Place making in my chosen site

I struggled to come up with an idea for this one. I think mostly because I see the whole place making concept as a way of improving a site whether its be renovating it or giving it exposure. But the problem with this is that I think my site is perfect as it is. If it was to gain mass exposure with any of the ideas I've proposed, it would take away the magical component that comes with being so untouched. So as a result of this line pf thought, I'm going to answer this weeks task with just no. Place Making wouldn't work in my site because I can't see creating a work for collaboration between companies and the government or community would be worth losing the appeal of this natural place. It's the classic problem of something being ruined as soon as humans put their hand to it. It's a miracle that we have been able to have a  reasonably minimal effect on this site so far, I wouldn't want to expand on the effect we have already had. Creating paths and steps as well as the human traffic that use these paths has caused enough disruption to this place without creating public art within the spot.

Response to Tasmanian Wilderness

This is just  a google photo because I had to work instead of going on the Higgs Track excursion. The first thing I would respond to in this space would be a mixture of the view and the vast space it covers. From this view point you can see an incredibly distance. I think it would be great to create a piece that really made people acknowledge the view. I think the way to do this would be to involve audience participation in the creation of the final work but not having it as the focus point. the idea I had was to get people to do their own tracings of the horizon as they see it from this viewpoint. I would then use all of these sketches together in an overlapping pattern to create an artwork. I think the most effective medium would be printing onto perspex or even a natural surface like tree bark rather than just painting them of tracing them on to paper.

Choose Two Tools

Two tools to take to my area and experiment with would probably be string and speakers. I've been thinking about ways to interrupt the natural flow of this space by introducing man made obstacles to throw people of enjoying their natural surroundings. The speakers I would use in  a sound projection piece, rigged into the tree tops and hidden from eye site. They would play a variety of unnatural man-made sounds like chainsaws, machinery, excavation equipment, banging and crashing. I could even use actual voices of people yelling and cursing as part of this dialogue. The aim of this type of piece would be to see how people react to such confronting noises in a place they would not expect to encounter such things, it would be as much a social experiment as an installation piece. The string I originally thought of using in a similar way, to create physical boundaries that prevent people from walking the paths and judging how they react to this but the idea of creating a string web across the path, although it interrupts their course, it actually helps them to engage more with their surroundings if anything because they would have to walk off the set path and into the bush to get around the obstacle, this action of stepping into an actual space rather than following the set path can be really beneficial to connecting with your surroundings. So these two tools could create two very different installations with different social experiments and incredibly different outcomes.

week six

Week Six Task:

• Consider the concept of the weathered body in your site. Does it enable/inhibit extreme physical conditioning?
• What are some extreme physical exertions that are related to your current site? How was it built/cleared/constructed?
• What modes of performance training/preparation might be enabled/suited to the particulars of your site/space?

The site itself doesn’t have anything to do with physical exertion but the trip to get the sight certainly doesn’t. You need to have strength- mental and physical to get to the flat. You can not expect to get there without a bit of sweat and muscle burning unless you are extremely fit. The circuit itself is about 5.4 k. to get to it you obviously don’t have to walk all of this, you can enter the circuit at other points. But the shortest distance between an entrance and the flat is to climb up the ladder, a series of very steep concrete, uneven steps to get there.

The physical component of getting to this site is completely unavoidable unless you want to fly in by helicopter. The tracks were probably made around the same as all the others around the gorge were, in the 1800s for the elite to stroll along. This track is not exactly strolling stuff so it’s a possibility that it was made for the men to train/ exercise on because e of course women wouldn’t have been seen physically exerting themselves in public back then. What I love about the tracks is that they haven’t just been dug out with machinery or made with concrete, they are rocky, muddy and natural because they are simply maintained by peoples footsteps and use of them.

week 5

Week Five Task:

• Reflect on the nature of tourist traffic through/in/around your chosen site. How does the history of your site affect various modes of a visitor 'reading' it?
• How do you anticipate audiences will engage with your work based on the sites past/current/future civic use and purpose?
• Can your work accommodate the accidental visitor and the visitor who arrives specifically to engage with your work?

Well the week five task has pretty much already been answered by past descriptions of my chosen place. Because the flat is at the top of the hardest art of the track, 99% of the tourists that wonder onto the looped track on either side turn back before they get to the flat because of the intense climb on either side. The only people that go anywhere near this flat are people that are purposely exercising. The place doesn’t really have a history that is different from what it is now. Its one of the beautiful places that hasn’t been changed by humans all that much. The only change is maybe the adding of paths and the marks people leave by walking. I think the audience would probably best engage with the place through silence. Through being quiet they will be able to connect with the natural place through the sounds of the wind in the trees, the birds, the animals moving in the bushes and all of the other beautiful things that are associated with a place like this that hasn’t been overtaken by humans. The only accidental visitors to a work in this site would be those using the area for exercise. Because the place is hard to access, this will also deter a lot of people, minimising the audience to able bodied people with no aversion to exercise and sweat. Through the location it makes the audience a selective type of person and it would be good to make the work cater to this type of in dividual by making it something physically and mentally challenging.

