The Everyday Journey

Everyday Stories
Connie Blake
Grace Rodgers
EvadOuld-Okojie
Jayne Riddell

Our Aim
to document the everyday stories, and journeys of ourselves and the people around us, with main focus on the student population.
to illustrate these journeys using crafts, in this case tie-dye and the manipulation of textiles.
to explore the inhabited areas and the links that can be drawn between each location and city area.

The Collection of Journeys
Collection of individual journeys particularly within Nottingham City Centre over the course of a 5 day week, Monday to Friday.
We collated the data and, with the aid of Umapper, began to see correlation between the student population movements within the city.
We mapped these locations and correlations into our own material to create a representational, abstracted map. The patterns seen in the dye represent the overlapping of individual journeys.

Fabric Experimentation

Our final fabric map
Layering and manipulation of the map. Working other journeys and stories into it.
Using receipts, tickets, public transport tickets, to further illustrate everyday activities.
Building upon existing map.

Digital Layering
Using Photoshop to digitally layer maps onto our visual representation.

Website
http://www.wix.com/evadouldokojie/ourcollectivejourneys

Influential Artists and Theorists

Mark Hansen & Ben RubinListening Post
“Listening Post is a ‘dynamic portrait’ of online communication, displaying uncensored fragments of text, sampled in real-time, from public internet chatrooms and bulletin boards...By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors' postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data.”

Susan Hillier Dream Mapping
A number of people were invited to sleep for three nights inside fairy rings of mushrooms that grow in grassy fields. Each morning the sleepers would map the shape and memories of their dreams in a notebook. These maps were then superimposed, making a survey of the dream space(s) that the sleepers had variously explored, to test if there was co-incidence, resonance or a shared event. Dream Mapping I is in essence a search for a collective architecture of these hidden, subjective dream spaces.

Chris Ofili
Ofili has built an international reputation with his works that bridge the sacred and the profane, popular culture and beliefs. His exuberant paintings are renowned for their rich layering and inventive use of media, including balls of elephant dung that punctuate the canvas and support them at their base, as well as glitter, resin, map pins and magazine cut-outs.

El Anatsui
El Anatsui, recognised as one of the leading sculptors of our time. Best known for his 'cloths' made from whisky bottle caps, he has won international acclaim for a range of spectacular gallery and site-based installations. Most recently, he transformed one of Italy's Gothic landmarks, wrapping the façade of the Palazzo Fortuny with thousands of glimmering bottle caps during the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Tom Philips
Tom Phillips: A Humument. Phillips is able to create a "found story" by highlighting certain phrases and pieces of text in the book " A human document". Philips creates a new narrative out of an already existing one.

Marcel Proust
Memories that are cued by everyday life. Simple actions trigger complex memories.“Re-experiencing is something more: it is not only the appearance of an image into the field of consciousness, but this appearance is so clear and is accompanied by such a precise and intense repro- duction of the state of personality of the subject at the time of the initial impression, that this subject again believes they are going through the same.” [J. Bogousslavskya, O. Walusinskib, 2011]“…he emphasised the “shock” provoked by the surge of a previously forgotten vivid memory, which may lead to an intense feeling of happiness and beatitude due to the affective overlap between the past and the present. This phenomenon leads to a synthesis of past and present persons in the subject, with a feeling of untemporality.” [J. Bogousslavskya, O. Walusinskib, 2011]

Georg Simmel
Simmel believes that the everyday and society consists of a web of interactions. It is an accumulation of moments. Personality and society should not be considered when understanding the everyday. It hinges on the patterns and the interactions of society.“The everyday is a plethora of irreducible particularity, yet across this unmanage- able actuality is a language of ‘woven’ ‘threads’ that ‘bind us together’, that point to the possibility of mapping a heterogeneous, diversified and complex totality. While the everyday is unpredictable and indeterminate there is within it the possibility of mapping its equivocality, of situating its ambivalence at the centre of the social.” [Highmore,2002, p.38]“Simmel argued that because there is so much going on in social life, people regularly simplify the world into a limited number of forms of interaction, and types of interactants. Humans are able to continually develop new forms and types because they are endowed with a creative consciousness. This creative consciousness allows people to overcome limits imposed by external structures, but it can also impose limits on action when it reifies the social world.” [Ritzler, 2011]

Walter Benjamin
The everyday is the show of progression, but does not sentimentalise the past. Taking simple objects and elements, and placing in position of power and importance. Seen through discarding debris and rubbish“Benjamin’s approach to history is through ‘trash’ – through the spent and discarded materials that crowd the everyday. In this everyday material world different temporalities exist side by side: the latest version alongside last year’s model. Everyday life registers the process of modernization as an incessant accumulation of debris: modernity produces obsolescence as part of its continual demand for the new (the latest version becomes last year’s model with increasing frequency). But for Benjamin the modern everyday is not to be found just in material objects; the world of affects, of sensation is equally important.” [Highmore, 2002, p.61]Importance lies with discarded materials.

Future Progression
Create an installation open to the public. Allow the audience to mark their own journeys, either through sewing and manipulation of the tie dye, or digitally through projected “map pins”. Open it up beyond the student population, take it to different communities within the city.
This project could be replicated in different areas of the country.

The Everyday Journey

by pervasivetheatre on Jun 08, 2011

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