Songlines

Chatwin, B., (1988), The Songlines, London: Macmillan Publishers.

p2
Aboriginal creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path-birds,animals, plants. rocks, water-holes-and so singing the world into existence.
p3
Now, in a Europe of mindless materialism, his 'old men' seemed wiser and more thoughtful than ever
p13
the Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. the earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died. a man's own country' even an empty strech of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred.
'to wound the earth ...is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth , they are wounding you.
p13
the Aboriginals...were a people who trod lightly over the earth; and the less they took from the earth, the less they had to give in returm.
p17
Aboriginals could not belive the country existed until they could see and sing it...'to exist' is 'to be perceived'.

Home

Blunt, A.,Dowling, R., (2006), Home. London: Routledge.

p22
home is not merely a physical structure or a geogrephical location but always an emotional spacel.
home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two.
p23
home does not simply exist, but is made. home is a process of creating and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging.
p49
for Rominies 'domestic rituals'are 'performed in a house, a condtructed shelter, and derive meaning from the protection and confinement a house can provide...it can be an ordinary housenold task such as ...sewing a seam.
p50
home is an idea: an inner geography ....
p52
household guides helped to redefine middle-class domesticity and the feminine attributes on which it was seen to depend, and gave a new status to women at home.
p53
magazines and a growing number of househokd guides helped to redefine middle-class domesticity and the feminine attributes on which it was seen to depend, and gave new status to women at home...throughout its history, the women's magazine has defined its reders 'as women'...femininity is always reprresented in the magazines as fractured....still to be achived. Houshold guides ...both asserting a femimized domesticity and instructing women on its achievements.
p53
resarchers in ...women's history have been reevaluating home economics, developing an understanding of it as a profession that... opened up oportunities for women...some were focused on the home, while others were more concerned with the broader social environment.
p54
the 1950s home increasingly articulated interior design as a form of household management....this discouurse gave women a new capacity to shape there part of the world during the 1940s and 1950s
one the one hande both state and market discourses suggested that women could sweep away the elements of traditional....home designs... on the other, popular magazines also placed a great deal of emphasis on the look of things and on looking itself, further inscribing women's identity within domestic space.
p57
'modern' architects argued that the kitchen should be a machine for cooking in, but this small modern, and efficient space.... completely overlooked ...working class social practice'.
kitchens were to small for a table, but ...reidents ate there...perched up at the ironing board or at the shelf by the hatch.

Mythogeography at the Royal William Victualling Yard

http://www.mythogeography.com

Bridgette Ashton artist.

This is a lucky find. I was thinking of making an inuet map of my kitchen out of cake, but was beginning to think it was a very off the wall idea, as it cant be picked up and handled. Now as I have found this it has encouraged me to take my idea forward, as someone else has mapped thing out of food.

England Biscuit (2010) Project I Dream of Europe.


Gingerbread Traffic Jam (2008)

Bridgette Ashton & Nicole Mollett

'Ashton & Mollett reinvent the hardtack ship's biscuit as an ornately embossed edible artwork depicting the fate of the Golden Hinde. From circumnavigator to decaying Deptford eatery to souvenir chair.

Audiences are invited to a "Make & Bake" performance at the Creekside Centre on 1st Oct 1-3pm.

Deptford X 2011 Main Programme'

http://www.bridgetteashton.co.uk/currentprojects.html

(Accessesed on 29/11/11 at 11:23)

Maps of Meaning

Jackson, p., (1992) Maps of Meaning, London:Routledge.

"Maps of Meaning" refers to the way we make sence of the world, rendering our geographhical experience intelligible, attaching value to the environment and investing the material world with symbolic significance.

page x
Human impact on the face of the Earth has become ever more insistent - we have no choice but to enlarge the geographical imagination.

page 2
Cultire is 'the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped, but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted.

p. 106.
Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of feminism to social theory has been the recognition that gender divisions (including so-called 'masculine' and 'feminine' personality traits) are socially constructed...Restraints formerly placed on women's actions...have increasingly been shown to have their roots in political and economic relations rather than in the laws of biology.

Inuit Wood Maps

In 2000 Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) issued a stamp with a wooden map as a part of the Cultural Heritage series:

“...wood was, and is, the most distinctive medium used by the Greenland Eskimos in mapmaking. Blocks are carved in relief to represent the rugged coastline of Greenland with its fjords, islands, nunataks and glaciers, the shapes of the various islands being linked together with rods. In order to reduce the size of the blocks, the outline of the coast is carried up one side and down the other.”

Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography. Revised and enlarged by R.A. Skelton. Cambridge, Harvard U. Press, 1960, p. 27.



