Tuesday 8 February 2011

Geocache and colour grid responses combined

Today was a day full of ideas flowing and threads coming together, so I decided to enjoy the sunshine and give the dogs a treat by going out to Bradgate Park for a run through of an experimental walks workshop activity I'm planning for later this week. Of course I've now got the geocache bug, so decided to kill two birds with one stone (do twice the research at one go, I'm not sure about the killing birds metaphor really!) and have a look and see if there's any caches around or near the park. The geocache.com map of caches in and around Leicester is quite staggering! I ended up downloading a free trial of the Groundworks app which would check for local caches when I get there. Ended up exploring Rough Hill Woodlands looking for the Great Galaxy Seekers' cache... and allowing myself 3 moments to document along the way (the third of course had to be finding the cache...)



Rough Wood Location 1, everything flows

1, flow
A sense of all the parts coming onto harmonious being
2, new beginnings, growth, endless cycles of nature
2, location of catkins
How simple the geocache app is on iphone4, great woods, planted as part of new national forest, dogs happy, beautiful golden late afternoon light, and somewhere to park without spending loads on a parking ticket ( especially useful as I didn't think about cash when getting grids, colours, caches and device ready, and 26p ain't enough these days!)
Grid 2: response, new growth









Only just dark at 6pm - what a treat, spring really feels on the way!

So, back in the warm inside, and cache logged on the website, I'm completing my response experiments.

An overview for the whole walk, and a 'perception' diagram based on the things that caught my attention on the way.

I've made two copies of the colour grid responses, one set to go onto the perception diagram, the other onto a 'measuring' chart which I made before I set out. They're very sketchy and by no means at final form, but do give an indication to test out how I could work with different ways of perceiving, that come from the walkers themselves. I'm interested in the extent to which making a structure after and before the walk give different frameworks and throw up different relationships between the walker's moments and also the walkers and other attributes. 

On this walk, my attention was quite different to other walks - influenced heavily by the limitation of 3 notations, and the excitement of the treasure hunt for the cache - and maybe using the app to follow my location, too. They were hard to 'define'. On reflection, I settled on : state of being, sight, emotion and emotion as the ways in which my attention had been triggered.

Here are the two charts as rough sketches.

As an aside: The numbering of the colour grids is to trace the sequence in which each square is filled - this informs colour grid animations and enriches the data that can be used later ... in ways yet to be revealed!




Observations:
I find the drawings fascinating: there is so much information in them. 
I'm not convinced about the recoloured grids. At first I wasn't keen on the smaller size, but actually the scale is right for these sheets of paper and drawings. The denseness of the colouring makes them quite different to the spontaneous ones made on location - and that's something that I now will be of consideration with the iphone app to record colour blocks instead of using paper and pens or crayons. But I think the main thing is that there need to be more - from other people. I'm convinced the secrets lie in the relationships between the groups of colour grids made by one person and another, or by people at synchronous times in comparison to people at other times or places. between cohorts, not individual responses necessarily. So I'm keen to see how this scales up when the relationships of one person's varied experience to anothers are implicit and explicit.

Ah! They need to be viewed side by side.... Two pictures next to eachother become the two halves of the brain. Each moment is perceived as a unified experience (colour grids occur in both pictures) but each is read, networked and related to differently, according to the underlying structure of that half of the brain and its functions. [Or substitute 'brain' for mind/body, yin/yang, inner/outer, etc]
...Wouldn't have expected that to have come out of this exercise!!


So a moment not so much of paying particular attention , more of feeling part of the flow ...

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