a city centre it would not be good enough but equally if you took a beautifully created teak and glass and steel gate from a shopping all and put it in the Mendip Hills it wouldn’t work either so it’s about context and it is about being good enough and the propensity of digital media for people to expect the world of it because there is no end to it you can carry on polishing and perfecting you can take on far more than you can chew and all that sort of stuff is a really for me it is homing in on what I am actually doing I’ve got today tomorrow and Tuesday is the day that I start this project with my experimental kids and really it is a distilling of what I am doing which is working with media scape mostly on the idea of engagement so the worrying thing for me is that I don’t proscribe what is going to happen because to proscribe will take away what I take to be their creativity they will then work to what I am expecting which removes the art where as what I want them to do is for them to be if they can produce the art through their engagement and in terms of the media scape itself this a patchwork quilt in the Sydney Gardens it’s whether I can communicate to them what it is that that is about and for me in the last few days thinking more and more that it links so much into the ideas of happening and random art another bit of serendipity going to an exhibition in Bath on Friday which was photo marathon where students will it was an artist that said this one up with about 10 people each one is given a disposable camera and they have a day to go round Bath and shoot 10 or so pictures to different themes and I was already thinking of the idea of disposable cameras leaving them around the park pinning notices to trees or leaving postcards to gather the information about the park so the project as a whole the media scape as a whole the actual process of creating it is the work of art is the happening with me as the artist and the students as artist participants and the general public outside of that so the actual finished piece the finished media scape isn’t the work of art at all it is the what happens next week which is the final piece that is where I got too at the moment thoughts of Richard Long

Lots coming out of the meeting that I had on Friday in London with the silver group and the Bridgeman Art library ideas of combining the library resource with the teaching that I will be doing in July the Apple thinking lots about copyright how we need not to infringe copyright in school and encouraged the students to understand about copyright as best we can and the Bridgeman Art library collaboration seems to be a really good way to me to be doing that getting the point across that still offering the creative resources so that was another bit of serendipity that those two things came together and the guy there getting quite animated over Interface design pointed me in the direction of the software but they have been developing to create interactive media so that will be an interesting one to develop perhaps the next year and talking with Cheryl this morning in the hot tub about my ideas and plans talking a lot about the fact that, well I started with saying that I wasn’t really prepared for Tuesday but at what preparation leaving a space and the creativity and the spontaneous and if it is organised I cut out the creativity but it adds a real element of risk and we moved on to talking about well I moved on to talking about what projects am trying to create in school particularly moving across from the art to working in Digital media across many disciplines and working out how I can do that and Cheryl suggested a pilot project within the School working with either the junior school or with history or geography or something like that and I think that the next year that is very definitely the way in and it may be possible for me to create that combination for Adobe funding working with Knowle West media Centre and working with Una Shannon over in Galway possibly with Carlos in Barcelona working online so online collaborative tools working with excluded youngsters from Knowle West alongside students in school a whole load of box ticking going on there but still basically working around the idea of engagement involvement and how we use digital media to engage and involve which I think for me has been the overriding theme all along

So this is down to simple organisation now I think I’ll have about eight kids so eight of the black laptops and 8 cameras Digital cameras they each have their own laptop and they will have a folder on it and I will take the scanner along or a couple of scanners are not on Tuesday but hopefully by Wednesday we will have a wireless network up and running so we can maybe grab stuff of the Internet particularly sound I want to work mostly with sound if I possibly can have the sound thing is much more difficult to do than getting into the imagery that have headphones to go with the laptops and I’ll take some microphones along although we’ve got the decent hand microphones so that will work five of those and were working with clipboards postcards we can scan the postcards in the evidence before a big map where we place things so we’ve got a physical dimensional to it over the table so I have got to print out a big map so actually when they collect images when they collect sound they can plot on the map that will also give us a record of were we have put the Digital cameras the disposable cameras and where we have put the clipboards that we want to claim back in and where we have hidden the postcards so we’re sort of using the big map as the command centre such going back to an extent to what I was thinking of doing with mobile phones that may be taking the technology out just a little bit more we can try and do the phone in stuff later on we can try and do the flickr stuff as well but I think that this particular one we will stick as much as we can to the simple stuff that is not going to go wrong trying to the mobile phone the flickr and the GPS the summer

And I need to have a look at the game’s book to see if there are any ideas from collaborative games that we can overlay over the top

Very interesting to discover that the author of the new games book and the inspiration behind the new games movement was also the instigator of the whole Earth catalogue and that if all out of 60s San Francisco the birthplace of Apple

Web two is all about user generated content, wikis it’s all about collaborative work it is all about the individual as being the learner as being the creator digital media is all about communities creating communities about networking its all about networking

Thinking about the image Galleries and putting in my road sequence and possibly the roadkill sequence and possibly as well a selection of the Mirror photographs not that they relates directly except that the image and the Mirror as a reflection and the mediascape is about being out in the world and seen a reflection you see a reflection of yourself in the mirror so it is just another nice metaphor really a bit like that film the Mirror Tarkovsky where you are looking back on yourself so mirrors memories reflections frames being out in the world contemplating yourself in a world on the outer world the world of the imagination the world the world of memory and the world of how we feel you can we see and how we react and the virtual being laid over the top as another layer the dreamworld the surrealistic dreamworld all these spaces tying in together spaces

Perhaps more than anything else it is just about having fun if we can’t have fun then what’s the point if we can’t have a good laugh don’t it too seriously I think that fun is my overriding pedagogic philosophy it’s got to be fun.

I was thinking I did the media scape by Duncan Speakman again yesterday in the centre of Bristol and I really appreciate and like the way he has over layered sound you have always got sound going on even when he is giving instructions you have a piece of music playing in the background and I was just musing on this walk up the hill and thinking about an overlay of my breathing And the sound of the birds and the wind and that has got me thinking about heavy breathing which isn’t quite what I in to but I am going to stop here and send tweet to the website having reached the gate

Tags:Bridgeman Art LibrarySilver ProjectSydney Gardens ProjectSilver ProjectHappeningsSilver ProjectDuncan SpeakmanSilver ProjectDust and Magic