User:Menno Harder/thesis outline

Menno Harder Psychogeography & Social Cooperation

Intro
Often the creation of a work starts while traveling. Traveling not only in the sense of visiting places I have never been before, but also traveling to places or situations described by people I meet. Projects that I have worked on collaboratively are also my strongest. Who are the people I surround myself with and what keeps them busy? What are their interests and what do I share with them? I can create a dialogue between me and the other person with whatever it is that they are trying to contextualize or provide a visual output to the ideas that they were questioning. It’s very important to live by the idea that as a visual artist, I am also an activist. As a designer you have a big social responsibility. You can take any kind of information (maybe a fact, an opinion, a status) and either decide to be true and honest towards it, or manipulate it so that it takes on a form that you think serves it right. I am aware that to be able to reach out you have to understand how to announce yourself in the communicative field. With time and growth also come new discoveries of presenting works, this means that a possible outcome or project can be many different things. Adaptation to different kinds of media can be a very strong point in any practice and this is something that I will try and embrace in coming projects. The many shapes a project can take seems to be limitless, and within this lies a lot of excitement and fun.

Chapt. 1
Forming new idea’s and starting a new project relies on the experience I have had with past projects. A new project is built while still dealing with the thoughts and concepts of a just finished project. Looking back on works I have done in later years, I identify a certain way of working and initiating projects. A work usually comes forth out of an exploration of the area visited (this can be exploring the place while actually being there), or exploring it by listening to stories or reading about it either on the web or in a written document. Usually the mere visualisation and translation of such an area can be a work in itself (objective journalism, documentation), but identifying the conflicts that happen within this area and commenting on them gives the work a personal and subjective layer, making the work critical towards the topic it is discussing.

It is important to work for a certain kind of audience, who am I making this project for? While it seems important to actively DO something, I have to realise that my intentions are not necessarily shared by everyone. So the reasoning behind my intentions should be clear, and should take in great consideration what the actual benefits towards the neighbourhood of this supposed space will be. Some of these questions are difficult to answer right now as much of them will be answered while initiating the different research-projects. To have a clear image of what the space around you actually is and what it consists of is nearly impossible. It is a space that is constantly changing and re–inventing itself. However, through the use of archived material you can actually have a guess at who is situated here at a certain time and how the area is slowly changing. Through means of a walk an urban space can be carefully documented by recording and abstracting it's architecture and atmosphere.

Chapt. 2

These works would be interesting to write more about as they reflect my interests. Some of the works I did quite some years ago are still very valuable to me and are still worthwhile to take a look at and to build new idea's with.

Tuzla & Sarajevo: Documentation of a visit
Tuzla & Sarajevo is a publication consisting of 3 different pieces: 2 booklets showing images and 1 folded letter. The 3 pieces are put together to form the whole publication.

• Booklet 1, printed on 100 grams nacre-glow paper. It is bound together using two staples. The contents of the booklet are various images in full colour. All of the images are in landscape format and have a blank border around them. The images are depicting various architectural buildings and landscapes throughout Bosnia. The images within the book are marked with a number. One picture is placed on the cover, half of it displaying on the front and half on the back cover. There is a certain sequence in which the pictures are shown, a spread with 4 pictures and spreads where only 1 picture is shown are placed after each other. Booklet 2 is placed in the middle-spread.
• Booklet 2, printed on 100 grams bio-top paper. It is again bound together with 2 staples. The contents of this booklet are again images but shown in black and white, without a blank border. The images are placed in landscape format and on it ruined or abandoned buildings can be seen. Every spread shows only 1 image. In the center of booklet 2, there is a letter.
• The letter is printed on 120 grams grey paper. The letter is folded in half and can be taken out. The letter addressess to a person and there is a text written about various encounters during the trip. The text is designed as an analog hypertext, where after certain words or sentences numbers are placed that are pointing towards the pictures found in Booklet 1.

Counter Culture series: Thoughts and perception of a Counter Culture
The Counter Culture series consist of various different media: digital images, posters, and a booklet.

