User:Mania/scores/tools

Scores - documentation

• Develop your own practice of encountering the city

• Take time to formulate different scripts and execute them

• Do not aim for a particular outcome

• We ask you to address: What is this script doing? Did it create encounters? If so, what kinds? Did it fell flat? Did it counter your expectations? How did your body experience this walk? Did it connect you with the environment, or isolate you from it?

• Step into the city and do some derives

• Applied to a particular place - In this way real surprises and unexpected encounters can be uncovered.

• Consider: The city as something that we do not only see, but also make. (!)

• Create an opening for situations where one takes a more active position in the experience of the city

• External assessors comment: "Note the difference between a scripted walk, and a derive, in the situationist sense. If you are interested in chance encounters, you could look more deeply into psychogeography, with a combined interest in interpersonal relations and the unplanned. In NL, see: Wilfried hou je Bek

Warsaw - Szukalski market

I found some notebooks and magazines. I was so excited because I discovered beautiful materials that I want to work with. These were magazines about track and field filled with graphic records of athletes’ movements, instructions on how to move, and frame-by-frame photos. These visuals reminded me so much of what I mentioned during my assessment: scores ---> language of movement… Language of subway maps. Scores as graphical representation, like I mentioned at the assessment, and then I noticed connections with what I had been working on in recent months… However, further attempts led me to start thinking about scores more as 3D tools. I documented further walks in those found notebooks.

Warsaw walk A note in a notebook led me to visit Pole Mokotowskie, a park where we always spent time after school or when we skipped classes. I started the walk at Plac Trzech Krzyży and along the way described my memories and observations. I came across a photo hanging in my favorite bookstore… I went to check what happened to the display where there used to be small exhibitions. (This is not a highly critical approach… city as a spatial poem refers to reading the city as a text and critiquing it as a text… Smooth city returns… George Perec --- list making… The situationist city perhaps…?) Graphic notation I experimented with notes from the found magazines. Simply walking and observing generates such different experiences and perspectives.

PARTICULAR PLACE

I decided to situate my project in my neighborhood in the North Previous attempts and what I worked on in the previous semester were based there, so I’m sticking to it. I continue my research about neighborhoods. I am not trying to study the neighborhood and tell its story but rather give my publishing practice context, so it becomes intentionally situated publishing. What interests me is more about what kind of audience the magazine gathers around itself and how it can be published outdoors. How does this make me perceive the area differently? How can the magazine become an instrument passed hand-to-hand, playing a role in exploring the surroundings? But perhaps I would prefer to answer a different question when publishing outdoors…At first, scores appeared as something that could reside in the magazine… But now that I know more, I am treating scores as three-dimensional tools.

Neighbourhood Lab

I tried different tactics to navigate and see what kind of experience it would generate.

I return to the notes from a conference about neighborhoods. During a presentation I attended at a conference Neighbourhoods as learning environments, a speaker shared the following guiding principles, which I adapted as scores for my exploration. The note is incomplete because I wrote it while listening, but this presentation particularly stuck in my memory.

"Listen to a place

Look what is already out there

What are the limitations of the practice?

Who is active?

How can you support what is already happening

Curate a dialogue

Look at the space as if you are looking at it for the first time

Have patience

Have you changed after the work?

Try different tactics

Find like minded people

Whose perspectives are misssing?

Practice power sharing

What participants need?

Turn it into a graphic novel

How participants perceive gentrification?

Invite your neigbours for a picnic

Draw portraits of your neighbours and ask them for their stories

Be present at the local markets

Give small things a big stage

Don't be afraid of words

Look at the means of production

Be aware

Communal love

Make the work visible

Do u have support?

Be aware of your power

Be soft

Step back, give voice

Share autorship"

Examples of Scores

Documentation in notebooks: photos of trash, abandoned clothes, road signs. These road signs — how many instructions and messages already exist in the city?