Week Four: a narrative turned performance

So I decided to use the recollection of an actual event that happened in my space and use it to create the basis for a performance piece, keeping in mind I have absolutely no knowledge of performance art when it comes to the making of a performance, I really only have a bit of knowledge about the theoretical concepts behind certain works.

Right, so... THE EVENT:
It's nothing all that dramatic and life changing but while walking up there one day I decided to sit on this massive square flat rock in the sun to have a rest right near the flat that is my chosen sight. After a minute or so this little snake slithers out of the bushes on the opposite side of the track from me and stops to bathe in the sun right across the track. Now even though this was only a little snake, here I was marooned on a rock, unable to move for fear of dying in the middle of nowhere. I could jump onto the track because I would have been in striking distance of the snake and I couldn't jump behind me because there was a giant bush behind me. So I was stuck. Luckily the snake moved along pretty quickly and I don't think it was even aware of my existence.

THE IDEA-
So this event got me thinking about how it would be interesting to base a movement piece around the emotion of fear and the effect it has on different people. For example, in this event it made me freeze, unable to move or think of a way out. Some people face fear with a more head on attack approach and others have the first instinct to run. In making the performance site specific I would get the performers to react to the natural objects around them. Jumping off rocks, running away from trees and being frozen with fear over the movement of a branch. This is probably more of a site generic installation if you don't take into account my personal experience but it is still a response to an event the site where it happened.

Week Three- Denis Wood and Janet Cardiff

Week three we had presentations on Denis Wood and Janet Cardiff. Seeing as I did the presentation on Wood, it's pretty easy for me to come to the conclusion that his early work doesn't really fit into my chosen area. His early work is minimalist industrial based work and to use my outdoor, natural area as a basis for this sort of work doesn't really sound right. His later work in cartography would be a brilliant way of approaching my site, or any site for that matter. His maps of his childhood neighborhood shows that he has a personal connection with the area, just as I have a personal connection with my chosen space. Wood tends to map the things that people don't normally notice like the street lights, Halloween lanterns and the route that the underground pipes take. In keeping with this theme, if I were to map this area I would not go for the typical markings like the trees and bushes that surround the flat. I would map things like the line that the sun takes over the clearing, the path I take to get to my favourite spot. I could also map small things like the placement of the animal droppings or the animal made tracks and paths over the clearing to show the type of natural place this is.

As for the work of Janet Cardiff she has already created a work perfectly designed for a setting such as mine. Her 2012 work called FOREST (for a thousand years...) is a sound installation in a forest that goes for around 28 minutes before it loops back to the start. This idea of an installation piece that engages through the sound of the audio and the sight of the space around you, the feel, smell and taste of the fresh air and your surroundings would be an overwhelming experience.

Photos of my location and the walk to get there

the track at the top of the ladder

track continue

i found a little friend on the walk in this week!

gorge side of the track

view of my chosen location from the edge of the flat

walking down the ladder

walking down the ladder to the power station

Reflection on Man on Wire by Philippe Petit

Reflection of Philippe Petit's Man on Wire

This was the 1974 performance in which Petit walked a single wire line between the top of the twin towers of the world trade centre. The other work of his we looked at was the walk he did on a line across the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. So the task is to imagine a similar wire walk within the space we have chosen for our journal.

My space?- Will be the amazingly beautiful flats at the top of the Penstock Ladder. I do realise that the teacher specifically said to choose an easily accessible place whether in public or in the privacy of your own home. BUT I chose to ignore this because as soon as we were told to choose a place my mind went to the beauty of these flats and the sense of peace I feel when I visit them. Although this place is public, it is rare to cross paths with people up here. Most of the people that do the Duck Reach circuit don't stray from the main path so the flats at the top of the very steep ladder are often so deserted that it feels like a private place. This place involves a pretty hard trek to get to but that is another reason I chose it- the beauty of exercise! The effort of actually getting to this place makes it all the more worth the experience and not to mention, its good for you. To actually get to this place you can only go two ways, both of which include walking up very steep and rocky inclines and no matter which way I go, by the time I get to the flats, the effort to do so has already cleared my mind and put me in a happier mood which I find helps a lot with getting my creativity flowing which is what i'll need for these journal posts.

So back to the task at hand- To imagine a cable walk in this setting. The most obvious way to do this in such a natural setting is from one tree to another. This flat has a line of trees around the edge and I can see the line running from one to another, creating the obstacle of getting around each tree to get to the next part of the line. I don't think height would actually be needed in this installation, I think it would be more beneficial to have the line only about 30cm off the ground, to give the sense of a person (or even numerous people) floating just off the ground. This sort of gets at the sense of otherworldly experience I feel when i'm in this space and using the work to represent this.

This work would differ a lot from Petit's with its intended outcome. Petit chooses highly populated areas to add to the risk and shock factor of his performance. These factors as well as the fact that it is done without permission, give it a sense of danger and excitement. The same sort of installation in a site such as my chosen one would change it from a performance like Petit's to something closer to a participatory work. a public place, accessible by most, in a naturally relaxed setting.