On Friday, we finally presented our navigators project. This was a difficult task as the project became much more of an octopus with many tentacles as opposed to one unified organism.

Julian gave us some good advice in preparation for the presentation by suggesting that we start by presenting the finished work as opposed to presenting the entire journey in chronological order. We had to curate our work rather than show every single element.

Looking back, we had many pieces to consider:

I. Journey on the Northern Line

II. Interest in the daily rhythms and the territorial boundaries of the street performers: how people set up, took down, cleaned up (mopped chalk), went for breaks, established networks, and took on different roles

III. Mapping sound in the square, as well as according to elevation (Charing Cross Tube to the highest elevation we could get inside the National Gallery)

IV. Creating additions to David Gentleman’s Charing Cross Mural in the Tube, and creating stickers out of them

IV. Putting ourselves in the Square by encouraging conversations and incentivizing those conversations with the aforementioned stickers

V. Installing these stickers in and around the square

VII. Creating blind contours of Trafalgar Square and turning them into an installation

VIII. Creating a stop motion animation about interacting with this installation

IX. Using the means of understanding and logging Trafalgar Square to understand and log Borough Market, and document the space with blind contour, as both a performance and documentation means

X. Creating an installation/interpretation of the market in my base room

It was a lot to cover, so we chose to highlight the video that Neveah made, which shows the stop motion and installation as well as pieces from the interviews in Trafalgar Square as a highlight reel from our experimentation. Additionally, we showed the installation that I had created in my base room.

The blind contour method that I had embraced within the last two weeks by far fueled the most physical work that we had created. There are a lot of other research paths that we started, but they turned into something else entirely, or we lost the tail for now.

It ended up creating a picture of these spaces that we didn’t quite understand, but there are elements that we are both excited to explore further. Mainly the stories from the square and the conversations there, both real and imagined are the largest untapped well.

Instead of populating these spaces, I largely got excited about illustrating them such that people could populate the ‘sets’ with their own stories. My installations lived in White City, but Benji pointed out in critique that this was probably not where I would like them to live permanently. Were and why would I situate these interactions of Borough Market and Trafalgar Square?

My mind immediately went to a book store, or a place for children to navigate. These spaces are heavily associated with stories, so I would want to put them in a place where stories could naturally be projected.

However, this was just the starting point.

Once I had the additional blind contours of Borough Market, I put my favorite ones into Illustrator, and I added color based on my memory, to establish a volume between the lines.

The image took this long banner format largely because it was accommodating the largest width that could be printed in the print lab. Ideally, I would like the installation to be a larger scale, however, I thought that my creation would function as a bit of a prototype.

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Once I printed out the large role, I quite liked the single paper composition, but I the images would take on a different life if they were cut up and suspended from the ceiling. I realized that these cutouts gave me a lot of different moving pieces, which I could stitch together in different ways. However for now, I would actualize the installation that I sought out to make.

I installed the pieces in my base room, and this time, I had varied the scale of the different pieces much much more than I did in the first component of the installation, which made the pieces even more unpredictable. I chose to install over my desk for two reasons: 1) the first part of the installation was already there as a foundation, and I was building upon it, and 2) I wanted to create somewhat of a visual think space–a special world for me to work by transporting the piece into the RCA.

I also had to create a little but of a skeleton for some of the pieces, as they flopped and curled over each other. It created an interesting effect, but it was not the effect that I had intentioned. Too, the ability to navigate this space drew attention to the sided-ness of the hanging elements. The paper was only one-sided, and the cardboard and sticks attached to the back were aesthetically unappealing when a viewer walked around the space.

Overall, I was happy with the way that the installation panned out, but it was very much a start. I know I am interested in this idea of translating spaces and bringing them into a new context–using illustration as installation. However, this was largely sight specific in the location that it drew from opposed to the the location it was being projected on to. It happened to work in my base room, but in my original installation I did not consider the places that it could go and how to make it more durable for that.

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After decided to let the stop-motion video of the Trafalgar Square installation lie, I decided to follow the lines in a different way independently for the remaining time of Navigators. So, I went back to Borough Market with the same notions of demarkations of space according to the rhythms of market set up and take down within the architecture of the space itself.

I continued blind contour drawing as a way of recording as well as interacting with the space.

This time, in addition to drawing the ceilings and the architecture, which just visually overwhelmed me, I decided to also draw pieces of the market that I loved, looking more at eye level, looking at fish and market stalls.

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I collected way more lines than I could possibly turn into an installation, but I figured I would extend it as large as I could make it with the time that I had left as one experimentation to see how much, if any would become overwhelming.

As a result of this shift into collecting lines from Borough Market and Trafalgar Square as comparative spaces to one another to create studio works, the sound pieces and directly working with the residents of Trafalgar Square sort of got pocketed and stunted in their development.

However, I was still interested in this idea of voices of the population of Trafalgar Square in terms of its flux residents (tourists and commuters), its semi-regular residents (street performers), and its permanent non-human residents (the statues). In order to give one final push to this, I decided to do some creative writing from the point of view of the four lions on Nelson’s Column, trying to give them different personalities and drawing from my experience of sitting as close to in their space as I could get.

These thoughts are just a starting point, and their existence as written words to be read is not the final form that I imaged them in. I would want to lion’s voices to be experienced as actual voices, so I would have had to have finalized scripts and hired actors to read them, which would have meant assigning everything that comes with voice to them: country of origin, a sense of gender identity, a sense of class, and a sense of age. Characterizing them as such would have required a lot more time and research for all of the other elements of the project that I was focusing on at the time.

