User:Mania/scores/tools

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

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?