Digital Psycho­geography

Before we delve into this project, let us establish what this term means. Psychogeography involves ’exploring or experiencing the physical landscape in new ways’ (Pinder, 2005). In our case, we were to use digital means to aid this exploration starting or ending in Hackney Marshes and letting a pathway and route open up before us. On this quest was a task to trace and express the emotional, spiritual, historical and spatial connections of our experiences while there.

Out and about

Unlike previous projects that could be approached with internet resources or nearby interviews, this was a location-based exploration for solutions to the brief and as a team, we agreed to have Hackney Marshes as our starting point as it would be most convinient for everyone given we had few days for the project. Being deep into the winter season, we had to to match up to the challenge as the temperatures would as much expected be freezing cold.

The journey to Hackney Marshes

Using different means of transport - a combination of buses and the tube network from our respective residences, we set out for Hackney Marshes on Tuesday, 24th January 2023.

Hackney Marshes' natural embrace

Hackney Marshes is endowed with natural beauty that is evidenced by greenery and streams of water running through the field. Also on location is a

Landmarks of Hackney Marshes

In addition to Hackney Marshes' natural beauty were, man-made landmarks likewise caught our eye.

Hackney Marshes' surroundings

Here are a few photos of places surrounding Hackney Marshes, with some being a few walks away.

Squishiness of Hackney Marshes' soil

Being a marsh, we had a playful experience pressing our shoes against the soil surface and the feedback was a ’marshy’ sound from the wet soil.

Human error

In world struggling with emmense effects of climate change, we came across a few abnormalies like an abandoned Lime bicycle in the river, a fallen tree and rubbish that had got stuck on branches from the riverflow.

Tanya employed the idea of using papers with distances in number of steps as prompts for directions for example 100 steps foward, 200 steps backward, 25 steps left and so on. We used this game as a method to take us from ’nowhere’ to ’somewhere’.

Narrating our experiences

Due to the randomness and the unexpectedness of the game, we told our experiences basing on where the prompts took us and how we felt when we finally got there.

Say cheese!

A light moment with everyone else whom we did our research with on Tuesday, 24th January 2023.

To be able to establish why Hackney Marshes was a place of interest, we listed its key differences with Elephant and Castle, where the College of Communication, University of London is located.

Hackney Marshes:

We had several ideas including an interactive map to nowhere from somewhere, a theatrical performance about direction, a navigation light source for that illuminates directions and we chose to narrate our experiences through use of an Arduino board and wires attached on top of our heads to express the fact that the media was coming from our thoughts.

Furthermore, we had collected several media files including videos and audio files that we could use to our advantage to design an experience.

Getting technical

To get started, we enlisted the help of CTL, the place for all things technical at London College of Communication, who got us going with a programmable Arduino board that would be the brains of the design, cable wire that would run from our bodies to the Arduino board and a memory card to store the mixed audio files. Below is a photo of Devin doing soldering of the wires to a length of about a metre each and then attaching metal clips at both ends thereafter.

Planning

We planned to have the device somewhere hidden to bring an element of surprise to the presentation but our efforts went to the drain. So, we opted to just have it on the table.

Audio layering

I used DaVinci Resolve an ’all-in-one’ media editor to edit, mix and clean up the audio files together with sound effects and music for an all-round sound experience. Below are screenshots of the audio layering in DaVinci Resolve.

After long hours soldering, programming an Arduido board, audio mixing and body-testing, here was our presentation:

Here was the feeback from our presentation:

Here were my after-thoughts:

Pinder, D. (2005), Arts of urban exploration: Cultural Geographies.