#rbrtISEA: reallybigroadtrip is on a road to no[w]here

a ‘where’s wally’ style homeJames at Hampton Village near Burra

There are going to be times when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place — then it won’t make a damn.

As quoted by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

reallybigroadtrip is an experiment in pretty much everything. Professionally, creatively and personally I live almost entirely fluidly and in the moment. I used to be a Stage Manager and plan everything to the tiniest detail. Then I was a producer or project manager, coordinating superstructures of activities. This streamed more into facilitating, nurturing other peoples’ journeys, troubleshooting & providing techsupport or technoevangelism and helping them define their flow or their structures as required. Now I’m a maker again and find myself craving the unknown in one big literal and metaphorical journey. reallybigroadtrip is a manifestation of that journey.

My work for ISEA2013 has been exploring this process and so, somewhat naturally, the work itself has turned out to be that process.

All aboard!

We invite you to join us over ISEA2013 in a microcosm of the overarching reallybigroadtrip world. We’re so fluid you can even choose one of three forms to connect with us.

1. Public Talk

My Nomad in Residence Kate Chapman and two special guests Brenda L Croft and Cheryl L’Hirondelle will join me in a talk about mapping culture as part of the ISEA2013 public talks program with Vivid Ideas Festival. This is from 10-11.30am at MCA on Saturday 8th June. It costs $15 for general audiences and is free for ISEA2013 Conference Delegates but booking is required.

2. ISEA2013 Conference

Over the three days of the conference 11th-13th June homeJames (my beautiful big red bus) will be parked up on Eastern Avenue at the University of Sydney. Everyone is welcome to just pop along and have a nosey or grab me for an official ‘tour’ (don’t worry, it doesn’t take very long!).

I’ll also be live-tweeting the conference with Elliott Bledsoe and our team using the hashtag #iseeISEA – we really encourage you to share your top tips and experiences!

3. #rbrtISEA is no[w]here

Between 11am to 6pm on Mon 10th, Fri 14th, Sat 15th and Sun 16th June the bus will demonstrate the (inter)national adventure by hosting a mini version. Starting from Paddington we will be driving around Sydney finding locations that just feel like they would be a good place to stop. We will not be using maps, just following our noses and waiting for the place that just feels right. Once the location has been found my Nomad in Residence Kate Chapman and myself will park the bus, put out a couple of chairs and throw on the magnetic signs that indicate we are ‘open for business’. Then we will just see what happens.

Some passers-by will come and ask what we are doing, so we will tell them about reallybigroadtrip and about ISEA2013 and how we want to just meet people and see what happens. Sometimes they will suggest where we go next – we have two spare passenger seats so it’s entirely possible we will take them along with us when we go.

Some ISEA2013 audiences might know we’re doing this and want to come and find us in a random spare moment. We will take an instagram photograph (my account is @feesable) tagging our location so that at any time you can see where we are. If you want you can also message us directly; I’m @feesable and Kate is @wonderchook on Twitter. Be aware that we might be engaged in deep conversations with random strangers so you should let us know that you are coming so that we can hang around long enough to connect with you.

And if we get ‘moved on’… well that’s all just part of the journey, right?

Schedule

OK, that’s a lot of dates and times so here’s a handy chronological diary for you to know how and where you might find us. Or if you happen to see a big red bus parked up be sure to come over and say hello!

Sat 8th, 10-11.30am – public talk on mapping culture at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA).
Mon 10th, 11am-6pm – #rbrtISEA driving around Sydney – see @feesable / @wonderchook for locations.
Tues 11th, 9am-6pm – ISEA2013 conference where you can meet homeJames and I’ll be live-tweeting #iseeISEA.
Weds 12th, 9am-6pm – ISEA2013 conference where you can meet homeJames and I’ll be live-tweeting #iseeISEA.
Thurs 13th, 9am-6pm – ISEA2013 conference where you can meet homeJames and I’ll be live-tweeting #iseeISEA.
Fri 14th, 11am-6pm – #rbrtISEA driving around Sydney – see @feesable / @wonderchook for locations.
Sat 15th, 11am-6pm – #rbrtISEA driving around Sydney – see @feesable / @wonderchook for locations.
Sun 16th, 11am-6pm – #rbrtISEA driving around Sydney – see @feesable / @wonderchook for locations.

