www.rosswallisma.org

In this project I set out to create a prototype that is part pervasive, part community arts project and part happening, based on locative technologies, digital photography and sound, and substantially based on mediascape: a landscape of sound and image, with events that are triggered by location.

I started out reading 'Dust or Magic', a book written in 2000 by Bob Hughes of Oxford Brookes University, subtitled 'Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design'
The reading of this book has coloured my thinking throughout this project. Hughes uses many metaphors based on landscape, from an opening sentence that features 'Cyeria,' to talk of 'landscapes of possibility and 'information spaces'. A second book, called 'Their Space' by Hannah Green and Celia Hannon, has been another key text. This book discusses the impact of digital media in UK schools. A third important source has been the many publications of Futurelab, and the Futurelab conference ‘Beyond Current Horizons’ that I attended in May.

As a secondary school art teacher specialising in digital media, my practice is mostly carried out through my students.

The project that I have set up for this module takes me substantially out of my comfort zone; working on a Windows platform rather than my preferred Applemacs, on a project that attempts to explore a hypothesis that digital media can excite and engage young people, and that I can engineer a creative engagement rather than a passive consumption. To this end I have chosen to work specifically with disengaged teenagers. I will be working primarily with sound rather than with the image making to which I am more accustomed, and with a project that combines the temporal and the spatial.

My intention to concentrate on mediascape and to work with disengaged teenagers will create the framework for this project, but the whole of this site is also an exploration. Hughes's topographical metaphor is apt, with this site as a map showing where I am, where I am going, paths I might take, and what I might collect along the way. Hughes also mentions 'bricolage' in his introduction, and this project represents many collectings, from random or purposeful collecting of images and sounds, to the collecting of concepts and ideas, and the gathering of sources and information that will inform the final year of my MA and my ongoing practice as a teacher of art. The site is in part an active exploration of new media literacy, semiotics, and the semantic web.

This site is a map of my meandering through this emerging virtual landscape. I am interested in the divergence of spatial montage from the temporal language of film, as discussed in Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media, the propensity of digital media to assimilate vast oceans of information and imagery, and how we then navigate through this, with the increasing ability to represent three dimensions on screen; the ability to burrow and zoom ever inwards.

This is not presented as a finished, polished project, but as a representation of the journey.

The website is intended to be:

- a record of my readings, meetings and conferences over the past few months
- a way in which to experiment and record
- a transcription of my notes on meetings, seminars, tutorials and conferences
- a chronological record of websites that I have visited
- a record of my experimentation with various technologies

Much of the material in this site has made use of speech to text technology, such as my 'walking blog' - a diary that I have kept using recording technology. I have intentionally left these transcriptions in a raw state, interested that the spoken word is very different from the written, but also because these explorations themselves fit with both mediascape, and with an emergent demographic of podcasters and vodcasters. With summaries, tags, a search engine, and technologies such as Twitter and Flickr, I have been looking at ways in which I can harness this plethora of untamed text, to extract useful information when I need it.

The reading that I have done is also recorded in an intentionally raw state, more or less chronologically, with yellow text boxes that represent the yellow stickies and highlighted text as I marked it to make notes.

I regard this site as both resource and purposeful tool for my ongoing investigations. I have unearthed a wealth of information that I have not had time to fully process.

The project with excluded teenagers that I undertook at the end of May was a trail for similar activities that I will be running in the first week of August.



In the spirit of both mapping and experimentation with new media, I have included an interactive site map to help with navigation, and have made use of the left hand side bar of the site to explain the main content of each page.

As this project depends on web technology, the site needs to be seen with a fast internet connection, and has been designed to be best viewed in the Firefox browser with resolution of 1024 X 768