• The digital images are depicting various urban environments, cityscapes, living spaces or parks. An abstract form is drawn through the image, either ignoring or complementing structures and shapes present on the image. Some of the images are with borders, others without. There are images in colour but also in black and white.
• The posters and map are both typographical and hand drawn. There is a city map covered in abstract hand drawn shapes. The other is an A2 typographical poster again using the same style of digitally drawn shapes that cover parts of the typography.
• The book consists of two parts, the first part is a smaller a6 booklet, printed on bright yellow 100 grams paper. It is wrapped around the inner book and in it are various different digitally drawn abstract forms. These forms are also found throughout the inner book, which is printed on white 100 grams normal printer paper (a5). The book itself consists of texts and images in the made in the same tradition as the digital images and typographical posters described above.

Am Kotti: Am Kotti is a five minute film that shows a 3d model of the Kottbusser Tor square in Kreuzberg, Berlin.
The model is build up using a collection of pictures taken on the square. The photographers are unknown in this model but all of the pictures are found on 4 different kind of online image galleries. These galleries are Flickr, Picasa, Panoramio and Wikimedia and their logo's appear on the picture where they were found. While the movie plays the camera rotates around the model and by doing so pictures appear and disappear because of the direction and angle they are facing. Because of the depth of the movie the overlayed images cover and reveal underlaying pictures. Clusters of images can be found on several spots and also elevation is visible. A simplified map of the square including it’s buildings and streets is the lowest layer on which the images are placed on. The film loops.' Although I had never been on this square before I was able to reconstruct it by carefully categorizing each picture and examining the buildings and places of interest in the background. The proces of creating this model was more about collecting and archiving then it was about designing. The construction formed itself by creating rules about placement and visibility of the pictures. The model shows not only spatial appearance but also social structures. For example: the Turkish community that resides in this area is visible, but also the touristic importance and drug-related problems can be found. The model is quite basic since only a moderate number of images are used. This is one of it's flaws, as I could imagine the model being a lot more efficient and better to read if even more images were used and placement was done scripted instead of being picked one by one and placed according to what I think should be the right spot. This also makes it not perfect: I might have made mistakes in the process and images could have been shuffled or not placed because it wasn't completely clear where the picture was taken. What is interesting about this way of handling image is that the pictures themselves become a spatial, they are no longer the flat images seen on the screen. When depth is seen not only within the picture, but also around it, and to be able to compare with 'neighbouring' pictures, they become part of something bigger. I understand that the real time location of the model is ever changing, this can make the model outdated quickly. One way to solve this problem would be to update the model regularly, re-organizing the archive of images and understanding what is happening in that area if you want to make it a tool that can not only show the change in space (new buildings, streets, bars, stores, nature, public transport etc.) but also the social issues that are present.

Chapt 3.

QUOTE: Coverley, Merlin, Psychogeography,
QUOTE: Debord, Guy, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, Internationale Situationniste #2,

As a starting point of my research exploring and documenting the neighbourhood in several ways (through interviews, photographs, extracting and recognizing certain specific elements from the streets, visualizing and abstracting its street life, recording the ‘sound’ of the neighbourhood) will hopefully provide me with more knowledge about the situation, and in it’s turn provide an explanation for my cause. The creation and afterwards evaluation of what I see as neighbourhood projects will give me more information and reasoning as to why I want to do this, and how I can do it.

Eventually the various different projects that I have done throughout the year will be revealed. Presenting all the material that has been collected and created through collaborative work and research of the subject. I see this eventual outcome as a library that explains the reasoning behind the projects, it shows a personal narrative and timeline that binds all the projects together. The viewer is able to see clearly all the research that has been done. This library should be located within the neighbourhood it researches, so to return the information to the local community. Obviously, the acquired space would be the most suitable place of presenting this. So while I am initiating all sorts of projects throughout this year there is also the struggle of obtaining the space, the research into previously done similar projects, the planning, talking and meetings that I have that are practical steps towards acquiring it. These steps should be carefully documented as they provide the story behind this whole undertaking. They can give a interesting insight in what works well and what does not and can be very helpful in writing my thesis.

Chapt 4.

Write about Psychogeography, Urban exploring, Walking as an Art, Situationism, Happenings.

Chapt 5. /