artist and public historian
As I was figuring out how I wanted to get the sound on the map, I discovered a way to actually generate random intervals of coordinates all along the path I had already input onto My Maps on Google. I go through it step by step here, but I wanted to include the code that method generate here as part of my paradata.
I knew deep down that I always wanted this project to be interactive, and that, for me, meant getting out of the online newspaper archives. I wasn’t really inspired by anything I found on there, but I was excited about having the opportunity to interact with people about their past and present and passed down love stories. So I made the project website and shared it on my social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). While I got lots of support and positive feedback, I didn’t really get any submissions, which was really frustrating. After a week or two of nothing, I posted about the project on a Facebook group (Bunz) late at night, hoping to finally get some submissions but really only expecting to get a couple of responses. The next day, I realised that the Bunz post had exploded. It had over 100 likes and 20 comments; I already had a handful of messages and they kept coming in through the project email and messenger.
As I’ve been moving forward on my mapping project, I’ve also been working on figuring out how to use Arduino again. Since I’ve last used it four or five years ago, a lot has changed. Mainly, there’s now a whole editor online, whereas before, I had to actually download the software, which would basically just open up a text box in which you could write your code. Speaking of the code - - I finally found it. It’s been quite frustrating, especially since it’s been right on my computer the entire time. Anyway, I first thought that it was uploaded onto the SD card, which it wasn’t: that just held the three sound clips that the sensors would trigger. I then remembered that it was actually on the Arduino shield itself. So, I didn’t actually need the SD card reader, I needed a USB 2.0. I got one, I hooked it all up, opened the Arduino create interface and immediately erased everything that was on my shield by uploading the empty code onto it while I though I was downloading my code into the workspace. 10/10 me!
I’m going to map love stories in Ottawa. I’ve been looking through newspaper archives to find sources in the personals/local news stories. It hasn’t been as straight forward as I imagined - - a lot of the “love stories” are about films or celebrities, and have nothing to do with Ottawa or local people. I found a recent article from the Ottawa Sun about a husband and wife, “inseparable for 51 years,” who died hours apart from each other. What’s interesting about this article is that it tracks places they liked to go, the church they went to, where the met, and lived as a way to tell their story. I couldn’t work on musicalgorithms to test out the sonification of these coordinates because I had no wifi all of last week, but I’ve created a path and plan on working on the sound aspect today as a test for what I could potentially do.
After a really helpful meeting before last class, I’ve finally grounded my thoughts for this project into a concrete idea. I’ve been playing around with musicalgorithms to figure out how exactly to get layered data to sound good together, which is a little difficult. Most of the time, it just makes an awful mess of sound. So, what I’m thinking I might do is plug in the raw data and work with the outcomes to create a more ‘curated’ version of the generated melodies.
I’ve been thinking about maps. What I love about maps is that they are products of multiple concerns: as objects, they are aesthetic, ornamental, decorative; as tools, they are aspirational, we see the places we have been, the places we might go, and the places we’ll never explore; they’re also aspirational in the sense that they depict a world that does not - and cannot - exist; as metaphors, they are fearful of losing control, of not understanding, of realizing how their black ink boundaries are so fluid off-paper; as the state, they are all these things, but also the people, landscapes, and other agents that live within, cross, and defy those borders every day.
“I cannot afford to be a spectator, an outsider, divorced from what I see and hear. It is my cultural humanity that joins me to everything I observe. I recognize, I understand, I see difference from within myself first. There is not a word that I read that does not have many meanings—for the occasions in which it is used, for the relationships among its users, for the trope of which it is a part. Nothing I observe is so trivial or particular that it is not larger than itself in some way, not interconnected with everything else, not suffused with system or structure. Nothing is so boxed in my theoretical or disciplinary vision that it doesn’t jump out of that box into another box… .” (Dening 4)
In case anyone was curious about the now-broken Sountrack Dress, I found the wordpress blog I had to keep for my e-textiles class. It somewhat documents my process, but unfortunately I don’t have the code up on there. I have it on my desktop somewhere.
Keywords from class: public, anonymity, ephemerality, boundaries, aesthetic