Three-dimensional maps of coastlines were carved of wood as long as three hundred years ago. These Inuit charts were usually carved from driftwood and are made to be felt rather than looked at. The Inuit hold this map under their mittens and feel the contours with their fingers to discern patterns in the coastline. The land is very abstract. It is limited to “edges” that can be felt on a dark night in a kayak. Since they are made of wood they are impervious to the weather, and will float if they are dropped overboard accidentally. It will also last longer that one that is printed.

http://spacecollective.org/mslima/3220/Inuit-Wood-Maps

Cake art by Russian baker Zhanna.

Unknown., (2009) Cake Art – The tasty side of design. [online] Available at: http://www.crazyleafdesign.com/blog/cake-art-the-tasty-side-of-design

The Everyday

Johnstone, s., (2008), The Everyday, London: Whitechaple & The MIT Press.
p70
it is in the space of the everyday, Marx claimed, that the workers self worth is possible. in this space, the fragments of the social world can be integrated with the essence of identity.

p81
how often is the particularity of the everyday lost as it is transformed in the process of description and interpretation?
the everyday represents an impossibly evasive terrain: to attend it is to loose it, or as Blanchot writes: 'we cannot help but miss it if we seek it through knowledge, for it belongs to a region where there is still nothing to know'
p68
the relationship between art and life is never straightforward or transparent. what cannot be denied, however, is the need for the artist to atart from the materiality of both art practice and experience.
p69
to consider art from the perspective of the everyday is to stress that the measure of art is not found by borrowing the yardsticks of other discourses, but rather from its articulation and practices within everyday life.
from'art and the everyday' there is but an indistinguishable step to the 'art of living'.
p70
a theory of the everyday is thus located in the in between spaces, the margins and disjunctive zones of the social.

paperwork

Clark,p., (2009), Paperwork, London: Black Dog Publishing Limited.

Paper collage, used / found printed paper, subjects are animals (dogs), and clothing.

Tuan, Y., (1990) Topophilia, A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Nee York, Columbia UniversitPress.

page 1
With out self-understanding we cannot hope for enduring solutions to environmental problems, which are fundamentally human problems. And human problems ...... hinge on the psycholohical pole of motivation.

p.53
Has the female a characteristic way of structuring the world that is different from the male?

In every known culture , male and female are assigned distinctive roles; they are taught in childhood to behave in differing ways, .... Dolls and guns.

p.55
When a girl designs an environment, it is usually that of a house interior, ..... in a girl's scene, people and animals are mostly within such an interior or enclosure, and they are primarily .. in a static position. Why static>

Along with tall structures boys play with the idea of collapse; ruins are exclusively male constructions. Does this include decay?

p99
A man's belongings are an extension of his personality; to be deprived of them is to diminish, ...his worth as a human being. Capitalism, ...a person in the process of time invests bits of his emotional life in his home, and beyond the home in his neighborhood. ...which in its familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderment of the outside world

Landscape phenomenology

Wylie, J., (2007), Landscape, Oxon, Routledge.

page 139.
Landscape phenomenology often lays stress upon some measure of direct, bodily contact with, and experience of landscape.

page 141
land art/ earth art, - movement began late 1960s, - aim to liberate art from confined, controlled settings e.g. galleries / museums. (spiral jetty).

page 143
landscape is conceptualised in terms of active, embodied and dynamic relations betweem people and land, between culture and nature more generally.
these relations are seen as ongoing and evolving rather than static. forever changing

page 144
landscape becomes the accomplice and expression. ?

p145
we define ourselves - we define the essence of what it is to exist as a human being - in terms of visual detachment. we define ourselves not as creatures in a world but as points of view upon it.

p146
thinking is thus the essence of being human, or, as Descarts puts it, I think therefore I am.

p149
"far from my body being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body" (ibid102).

p150
As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject: I do not possess it in thought, or spread out toward it some idea of blue.....I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it thinks itself in me. (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, p214 Merleau - Ponty, 1969 quoted in Wylie, 2007, p150)) It's only when someone puts it into words.

p152
When I look, I see with landscape

p160
Landscape here understood , is not an amount of something, but a quality of feeling, in the end an emotional investment. I aggree.

p161
'through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are part of it' (ibid. p.191).

At its most intense, the boundaries between person and place, or between the self and the landscape, dissolve altogether. (ingold, 2000,p.56, original emphisis).

p.162
the landscape is not so much the object as 'the homeland of our thoughts'. (ingold, 2000,
I like this.
p176
Landscape is more than a way of seeing. Landscape is that with which we see, a perception - with - the - world. When I look I see with landscape.

p178
'my power of imagining is nothing but the persistence of the world around me'. Yes I only think about what I see and hear.

p182
Phenomonology originally takes shape as a lost quest for lost essences and ultimate foundations. ? Is this true?

History of maps

What is a map ? - A map is a graphic representation or scale model of spatial concepts. It is a means for conveying geographic information. Incorporated in a map is the understanding that it is a "snapshot" of an idea.

A map can display only a few selected features, which are portrayed usually in highly symbolic styles according to some kind of classification scheme. In these ways, all maps are estimations, generalizations, and interpretations of true geographic conditions. Maps of all kinds are fundamentally important for modern society.

