Pyschogeography...

I was looking back on my notes over the weekend; I came over the lecture on media art, and our pyschogeography project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxuBY2b2-cc

Unfortunately, for some reason, YouTube won't allow the music to be played for "copyright" reasons, even though I purchased the song from iTunes, but then again, the copyright/copyfight debate is for another day.

I loved the idea we came up with, leaving our journey to the game of chance, by throwing a die to know how many stops we would have to wait until we got off. Using only First buses it meant we would at least stay inside the city of Leicester, however if we had more cash, and more of a sense of adventure, i would of loved to have ventured out on the "out of city buses" and seen where we ended up.

We used a mixture of film and photography to track our course of where we went and ended up in. We started a trend of taking a picture of the bus stop, the number of the bus, and the first landmark we saw as we got off the bus on our chance decided stop. So when it came down to finally making and editing the footage, the only sound I used was at the very beginning, and then put the rest of the film in silence, with "King of the Road" playing in the background, using the old country song as a comparison with the new age type of art we were creating, making a contrast between the two types of creativity. I also put the films and images in a weird, almost A-Ha style effect, everything was just like a drawn outline, rather than full images, showing the fact we didnt really know any details of where we were, just the general outline of the place.

As it was, our bus took us to the most deserted streets of Leicester, with only rubbish blowing on the pavements for company, to then the more "suburbia" type estates and cult-e-sacs, passed a primary school, passed a Tesco and, quite randomly, we ended up at Dale's Mum's house.

The game of chance is a powerful, and quite coincidental, thing.

Looking back though, I would of loved to have tried something a little different, maybe on foot, mimicking 'The Thought Project' by Simon Hoegsburg, stopping people in the street, asking what they were thinking about just before we stopped them, and using their quotes and pictures. I think that would have been so interesting just with random strangers, yet you never can tell what kind of answer you'll get, like Simon Hoegsburg did with some geeky looking man telling him he was thinking of a rude, intimate joke about a hostess...

Looking at more professional New Media Art, I feel like ours lacked a lot. I love the Listening Post done by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin...Though it would have been a lot harder to mimic that, maybe taking a status from each of our Facebook, from a random friend, and writing it up on a wall, till they all form together in just a bundle of words and random people's thoughts. Some call it graffiti however...