Investigative Cartography at Floating Land Festival

The Backstory

Pretty much everything about reallybigroadtrip has a story behind it; here’s the one behind Floating Land. Or alternatively you can just skip to the end and download a PDF to get involved yourself.

During the crowdfunding campaign I received a tweet from Leah Barclay, asking me if I’d like to bring the bus up to the Sunshine Coast to develop an artwork at Floating Land Festival and talk at Balance/Unbalance. She had seen me write about my desire to create a new life for myself – creatively, ecologically and economically – and felt that was a perfect match for the themes (Nature’s Dialogue and Future Nature, Future Culture[s] respectively). I felt it was only fair to remind her that I was in the middle of a campaign that I was completely uncertain I’d pull off, so that maybe the whole idea would be pretty moot. Fortunately she had more faith than I did and said she’d still love for me to think about it – BLESS HER COTTON SOCKS! On taking a look over the dates I saw it crossed over with ISEA2013 – an event I have a long relationship with and knew I’d be involved with. Leah is a force of nature in herself and she even created an opportunity out of that concern, suggesting I use my time in Noosa to develop a work that I could take to ISEA.

Festivals are a great excuse for bringing in a Nomad in Residence. My plan with the Nomads is to invite them to share their skills so that I sneakily get to observe and learn from them as well as collaborate with them and/or be inspired by their practice to influence my own. My early thinkings for Floating Land last year were around Augmented Reality. I had been planning on bringing out Dutch artist Sander Veenhof whom I’d first met at ISEA2011 in Istanbul and later hung out with at ReWire in UK and STRP in Holland (where he was presenting the ‘world’s first augmented reality rabbit’ ;P). As the year went on his calendar became more and more booked and the focus for my own work become more directed elsewhere, toward open source and nomadicy.

In January I presented a talk on ‘Open Source Cities’ at the Haecksen mini conf at Linux Conf Australia. A woman with the fabulous twitter handle @wonderchook (Kate Chapman) tweeted that she was ‘down with the whole nomads thing’ and so we had a nice exchange (again with twitter being a catalyst for this project!). Watching her talk, Open Source and Open Data for Humanitarian Response with OpenStreetMap, I realised she would be a perfect Nomad for this stage of my journey. I had already been looking into using OpenStreetMap on the reallybigroadtrip journey but had seen how underused it was – some areas are big empty expanses by comparison to Google Maps and for someone who already doesn’t know the country very well that could be dangerous! Insofar as Floating Lands & Balance/Unbalance were concerned, Queensland is increasingly facing major emergency scenarios due to floods and storms; Kate’s work with the Humanitarian arm of OSM in this area would be invaluable and should be more widely known.

Become an OpenStreetMap Contributor!

So, fast-forward to May, when I collect Kate (who’s normally based in Jakarta) in Brisbane and we start the drive to the Sunshine Coast. We originally were invited to use our time here to develop a work – one which we plan to take to ISEA2013 but we have also been scheduled for a run of public sessions, drop-in style workshops. Unfortunately some of those had been mis-scheduled for after we have to leave for the long drive down to Sydney for ISEA (apologies to anyone who tries to come find us at that stage). So we have produced a kind of DIY workshop program that can be done both with and without us and which drops some of the more complicated geekery and creates more awareness for OpenStreetMap use – our original basic goal.

When we got to Boreen Point (the site for the Floating Land Festival), online OpenStreetMap looked like this:

original map of Boreen Point

Over the next week this map will be updated by our team of “investigative cartographers” made up from artists and the local community as well as the visitors who come to the Floating Land Festival and Balance/UnBalance conference (which may well include you!).

Kate has done some more detailed surveying to get the ball rolling (as you’ll see in the download) and we have printed out a few hundred Field Papers to aid the DIY process. They have a set of instructions on one side and a map that you can draw on and then photograph to upload to the community on the other. While we’re ‘open for business’ up here we can handhold you through that process, but it’s also incredibly simple to do yourself. We will leave a bundle of these in the workshops tent after we have left.