Stop making sense

The wonderful feeling of being outside, moving through space guided by intuition, and walking the way I want without trying too hard to prove something or achieve anything specific. Just being outdoors — left foot, right foot — and seeing where it takes me. Walking allows my thoughts to flow differently; ideas come more easily. I enjoy moving forward, participating in what unfolds in space. Many of the following scores resulted from simply being outside.

Score: Image ---> format for the tool:Just an image as the score's opening.

Be present at the local market

The script is meant to encourage being among local people, listening, and observing the place. That’s where the locals are. Local residents are the best witnesses of what happens in the area; they shape its character. A seller recommends a newly opened bookstore in the area, which I then visit. I talked to vendors.

Ask local people; they know best. ---> format: envelope with a list for your neighbor.

What are all the rhythms you can perceive now?

This score felt incomplete. I see it as an attentiveness exercise. It would make sense if it were developed further, but as a standalone prompt, it didn’t meet my expectations.

What is your normal rhythm of walking? Now walk at 80% of that speed. Then change to 20%. What changed?

This score is intended to experiment with different paces in familiar spaces to observe how perceptions shift and feelings change when consciously slowing down. I tried this score on my street, which I know by heart. Walking at my normal pace, I’m so used to the surroundings that I may no longer pay close attention. I sped up, almost running — it’s interesting how everything looks different. Slowing down to 20% of my normal pace, I noticed a photograph on a building wall. What used to be there? Who lived there?

Look at the space as if you are looking at it for the first time. Document your findings. What does it tell about this space?

An invitation that you don’t need to wander far to find something interesting in your surroundings. There are so many visual clues...

I found lots of furniture to take, lost gloves, and an abandoned coffee cup. The cup comes from the café on the corner; have I ever met the person who left it there? I often run into people who return to that place.

Along the way, I found lots of lost or discarded clothes…

I noticed repeating traces of footprints; so I followed them. ---> Follow a pattern: Following something can lead you to a place you might not have gone to otherwise... These footprints didn’t lead me anywhere. But they gave me a nice feeling that the city is full of clues and existing invitations to play. I can look at the space as if it were a game.

Look upside down

"Perception is not passive. Perceiving is thinking. Observing in different ways equals thinking in different ways."

Paying so much attention to the fragment of the bridge and bringing it to the forefront - it tells me about the history of a place... A fresh look at something familiar allowed me to see it with renewed interest.

I’m playing. In this city. The same happened with the camera obscura.

Observe weirder. Perception is not fixed. It takes action.

Format: camera obscura.

Try hopping instead of walking

Someone joined me while I was doing it.

Poster: No time for a fancy poster because busy exploring the neighborhood

Try walking this score. Invite play into your familiar places.

Give and receive

Print scores as a zine. My zine was brought to a street mini-library…

Look at the edges of the space and draw them with your body.

Movement class exercises

1. Walk - notice other people in the space.
2. Stop - take a moment to really acknowledge the space.
3. Find corridors between people.
4. Walk backward. Be aware of your surroundings.
5. Look at the edges around you and draw them with your body.
6. Imagine that you can change things with your movement. How does it affect the way you walk and look?

In dance classes, we try various imagination exercises that influence how we move. Recently, we walked backward to awaken awareness of others in the space. On a specific cue, we had to start laughing and notice how our bodies moved differently, more freely, in a less learned manner. For specific numbers, we performed assigned actions.

It was a fantastic exercise because it genuinely changed how everyone moved in the space. We made silly movements and crazy dances, but it felt so natural and allowed us to discover a completely different quality in movement and awareness of others around us.

When I try this in the city, I feel people’s gazes. It was probably the first time I questioned social norms when I danced on the street and felt people’s surprise.

