Initial Thoughts

On the train to Sheffield at 13:51, the following things are on my mind: What is a digital practice in the rural landscape? What am I, as a confirmed urbanite, going to do in the rural setting of the Peak District National park? Why does the Ordnance Survey Landranger series start with the area I'm going to? What am I doing in the First Class compartment? Do I really look as jowly as the webcam pictures suggest? Where did I put that hard drive with all my files backed up on it? Will I eat my way through my material budget in absence of per diems?

I replied to a PhD student today who was directed to me by Gabriella Giannichi, trying to give her a flavour of what I might be doing this weekend and found myself in a rather chaotic but inspiring mood about what is in my head. I'm thinking about reflecting on romantic landscape painting and its role in the perception of what countryside is to this day and how that might inform a slightly absurdist desire I have to take a laptop for a walk in nature, working on digital art production or data gathering en plein air, as the impressionists would say.

Talking to Dad last night, he told me about the Claude Glass or Black Mirror which 19th Century aesthetes used to take for walks in the countryside with them, turning their back on what they wanted to see in order to see its reflection, distorted by the convex mirror and desaturated by the purposefully dim representation. It reminds me of the Scrying Mirror of John Dee I used to visit in the British Museum and looking at one on an internet search earlier in Foyles bookshop, I was delighted to see that one design of Claude Glass looks rather like my Eeepc which I am going to be taking on my walks. Perhaps the code I wrote that periodically takes a set of pictures from the eeepc's webcam is the digital equivalent of this absurd and fascinating device? Like it, the eeepc webcam points back at the user, forcing you to turn your back on your subject and look over your own shoulder if you want to see how the webcam sees it.

There is something else crucial about the placement of the webcam in most laptops that have them built in: They all face the user rather than the outside world. This is clearly about video calling where the person on the other end of the line wants to see you, not what you're facing. Last week I extended my adventures in programming to the linux crontab, writing a small script that takes between two and four pictures every ten minutes the netbook is on and I've been surprised by the results. Programming a script that will take a picture rather than pressing a button to take a picture doesn't affect the authorship of that work but it does change utterly the content of the photograph. I've been delighted and horrified by what my little laptop witnesses and a narrative seems to form around it, anthropomorphising its presence. Looking at the photos, what you get is a sense of what the thing looks at, without being able to move, a bit like a tiny child, witnessing the world its parents have wittingly or unwittingly placed in front of it.

The outcome of all this is that I have now a collection of pictures, sometimes of empty rooms, many of me and other people getting caught unaware and many more of my face frowning into the screen of this eeepc computer I'm typing at now or working at another machine in our studio. I think my favourite set so far is seeing the light through the train window change as I travel from Nottingham to Winchester on Tuesday evening. My intention is to use this as a tool for documenting the residency.

As for other activities, on my way to St Pancras this morning to catch the Sheffield train, I popped into Cass Arts on Charing Cross Road, near the National Portrait Gallery and bought some more watercolour half-pans for my watercolour set that I recently revived for a web site I am building (http://www.archivdesumbruchs.de), in case I get inspired, like the San Diego artist Tony Allard, who I met in Banff, to combine analogue mark making with digital image production and connectivity (see drawing in the media stream).

I also intend to draw the town of Hathersage by walking down all its streets until I have a complete record of it in my GPS drawing data (http://planbperformance.net/dan/mapping.htm).

This morning my Mum found a few faded photographs from about 1979 when we had a family holiday to Bamford, the next town along the Derwent valley from Hathersage. I re-photographed these images with the intention of visiting Bamford and see if my memory is prompted. I have very little recollection of this holiday, other than finding a vinyl record of a patriotic song in the bedroom I was sleeping in about Guernsey - 'Guernsey, Guernsey my home / Island, born of the foam'.