Because this project is very much about open source culture, we wanted to share that experience here so that you can use the same tools and processes to enhance and update the OpenStreetMap in your area. You don’t need to be in Floating Land over the next week, or even in Queensland, to follow the same process. Download the PDF and follow the instructions, or pop along to the big red bus while we’re here (until Tuesday lunchtime). We’d love to see what you do, though, so feel free to share the link to your own maps in the comments below, or tweet @feesable and @wonderchook with your links.

Happy Mapping!

on being uncontrollably controlled

Several weeks ago a dear friend (and Nomad in Residence to-be) Alex Kelly tagged me in a facebook post with a link to an article called Conscious computing: how to take control of your life online. Laughably (?) I was so busy (mainly online) that while I saw the tagged update I couldn’t spare the headspace to read an article about how potentially damaging being online actually was. I’ve just found the time to read that article and realise that – the smart cookie she is – Alex shared an article that has deep relevance for me.

“making a bolt for the door” what time away from the digital world and a cornflakes packet does to me – http://thesubjects.anat.org.au/2013/02/day-3-fee-we-are-cyborg/

Firstly, I never had the chance to ask Alex if she tagged me because I’m always online or because of the affect The Subjects (a sleep deprivation residency created by Vicki Sowry from ANAT, hosted by Professor Drew Dawson & his scientists at The Appleton Institute and experienced with my utterly phenomenal co-subjects Sean Williams, Thom Buchanan & Jennifer Mills) had on me earlier this year. The article mentions a thing called “paper-tweeting” – “scribbling supposedly witty wisecracks in a notebook as a substitute for the urge to share them online”. I never knew this was a thing, but it’s precisely what I did when my internet connection was taken away – as you can see! (NB this link hosts an incomplete version, somehow the full untweets including photos weren’t uploaded, i’ll have to fix that…): http://thesubjects.anat.org.au/2013/02/the-untweets.

I have talked publicly at Adelaide Writers Week about what The Subjects did to my brain, but I have yet to write it up (at least for public dissemination). Partly this is from being too busy with a stupidly complex calendar of commitments this year, but also because it’s not an easy one to untangle (especially for public dissemination!). I’ve always been a bit of a hermit – I prefer one-to-one over group activities and am always kinda freaked out by parties even though I can talk professionally to a room of thousands. Since I started playing online back in 1996 I have been about as ‘always-on’ as my access to technology and my location would allow. Last year’s crowdfunding campaign pushed my online presence to an unprecedented level. It obviously climaxed over the Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman and Hugh Jackman tweet viral explosion, but has still (to my surprise) maintained a strong consistency long long afterward.

The Subjects was a research study into the affect of sleep deprivation on creativity, but for me it wasn’t vaguely about that; I am invariably sleep deprived and I have often questioned my creativity in any context. The residency to me personally was to explore the affect of complete disconnection from my online & social media community on my … well, on my everything. I really will write this up properly, honest. But for the purposes of this blog post let’s just say that being disconnected from my online world, even just for a week,

FUCKED. ME. UP.

It rewired me in every way imaginable and I’ve really struggled to get my shit back together ever since.

In some ways it’s been a really good experience; I have questioned and challenged what ‘being digitally connected’ and ‘being physically connected’ all meant to me then and what it all means now, which is healthy (if sometimes painful). But in other ways – when you are supposed to be a public voice for not just your own projects and creative path, but have contracts that require you to be actively social online for other people & events – fuck me, that’s hard. And yes, you can easily add the stress of couchsurfing (read: being homeless) and launching a new project (read: finding/renovating a bus and all the crazy that entailed) on top. Suffice to say… it’s been a huge year and it’s still only May.

As I said, I will write up my experiences with all that…another time. For now this article was really pretty bloody good and so I want to come back to that (and thank Alex for tagging me even tho I so rudely blipped her off my radar at that moment in time!).

Muscle (or any) Control

Oliver Burkeman ends his article with this: “What we need are ways of strengthening the muscle that lets you maintain control of your own attention, so that you can more frequently win the psychological arm-wrestle against the services and sites that are itching to control it for you”. He’s right, that’s a smart view and in a way reflects the ‘program or be programmed‘ advice from my old friend Doug Rushkoff (and others). But for me there’s something else that turned ‘being disconnected’ into ‘a gift’. I returned to skills I used to use every day in the physical world – I started MAKING PHYSICAL THINGS again.