Modern maps:- much of the world was poorly known until the widespread use of aerial photography following World War I. Modern cartography is based on a combination of ground observations and remote sensing.

J.S. Aber (2008) Brief History of Maps and Cartography. [Online] Available at: http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/map/h_map/h_map.htm. [Accessed on 18-3-2011]

Maps byArtists

Maps are an increasingly common feature of artistic practice in this information addicted early 21st century, as both representations of real places and diagrams of intangible things, whether movement, data, networks or imaginary realms. Any of these works represent maps that exist in people’s mind.

The exception is Simon Clarke’s Geographically Accurate Tube Map, which shows the actual shape of the underground system

Icon Magazine. (Issue 040 October 2006).Maps by Artists. Online [Available at] http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2906 [Accessed on 18/3/2011]

"Glory in human chaos": Stephen Walter's maps of London go on show at Fenton House

By Culture24 Reporter | 12 October 2011

© Stephen Walter

Exhibition: Stephen Walter – The Island: London Series, Fenton House, London, until October 30 2011

"My maps revel in the intricacy of life," says Stephen Walter. "My epithets to places are intrinsically tied into the stories and experiences of the people who inhabit them and their collective knowledge.

"Life is fascinating. People are fascinating. How this mixes with the geography of this world is even more interesting and endless.

"The maps glory in the human chaos and are a celebration of the concept of place. And the sheer intricacy of it all."

In Walter's world, every one of his minutely detailed drawings of London (The Island, as he sees it) tells a story.

Culture 24, Avilable at: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting+%26+drawing/art366017 [Accessed on 18th 0ct 2011 at 11.45]

Psychogeography

Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."^[1] Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."^[2]

1. ^ Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955
2. ^ http://www.utne.com/pub/2004_124/promo/11262-1.html Joseph Hart, "A New Way of Walking," Utne Reader July/August 2004

Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography [Accessed on 18th October 2011 at 11.15].

Urbanomic/Robin MacKay

Urbanomic/Robin MacKay: The Concept of Non-Photography
Philosopher and Director of Urbanomic Robin MacKay, gives a talk and reading from Francois Laruelle's book The Concept of Non-Photography, which develops a rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy and art, as well as introducing the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle's 'non-philosophy'.

Arnolfini, (2011) Available at: http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/events/details/1005a [Accessed on 18th October 2011 AT 10.45]

Over the last few decades, conceptual and post-conceptual art has tended to colonise the space of philosophy, whilst philosophy has retreated into academic isolation, and the sciences have continued to become more specialized and inaccessible. Urbanomic proposes a renegotiation of the relationship between philosophy science and art, on the model of an interrupted relay in which thinkers offer their conceptual resources for reflection on artists' practice, and artists in turn develop and synthesise them in unforeseen ways, stimulating a productive and unpredictable cycle of "research and development" subordinated neither to the norms of academic thinking nor to the mainstream discourses of art criticism.

http://www.urbanomic.com/about.php

situationist art movement

They originated in a small band of avante-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The post-war Lettrist International, which sought to fuse poetry and music and transform the urban landscape, was a direct forerunner of the group who founded the magazine 'Situationiste Internationale' in 1957. At first, they were principally concerned with the "suppression of art", that is to say, they wished like the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to supersede the categorization of art and culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life.

At first, the movement was mainly made up of artists, of whom Asger Jorn was the most prominent. From 1962, the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure.

Key dates 1957 - 1972

Available at: http://www.artmovements.co.uk/situationism.htm [Accessed on 17th October 2011 at 20.00].

What is a flâneur?

What is a flâneur?
(The familiar Englishnd academic) a definition of the flâneur is courtesy of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin's writings, and is a far cry from the traditional French translation of flâneur an idler or lounger. For Benjamin (Paris - Capital of the nineteenth century New Left Review 1968), the flâneur was the stroller and observer hidden in the crowd. His haunt was the developing consumerism that swept Paris in the nineteenth century. The arcades as described in Benjamin's The Arcades Project provided a protected urban space from which the flâneur could consume his surroundings.

Today, I believe that the street is the flâneur's drawing room, the cafe his study. The flâneur is a native of the cityscape. He can use the city as an open book; reading the street and the activities it contained. Hopefully you too can find the time to take part in a bit of flâneurie.

For more background see Keith Tester's book The Flaneur published in 1994 and Edmund White's The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris published in 2001 (commission from the sale of any books via this website help support the Buckingham Old Gaol).

Available at: http://www.flaneur.co.uk/frabout.html [Accessed on 17th October 2011 at 18.20]

Kitchen Stories. 2003. Hamers,B. Sweden. Bul Bul Films. [DVD].



pic ref: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323872/

Very funny. Its interesting to see the freindship develope between the two men who meet for the purposes of a resurch project and the jelousy it cause his old friend.