Give small things a big stage

Drawings with chalk that I adore. I didnt see so many but I did a drawing with a friend some time ago, and it was a dream city. Things were added to it later on

One-Day Residency

"Making a book is a delightful process. It compels us to focus, demands editing and making choices. Ultimately, it's an instrument for concentration and contemplation. A book marks a beginning and an end. But it’s also a social tool, bringing people and ideas together as a mobilizing subject; building new communities and empowering other futures." (The future of the book is beyond a book - Annelys de Vet, p.22)

During a one-day artistic residency, which focused on the theme of the neighborhood, I wanted to explore this very idea. What audience does a book gather around itself, and how does it create the opportunity to see things from someone else’s perspective? I approach this with the intention of looking outward—to do this, I planned to curate a dialogue. Talking to people about whether they have any personal habits when moving through their neighborhood. How do these habits connect them to the space? Are there places that encourage interactions with their neighbors? I collected fragments of texts from people about the smallest things that are already there, things they appreciate. I want to give small things a big stage. I assembled these fragments into a whole, creating a long list of small things. At the end, when we all gathered together, I read these fragments aloud, expanding the list as we listened together. The act of READING AND LISTENING TOGETHER became a performative aspect of the mini publication, which created a space where different voices could coexist. Under the pretext of sharing observations from personal experiences, I began to decode my own image of the city.

What I notices

Navigations and prohibitions

Road signs that navigate how we move. The height of curbs, prohibitions, and rules nearly everywhere. Benches where you can only sit, not lie down…

How scripted cities already are. This idea informed my work in the previous semester, starting from the assumption that the city is already so scripted, constantly navigating and prohibiting. How can the idea of a script be used to invite more playful behavior in space? This still motivates me to some extent. I’m not sure if this came across during the assessment, but I definitely mentioned the "smooth city": how the experience becomes seamless with dating apps and food delivery to your doorstep. While this brings comfort, it also eliminates surprises and unplanned urban experiences.

What a nice task for a magazine to foster friction and connection. How can it become an instrument for reading the city and rewriting it anew? Adding a part of yourself to the city.
My central question is how this process of reading the city and rewriting it anew can be done with a magazine.

It stays open, invites people, not just for co-creation, but perhaps to foster connections… passed hand-to-hand, gathering people around the workshop.

The idea of scores as a three-dimensional tool - it’s an invitation to a specific action. I’m not sure if "action" is the right word. Is it a score? It definitely encourages and initiates something to be done. If it takes the form of an envelope, it becomes an invitation, but it also took the form of a poster with a route to follow or a mini-manifesto passed to a street library.

Do I need to limit myself to one specific form of this record? I need advice and feedback. During the assessment, it was said that I have many ways to document these scores, so where is my focus?

Conclusion:

What drives my magazine, the values I want it to embody, are curiosity, friction, connection. I want to design with an eye toward the situations that the book could inspire—how it might contribute to creating moments… in cities where experiences are becoming increasingly seamless. We have services that deliver groceries to our doors, dating apps, and smart solutions that provide us with comfort, but they also create a frictionless environment. René Boer’s concept of the “Smooth City” ties into this idea. He argues that while everyone deserves a safe and clean environment, such pervasive smoothness gradually eliminates opportunities for serendipity, potential, encounters, and all those unplanned, unexpected events.This makes me ask, what kind of cities do we really want? Do we prefer a predictable, frictionless environment, or do we embrace randomness and chance? Personally, I long for a city where, I enjoy conversations with strangers, where not everything is reduced to the same polished appearance—a city created by people and therefore full of potential. What a nice challenge for a magazine: to foster friction… to seek ways to open up to different experiences, exciting connections, and interactions with others in shared spaces. To be a tool to help me see my neighborhood in a completely different way, to step outside the frames of my perception, to look not inward but to truly look beyond the limits of my assumptions. Look outward. It opened up avenues for connecting with others.

• Think about the city as a text - When I think about it, how could it be annotated, and how does what I leave behind serve as annotations? (But perhaps this gets overly complicated then.)

• Maybe I indeed publish intermittently.