‘appy new year y’all.
Got some bits coming up in January that we’ve been thinking about recently. The first being the first iteration of Word in Transit, curated by Anais Comer. Since Word in Transit happens on the underground we’ve decided to make it about another form of public transport.
Earlier this year we attended the beta run of the Citymapper bus; for a weekend the company offered free lifts around central London to trial their new green shuttle bus. The bus is being introduced by the company to ‘plug the gaps’ in the city that TFL neglects. The compact size of the bus combined with the company’s ability to monitor and track the traveling habits of the city means the Citymapper bus could be the first private mode of public transport in the city other than TFL (or the second, Uber Pool could technically be considered as public transport). The App, which has been used widely for quite a few years and now has a global reach, is characterized by small, stylized cartoons, constructed using white lines on a green background, one of which (a bus) is called Bussy. As the company begins to roll out actual busses the shift from application to Bus Company is in motion, and as a business whose aim is to improve efficiency of cities (and in turn collect data) one has to consider where it may eventually lead to; town planners? Public property developers? Self-driving vehicles?
In response to this thinking we’ve written a short kids story about Bussy; how Bussy deals with the changing landscape of the city, from the ‘rejuvenation’ of areas as well rising sky scrapers that confuse Bussy’s GPS as a result of multi-path interference. Multi-path interference is caused when the location-based device does not have a clear shot or line of sight at the sky. In areas where there are many tall buildings, the source signal of the GPS device can split into more than one signal, causing erroneous readings. Bussy is torn between his/her dependence on 4G (and the infrastructure surrounding it; demand, funding etc) and a desire to escape the city, as well as the pressures of being needed by the citizens. Like a young adult leaving home the Bussy deals with feelings of guilt, liberation, and a general curiosity of the mysteries of the world outside the Internet and the city. The small publications are then fitted inside a the plastic oyster card holders we all know and love, and then distributed to the crowd in the carriage.
Another year means another Tate exchange, and this year’s title is ‘How to survive as an artist in the metropolis’. We’ve decided to go down the route of the rucksack being a kind of mobile studio. Artists’ rucksacks embody a behind-the-scenes view into their studio; they are the vehicles that transport the tools used to create the concepts that make up their practice. Notebooks, pens, laptops, chargers, cigarettes, old bits of paper, receipts. All of these items have the potential to tell a story of both, where the artist has been, and where they might be going next. The process of artistic production is something that isn’t bound to a singular place such as the conventional idea of a studio; themes and concepts follow the artist around the entire time, as if they are within the rucksack on their back.
Therefore, what we decided was that our studio will take the form of a ‘guess the weight’ game that one might find at a school or town fete. Participants will be asked to guess the weight of an artist’s rucksack that contains all the materials required to make a portable artists studio. Items ranging from notebooks to PAYG oyster card to phone chargers and paints will make up the materials of the bag. Each participant will get to take a lucky dip into one of the rucksacks, receiving an object from the artists’ rucksack studio. The winner will receive one of the empty rucksacks; a space to carry around the constituent materials of their own practice, whatever that may be.
Our conversation with Jeff Ko from Ko projects is going really well! He’s put such a great page together for us. Doing these sorts of things is such a great opportunity to see how other people organise and reflect on our work. Letting other people do what they do and see how we’re depicted is such a rewarding experience for us.