How do we notice the unnoticed?
How can I use different recording tools to capture information?
How can I use multiple ways of seeing?
In this week’s lecture, Susanna Edwards explored the idea of really looking at the world around you, taking in the beautiful and the horrible.
Susanna talked about ‘The Situationalists’ founded by Guy Debord. They were an artistic and political movement, who looked at the way we travel around cities, creating the idea of ‘the drift’ where you allow the city to take you on a completely unplanned route. It allows you to see the city in a new and unplanned way and opens you up to new discoveries and experiences.
They also cut up the city and put it back together differently using collages and disjointed maps.
“everything that needed to be said was already there, it just had to be put together in a new way”
This was a form of Psycogeography. Looking at the way places make up feel and behave. Cites are divided into zones where the atmosphere and ambience is completely different. This idea really resonates with me in relation to Bristol as I can often find as little as one street separates locations that feel completely different, housing different people and different kinds of shops and restaurants.
Everywhere has a feeling and creates an emotion in the person who visits it or lives in it.
“How do different places make us feel and behave?”
Tate Modern
The human element of a city or street is such an important one to consider as its this that gives it an atmosphere.
I found Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, which captures the motion of walking and human direction so perfectly in such a still and apparently lifeless image. I think this simplicity in hinting at the human influence on a location is incredibly interesting.
As we grow busier and more engrossed in technology as a society, I think the idea of simply drifting around a city aimlessly is very unnatural, but maybe even more necessary for people to do. Our views of a place are so frequently viewed with a smartphone shaped hole in the middle, making us miss the subtleties of the environment and hide away from the strong human emotions that a street holds.
I came across the idea of Land art which uses the physical aspects of the place to make a piece of design that represents that place.
Land art or earth art is art that is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials such as rocks or twigs
John Smith’s ‘Girl Chewing Gum’ video shows how you can transform a simple and almost boring video of something as mundane into a form of art simply by talking over it. It shows the transformative nature of adding another layer onto something.
John Berger talks about the same idea in his ‘Ways of Seeing’. Berger talks about how the camera has changed art irreversibly. Now you can see something in a completely different location to where it was intended to be seen you constantly change its meaning. You can change its meaning with music or text or by showing only part of it. You take a kind of ownership of the art and have a power over how it’s seen. This idea can be transferred over to how you look at anything. Capturing just part of it, or combining it with other things allows you to change the meaning of it to suit you or to show it in a particular light. You have the power to manipulate how the viewer will interpret the scene.
Martin Parr, Maxwell Granger and Iain Sinclair show that another great way of recording an area is to speak to and photograph the people that populate it. While Charles James Booth draws on a completely different perspective to this. He doesn’t think about the individual and the story they have to tell, but focuses purely on the data of the area.
As a way of recording a place, artists and graphic designers use sketchbooks to increase creative thoughts, to do things just for them and to allow them to look at the world differently.
You don’t necessarily have to look back through them, the act of writing of drawing in them can solidify the thought or idea in your brain. It’s a safe space for really organic free thought, without any worries of who might see if or if it’s any good, no one else has to see it.
I like the idea of actively looking at the world around you, things that you pass all the time and don’t notice. We spend a lot of time not noticing things as we are preoccupied with thoughts of where we are going and what we need to do next. Slowing down, being in the moment and really looking and thinking about the world on your doorstep can transform somewhere from mundane and even unpleasant to a treasure trove of inspiration and secrets. Streets have a personality because of the people that live there, they have emotion and I want to make sure this comes across in my project. I am also keen to try out the idea of layering something onto of the mundane to give it more meaning.
Workshop Challenge
Stapleton Road
As soon as I read this challenge I knew what road to choose. Just outside my house in Bristol is Stapleton Road. The road is incredibly interesting. It’s very much full of life, but also feels a little unwelcoming. You can feel the vibrancy of it as soon as you arrive at the street. It’s always full of people and everyone seems to know each other. There is a strong sense of community here but one that I am very much an outsider in. The road was previously called ‘the most dangerous street in the UK’ but is trying desperately to rid itself of that title.
My starting point was to walk along the road, taking in the atmosphere and noting down what I noticed and the feelings the road inspired in me. It becomes apparent very quickly that the road is home to a multitude of different cultures. The road starts with a mainly North African, muslim community. Men spend hours sat out on the street talking and drinking coffee, often in religious dress and speaking arabic. As the road is bisected by another, the atmosphere changes and the community here are now mainly Caribbean, the shops are colourful and loud and the sense of community is different but still very much here. The shops and restaurants on the road add to the multicultural feel with food stalls selling a massive mixture of groceries and restaurants specialising in food from all over the world. The mixing pot of cultures makes the street vibrant, loud, colourful and at times a little overwhelming.
Words to describe the road:
Colourful
Crumbling
Dirty
Eclectic
Community
Diversity
Creative
Full of life
Intimidating
Rubbish
Busy
Ever-changing
Patient
Dangerous
Uneasy
Religious
Cultural
Watching the way people interact with the road is interesting. People seem to use it freely, driving along the pavement, parking in the middle of the road, walking and stopping to have conversations in the road, talking with friends outside shops, sitting on chairs outside the shops they own. It seems like every inch of the road is used for some purpose.
