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- Jan/Feb 04  DISAPPEARING TOWNS: IN SEARCH OF OLDTON  This
is not my photograph. I found it on the Internet. This is not my memory. There is no evidence of me ever having had to say farewell to this special place, no visible means of connection back to the place where I was born, no way of understanding how or why I lost my place of my birth, how I misplaced it. Or was it rather that it melted through my hands? Instead, I hijack the memories of others. I move from town to village. I drift across the Web. From other people's photographs, their messages of farewell, their keepsakes - the digital memories that keep them anchored to a time when they belonged somewhere - I formulate a replica of the town where I was happiest. My little Eden. My disappeared town. My Oldton. As someone born in the 1960s, I have no digital record of my childhood or the town I lived in for the first six years of my life. The few albums of fading prints my mother owned have been lost. And now when I go back in search of the town itself, I find it has disappeared too. But how does a town just disappear? And what does it feel like to be cut off from your roots in a digital age where people have so many tools for recording and documenting their lives? How do those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age recover and maintain a sense of belonging that is becoming increasingly so hard to hold on to? In Search of Oldton is my attempt to use other people’s digital documentary in order to recapture and re-invent my own personal history. Please help. Rough frontispiece : an excuse to try my hand at very basic Flash Mission statement : how I might proceed; how you might help. Progress report : blog entry with links to new draft assets SIDETRACK 1: GET STONED  An absurd picaresque in the form of a fictional blog with elements of performance video art. My alter ego Mike Stone needs to get round the world and the only way he can raise funds is through the blog. You can fund him through a PayPal account or you can buy the Amazon product he recommends and he'll get a cut as an Amazon Associate. Problem is that the guy's a drunk and also has a thing about shoes (?!) so he wastes quite a lot of money and gets diverted from his supposed route. The idea is that you never quite know where he's going to pop up - and he should cover large distances between reports with no explanation of how he did it. I'm beginning to think the piece is about how drunkeness, the ease of travel and access to electronic funds causes and encourages the kind 'drift' described by the new wave of psychogeographers. It'll also be an experiment about being financially self sufficient by generating digital content. Very rough blog setup : need to re-do template, add Amazon & Paypal, add episodes and work out how to integrate DV footage (phew!) Psychogeography & location aware narrative discussion in trAce forum : should Mike go out and about in the real world, making it up as he goes along, rather than working to a pre-formed narrative?
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| Keep Informedwritersforthefuture@ntu.ac.uk | |
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Talking
fridges. Do they talk? If so, what language? And once they are all net
enabled, how will they talk to us?