However, I am excited about the idea of animating these statues in the same way that we animated the place, especially given the reversal of the silent ‘living statue’ performers a couple of feet away. If that were the case, I would have little stickers with QR codes that people could download to get the audio files on their phones, much like the Talking Statues project.

Thursday September 13th, I wanted to transform my blind contours into installation as a way to interact with Trafalgar Square as removed from the space itself. Interacting in the square itself felt increasingly uncomfortable. I kept telling myself I would bring a sign to the Square and have some conversations on my own, but my anxiety kept me from it.

As a result I printed out three of my favorite blind contours very large on translucent paper. I originally wanted to use these in the capture studio to see what would happen if the lines could be warped as shadows, if light filtered through the transparent paper. However, when Neveah and I tried this, the light did not penetrate the plastic paper in any clear way. However, we still wanted to play with the physicality of the transformed space, so we suspended the drawings in the air, and projected more drawings on top of them.

Taking this space and suspending it in these warped line drawings is a ‘shadow’ of what happens when people collect images of the space and bring them back as pictures of vacation or a memory of the place at a certain time. There is a certain transactional nature that comes from interacting with the space itself–getting an experience–which is echoed in our attraction to the street performers as well. Additionally, the space is some version of this mechanism as well. For, Trafalgar Square is named for this battle that took place off of the southern coast of Spain. However, is the monument is the ‘vacation album’ that lies on the ‘kitchen counter’, Charing Cross, of Britain, for a curated flash of what that memory in another place was.

At first, we just hung up the images, and walked around the space, experimenting with scale and different lights.

We also experimented with projecting different colors into the installation in the same way that lights recolor the square itself with the different time of day as well as the changing colors in the fountain.

We then wanted to log our presence and disorientation in this warped version of this overwhelming space, layered with so many different histories, with a ‘ghost’ of the path we travelled. SO, we decided to make a stop motion animation by extending a semi-blind contour line of the drawing, using the projection on the background of white paper in the capture studio as our surface.

The drawn lines ended up being quite subtle, and they only interacted with the back, flat pane of the installation, which undermined the three dimensional nature of the space, so after using marker for a little bit, we wanted to extend the idea of editing the space into a three dimensional animation that could also interact with the other suspended images.

As a result, we used thin black string to create a bit of a web in the 3-D space, and on top of that web we used thicker ‘black lines’ in order to extend our blind contour and turn it into a living being.

Largely this was an experimentation of how far we could push line drawing to recreate a space and bring it to life. It was also an experiment in full body stop motion animation, which ended up being a very laborious process on the scale that we were creating the installation.

When we looked at the footage that we collected, we noticed that our pace was too quick for what we wanted to create. Additionally, in the first part, we should have experimented with line size and different materials beyond market to extend the drawing on the paper, though we planned to go back and ‘follow’ the lines the editing process.

Overall, we were excited about the multiple lives this installation could have, as both a stop motion animation experiment about the life of lines in a memory of a space as well as an installation that could be navigated by others based on our own navigation.

On Monday, after the creative writing workshop, I started to think about my blind contour drawings of Borough Market as a sort of observational poem. I was wondering how they could weave and twine together, so I started playing around with them on photoshop.

I quite liked the idea of printing these line drawing out on large, transparent paper and allowing shadows to fall and criss-cross on the floor, depending on how the light hit them. I am interested in this ceiling determining the breadth of the market–how it feels underground, but as if the arches create their own sky.

Then, I started to experiment with what happened to the visual space that was created by using blocks of color, as I remember them from the market. Eventually, Caio told me about live paint, and that process became a little quicker.

The forms take on a whole space when the images are overlayed, even though they come from different perspectives of observation in different locations throughout the market.

Then, I started thinking about 3D applications/how these would have different effects at different scales.

I am excited to do some more drawings and to play with installation, though it does feel like a bit of a radical break from the observation I was doing in Trafalgar Square.

I was sick throughout the weekend, but I finally started feeling better on Sunday. I was feeling quite inspired by the communications pathway session that we had on Thursday about re-engaging with the city with our eyes closed, and by using different parts of our bodies to log information from the city.

I was feeling a little stuck with Trafalgar Square, so I went to a place that was quieter on a Sunday–still on the Northern Line–Borough Market. This market is interesting to me too in terms of the spacial demarkations and zone-ing that we have been exploring in Trafalgar Square. There of course is the physical and visual demarkation based on what stalls are permanently or transiently set up in the markets. However, the competition for the air is different. Sound doesn’t draw people so much as smell.

When Neveah and I walked around there the first time we noticed that the smell of cheese was intermingling with the smell of fudge with the smell of coffee. This was not necessarily pleasant. It was an interesting juxtaposition with all of the criss crossing arches of iron above, for the underneath part of a bridge.

In fact, it was an interesting reversal in comparison to Trafalgar Square with this nearly sub-terranean marketplace. Instead of being above rumbling trains, they were now rumbling way above our heads.

I am drawn to the visual complexity and layering of the ‘ceiling’ of the market, so I started to draw it like I would an illustration from observation. However, I quickly became a bit too obsessed with the accuracy of the geometry. It was a bit like there was something fascinating to me about what I wanted to draw based on the holistic experience of looking up, but all of the boring parts were getting in the way, because I had to build up to the interesting stuff.

So, I drew on Thursday’s pathway session to draw with my iPad using blind contour. The visual part was still interesting, but I would only permit myself to look and linger on that looking. I would let my eye focus where it wanted to focus and have my hand record what it could.

I turned around different corners and drew from different perspectives according to whatever was interesting visually. It felt very indulgent, but I liked what I produced so much more.

I am thinking that I want to return and make many many more of these illustrations, and perhaps I will print them up on large scale transparent paper and install them from the ceiling.