In a past life, for around a decade, I worked in Theatre as a prop maker/set designer/lighting crew and stage manager. I was a jack of all trades who moved happily between departments depending on location and need. I would make things from whatever was around or I would imagine things and make tiny versions of them to try to ‘sell’ the idea of what a large-scale version might look like. That was an art (or probably more accurately, a craft) that I had grown up with and then lost (or more accurately, forgotten) because of technology. Not by choice, just by muscle memory.

The absolute disconnection afforded by The Subjects residency (combined with the dedicated time to notice that was what had happened and act on it) made me incapable of ignoring the differences between those worlds any longer. I hadn’t ever lost my love for physical making, nor the ability to actually turn a cornflakes packet into a mediaeval door bolt, apparently, but I could feel how much I had let that muscle become weak. My time ‘inside’ reminded me that making matters, making ANYTHING matters, and that while, yes, you do need to Make Good Art, you also need to allow yourself the time at a new beginning to just make anything so long as that in future your aim is to make BETTER art. One day, perhaps, with a lot of time and effort you will make GOOD art. It doesn’t matter whether what you make is digital or physical, it just matters that you MAKE IT.

For the record I have now taken control (of a sort!). I am now living fulltime in a bus that has a bed, storage, and a kitchen (although of course there will always be more work to be done). I have (more importantly) just finished or delegated ALL my pre-organised ‘service’ commitments and am now only looking ahead to projects where I actively make things or talk about making things. In case you are curious: Yes, my ego is currently shitting itself. I have spent far too long not making my own work (because I’ve been facilitating other peoples’ creativity) and I have lost both muscle memory and muscle strength; I’ve been in a creative coma and that takes time to recover from. It often feels like nothing I knew before has relevance now – all the code, platforms and hardware have changed since I last made digital things and even then I will admit to a great deal of bodgit & scarper and google copy paste. But I am learning those bits and I have an elderly teenager’s worth of experience in anecdotal references and context. So this year I might not make the art I want to make, the art I can see and desire in my mind. But I will MAKE THINGS. And then, hopefully, next year I will MAKE GOOD THINGS.

Because of how the internet has exploded in that time (and because of how my own online presence has exploded in that time) those things will be a lot more public now than anything I ever made before (erk – this just gets more terrifying the more I write!). These days I am offline more than ever because when you live in a bus you don’t always have electricity or an internet signal (and I’m paying the utterly disgusting rate of $180 per 12GB of data thanks to living in a country where Telstra are allowed to be fuckwits). I have maintained creativity both digitally and through analogue crafts, playing with projects around knitting and sewing, recently starting my first ever cross stich pattern, am about to get/build my own 3d printer, and have a few Arduino toys to play with. I don’t know that I’ll ever take control of my life online (or off!) but I do know that either way the most important thing from all this is that whatever I do, it should have ‘meaning’. For me, meaning comes from both digital and physical; people, like Alex, sharing things that matter on places like facebook that help me live a better life in the bus actively thinking about what I’m going to make and what meaning it’ll have.

Confused? Yeah, me too. Bear with me, I’m working it out and will probably post a status update when it’s ready… so I’ll see you uncontrollably controlled online sometime:)

UPDATE: After writing this post I was chatting with my old partner-in-crime Ben Jones about this creative shift and the problems therein. He mentioned he’d had this quote from Ira Glass as the homescreen of his phone for about a year saying ‘I thought it was a really useful thing to hold on to, especially when making things that i’m not entirely happy with (which is essentially all the time)’. I’d stumbled on the same quote earlier this year while thinking hard about what I was going to be making, and why. It’s helped me enormously to accept what I was saying above – that not being great now is OK and I just need to not give up. Anyway, in case you missed it, here:

No[w]here

“big bus, little bus” photo by Sayraphim Lothian @Sayraphim

Four women from four different lands (UK, US, AU, CA) converge in Sydney in June 2013 for the International Symposium on Electronic Art. Collectively the four have never physically shared the same geographic location at the same time, although lead artist Fee Plumley has spent time independently with all of the others. Creatively the four have never previously collaborated but they are brought together by a collective interest in exploring location and its affect on meaningful human connection.