I created a drawing to show the movements of people along a small stretch of the street.
Looking from far away
I wanted to look at the road from as many different perspectives as possible. I looked from far away, taking to google earth to see if from above. The road had a great geometric look to it that I would never have noticed from street level.
I also used google street view to travel along the street. I wanted the chance to look at the street quietly and slowly. What struck me straight away was how different it looked from my trips down it. The street view was photographed in May 2019, and now in October 2020 so much had changed. There is graffiti in different places, different shops, different rubbish on the roads. The road is always changing and evolving.
Looking up close
I went out again and took close up photos of the textures, the graffiti and shop signs of the road as I walked along it, trying to notice the small details that would normally be overlooked.
The walls of each shop and house are covered in graffiti, ranging from beautiful and artistic to a childlike scribbling or message. The ground is also covered most of the time with rubbish, from an empty pot noodle, to a sofa or burnt out industrial oven.
I videoed my view as I walked along part of the road so I could watch it back later and see if the road looked different when I viewed it somewhere else. I recorded the sounds of the road. Constant traffic, conversation spilling out of busy cafes, frequently the sound of sirens or shouts, however, nature never manages to make itself heard.
Looking at the graffiti I came across the worlds ‘The Never Ending Canvas’ written on the shutters of a shop that hadn’t yet opened. This poetic little line seemed to perfectly sum up the road to me. Almost every inch of the ‘canvas’ of the road seems to be used, but somehow people never run out of space to make their mark on the road somehow. New graffiti appears all the time, people stick up posters expressing their view on the world, or they change the canvas of the road simply by being on it. This never ending cycle of change is what makes the road interesting.
Looking back at the photo I took of this graffiti I noticed in small letters written underneath the words ‘till you get arrested’ which reflects the dangerous aspect of the street.
Data Mapping
Inspired by Charles James Booth and his data mapping, it started to think about how representing Stapleton Road in data would be. I looked at Stapleton Road on https://www.streetcheck.co.uk/ (which may or may not be that accurate but gives a good overview of the area).
How the data of people living in an area can be used to represent the area is a very interesting idea. I used the basis of a tower block which is such an impersonal structure, to represent the data of Stapleton road. The tower block has 100 windows to show the percentage of people on the road in certain demographic data values. This is a very impersonal and unemotional view of such an emotional and alive road.
Other ideas
I complied a selection of the images I took to see what jumped out at me. It showed the messy, colourful nature of the street.
I simplified the geometric shapes Id seen earlier in the google earth view of the street into shapes to see what they were like. I tried combining these simples geometric shapes with images taken on the road.
I created a triptych of photos that I felt best summed up the road.
The Never Ending Canvas
I kept coming back to the graffiti of ‘The Never Ending Canvas’ so I recreated the text and added it to a crumbling wall. This however didn’t seem to feel right and sum up the nature of the road enough for me.
While searching for inspiration I came across this image.
The bright bold typography reminded me of the colourful shops that line Stapleton road. I played around with the words ‘the Never Ending Canvas’ to create a typographical layout, trying out bright colours and drawing one word into the next to show the multitude of people and cultures all living together along the road. Laying this text over an image gave a nice movie poster feel.
Looking back through my phone I found an image taken a few weeks back of a MacDonalds meal that had been repeatedly trodden flat into the road. The image looks almost like a flag as its happened to be dropped onto a white line. The bright colours, fast food, rubbish and heavy footfall all represented by this image perfectly represent the road to me and having been inspired to photograph it weeks before knowing about this challenge make the link to the road even more organic somehow.
After some feedback from the Crit, that I could extend this to a series to show the never ending nature of the street, I decided to rework my design a bit.
I placed the text over the top of multiple images of the street that I had taken. Each image is quite bleak and everyday, which I think works really nicely with the overlaid text. I then made this into a concertina type book that pulls out to show all the images.
Overall this week has made me stop and think about the way I look at things, allowed me to slow down and really take in my surroundings, seeing things I’ve never seen in places I walk past all the time. It has introduced me to looking at things in multiple different ways, and how doing this allows you to get so much more inspiration out of the one thing. In my workshop challenge this week I have tried to show the emotion of the street and the influence of people on it. I like the idea of actually printing the text onto of the printed image to make it even more layered and reflect the layering of graffiti onto the structure of the street.
BRERETON, R. 2009. Sketchbooks; The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives. Lawrence King: London.
BERGER, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Penguin: London.
TATE. ‘Land Art’. Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/l/land-art [accessed 28 October 2020].
LYONS, Siobhan. 2017. ‘Psychogeography: a way to delve into the soul of a city’. The Conversation [online]. Available at: https://theconversation.com/psychogeography-a-way-to-delve-into-the-soul-of-a-city-78032 [accessed 27 October 2020].
Lizzie Wa Design 
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