Because they reside across the world No[w]here is a digitally-driven collaboration process through skype calls, shared documents and emails. It will culminate physically with all four arriving at ISEA2013 in Sydney. Once there we invite you to join us for a series of experiences around the city that will be announced through the reallybigroadtrip blog and social spaces – sign up for notifications below.

Expect maps that lie, perambulatory conversations that uncover liminal spaces, and the decadent sensation of being lost on purpose.

Fee Plumley is a Welsh/Mancunian/Australian nomadic geek artist travelling around Australia in a bus, making and sharing with everyone she meets along the way. reallybigroadtrip.com | technoevangelist.net | @feesable

Kate Chapman is a US geographer and technologist from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team who has most recently been working in Jakarta on crisis preparedness and response. @wonderchook

Brenda L Croft is a member of the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra peoples from the Northern Territory, Australia. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), College of Fine Arts (CoFA), UNSW. http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media-office/brenda-croft

Cheryl L’Hirondelle is a non-status/treaty nêhiyaw/âpihtawikosisan (cree/metis) interdisciplinary artist and singer/songwriter from the land now known as canada. cheryllhirondelle.com

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Call for Investigative Cartographers!

City of Lights LED map made for TEDxADL

Open call for 12 people to join our project at Floating Land Festival and Balance/Unbalance Conference, 26th May – 9th June 2013.

:::::: UPDATE :::::: DEADLINE EXTENDED to Fri 24th May at NOON (we will inform everyone by Fri evening).

“We” are Fee Plumley (@feesable) & Kate Chapman (@wonderchook). Specifically, Fee is a nomadic geek artist from UK and a permanent resident of Australia and Kate is a technologist geographer from US currently based in Indonesia. We enjoy exploring the way people perceive where they are & how they navigate through open source technologies and human contact.

“You” are an adult professional with an interest in creative experimentation, open source technologies and navigation. More than that we do not know, which is why we’re sending out this invitation. You may be a local to Noosa or a visitor here for the festival; you might be an artist, scientist, teacher, technologist or academic (or one of many other things); you might already be a geek or perhaps an enthusiastic newbie. We really don’t mind so long as you are passionate and curious and willing to commit some of your time over two weeks of the Floating Land Festival & Balance/Unbalance Conference.

Activity

Using a combination of OpenStreetMap online mapping technology, extremely basic electronics and our natural instinct to explore and share, Fee and Kate will run a two-day Masterclass and public program with twelve selected participants.

During the Masterclass we will explore how we perceive the locations we occupy and what we gain or lose in communicating those perceptions with others. Through these two days we will collaboratively develop a public program in which Floating Land & Balance/Unbalance delegates can engage in a process resulting in an open source physical and digital artifact that can be added to long after the festival has ended.

Commitment

We have a lot to achieve in a very short space of time, and most importantly we want to build a legacy that can continue after we have gone. If you are interested taking one of twelve positions you must commit to being available for the following dates:

26th May – social BBQ to meet and get to know each other (including meeting the rbrt bus, homeJames!).

27/28th May – two-day intensive Masterclass both working through a creative process and developing a program that you yourselves will run with delegates during the festival.

30th May – an opportunity to trial / talk about our new program at Mill Point (don’t worry, we’ll be there too).

3rd-5th June – run the program for Floating Land participants (with Fee & Kate attending).

5th-9th June – run the program alone (with Fee & Kate participating remotely).

NB: for 3rd-9th sessions a rotating schedule can be arranged at flexible times to enable real life to continue at the same time.

Interested?

Excellent! Now, we only have twelve places, so we want to know a little bit more about you so we can build the right team. If you submit an expression of interest below but we aren’t able to fit you in you will be given first dibs on public sessions to make sure you still have a great experience.

This reallybigroadtrip artwork has been supported by Sunshine Coast Council (Economic Development) to expand the awareness and opportunities for digital culture on the Sunshine Coast. This capacity building project is designed to inspire the developing digital economy and capitalise on the opportunities for community engagement around the NBN roll out on the Sunshine Coast.