11-17-09
Green Dream @ Le Champ des Possibles
“Le vent me semble qu’il est libre pour s’en aller dans tous les directions. Il sent le vert. J’aime comment qu’on peut voir les chemins pris par les gens, par exemple o
ù l’herbe est aplatie. J’espère qu’il y aura des choses qui poussent ici dans l’avenir et des gens qui viendront pour aider.”
On November 1st Green Dream visited a wild green space in the Mile End in Montreal. This is the only unmanicured wild space in this area of the city, and it is nestled behind a few monstrous old industrial buildings.
The fate of this space has been at question. However in the last few years it has enjoyed a lot of cultural activity and community attention, especially after an artist Emily Rose Michaud started an earthwork installation, le Jardin Roerich. She used the Roerich symbol, which was created by the Russian artist and mystic Nichola Roerich, who proposed the red circle with three dots inside as an international symbol to mark museums, schools, and similar cultural landmarks to prevent destruction by aerial bombs. Emily with the help of the community has been maintaining the Roerich garden within this wild green space for the past two years.
le Jardin Roerich
With recent developments in the Mile End and the upcoming gentrification of the neighborhood the fate of this little space is uncertain. I with the help of two Green Dream volunteers visited the field to create a community map and capture people’s relationship to the space and their contemplations on it. Click on the blue dot to see each person’s reflection.
View Green Dream Map, Mile End Montreal in a larger map
photographs by Wayne Egers and Maia Iotzova
If you have any reflections you would like to add to this map you can e-mail them to greendreammedia@gmail.com
10-30-09
Bringing Green Dream Mapping to the Mile End
- le Jardin Roerich
* November 1st : Living map
This Sunday November 1st from 2:00 – 5:00 pm Green Dream Media will visit the Roerich Garden. (for information on the garden visit http://pousses.blogspot.com/) Green Dream is documentary media project who will be collaborating with Sprout Out Loud to create a map of a green space that is special to people in the Mile End.
Come spend time in the garden and use a fun creative process to share what the field means to you and what your visions are for its’ future. Your contributions will help create an interactive community map of this space which will be displayed at www.greendreammedia.com. To see similar projects visit http://www.greendreammedia.com/green-dream-project/
* Le 1er novembre
Dimanche prochain (1er novembre), de 14 h à 17 h, Green Dream Media rendra visite au Jardin Roerich (http://pousses.blogspot.com/)
Green Dream est un projet documentaire qui collabore avec Sprout Out Loud dans la création d’une carte d’espaces verts que les résidents du Mile End tiennent à cœur.
Venez passer un après-midi dans le jardin afin de participer dans une initiative créative et de partager vos visions et idées sur le futur du champs. Vos contributions feront partie d’une carte interactive communautaire qui sera affichée au www.greendreammedia.com. (Vous pouvez consulter d’autres sites similaires au : http://www.greendreammedia.com/green-dream-project/)
maia helping in the garden
03-02-09
I know a place… at the Women in Film Festival, New Media Day
Green Dream is more then a documentary film.
In this project I have expanded beyond the boundary of the video medium and want to create frameworks that will allow the community to have their ground for involvement, connection and discovery. This is where the Community Mapping Project comes in.
This project will create interactive web community maps of the green space hot spots (green spaces that have been threatened by development in the past, present or future). The maps will concentrate on the areas of Canada and Bulgaria. They will be used in the Green Dream documentary film, but will also exist on-line and be a great public resource.
I am currently looking for community organizations to become partners, and am also interested in finding grassroots ways to sustain this project. (If you have any ideas or contacts please let me know)
The first step for the Community Mapping Project was made as a prototype called ‘I know a place…’ during a residency at The Banff New Media Institute.
‘I know a place…’ is going to be presented during the interactive display at the Women in Film Festival on March 4th.
If you are in Vancouver come down, it promises to be an amazing and informative day:
NEW MEDIA FORUM
MARCH 4, 9AM- 6:00 PM
Vancity Theatre, Seymour @ Davie, Vancouver, BC
Buy Tickets at www.womeninfilm.ca
Festival Blog http://bridging-media.com/
Expect Updates from the New Media Day.
01-11-09
Animation of out-of-copyright maps
An interesting video I saw on Vimeo.
OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo. An animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data.
OpenStreetMap started in 2004 and the rate of contributions is accelerating with four times as many people contributing to the project in 2008 compared to 2007. During the year, edits were made by some 20,000 individuals and there were bulk imports of data for many places, including the USA, India, Italy and Belarus which are clearly visible in the animation. (wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources)
This animation was produced by itoworld.com; it is licensed CC-BY-SA and can also be downloaded. The music is ‘Open Electro’ available from archive.org/details/silence-silence by Vincent Girès’ jamendo.com/en/artist/silence. Various still images are available on flickr.com/groups/itomedia/pool/. ITO World provide free online support software for OpenStreetMap (itoworld.com/static/osmmapper) and also provide online mapping services to organisations and individuals.
if you are seeing this on facebook the original post could be found at www.greendreammedia.com/blog
11-28-08
Almost Perfect
The residency at Banff is almost over.
It was an amazing, inspiring and recharging experience, which I shared with 10 others. We often joked that we are an almost perfect family. It has been an intense month and I am sad to leave.
Almost Perfect Residency at the Banff New Media Institute
I would encourage you to look at the work these people are doing.
From top left to bottom right
Florian Hollerweger – www.flo.mur.at
Maia Iotzova – www.greendreammedia.com
Laura Silver – www.laurasilver.com
Robert Damphousse – www.robertjd.com
Jesse Scott – www.memelab.ca
Amos Latteier – www.latteier.com
Sarah Shamash
Nikki Pugh – www.npugh.co.uk
Andrew Roth - www.aranarproductions.com/main.html
Austin Angelozzi – www.nanochild.ca
Christopher Quine – www.sneakerbike.com
As I was writing this, I had a beautiful view to the sunset behind the mountains.
11-25-08
I know a place…
11-22-08
My Process and Community Mapping
A peak into my process.
The way I work is by creating diagrams that help me conceptualize what is important to me and the ideas that are central to the project. I usually tape them to my wall and start working out my process from them. I though it might be interesting for some of you to follow that paper trail. Here are snippets of the thoughts and ideas behind the Community Media project called I know a place..., which is still in development.
The first stage of it will be released soon at the open studios in the Banff Centre, JPL 212 this Thursday, November 27, 3-7pm.
And let’s not forget my two major inspirations in the last month.
- the view from my studio
- my watercolours
11-20-08
Mapping
I have been doing a lot of thinking about mapping and our relationship to places.
We see a map as a piece of technical information, a static two dimensional entity. Here is something I read in the book Boundaries of Home: Mapping the Local Environment, p 72, edited by Doug Aberley
“Maps hold a magic that is anything but technical. Maps are a human attempt to represent the incredible complexities of time and space. They are shorthand for perceptions that each of us create with senses evolved as hunters and gatherers, as explorers, as animals that must navigate to survive. A map becomes more than a series of lines; it becomes an agenda for action, a turf to defend, a series of memories that remind of action and pleasure and history. Maps have been made that inflame war and hatred. Maps have been made that create new visions of human society.”
I am trying to capture the layers of our relationship to places in my project. I think it is going to be called I know a place...
11-12-08
Sulphur Mountain locative experience
On our third day at Banff, (the morning after the Halloween party) We decided to hike to the top of Sulphur Mountain. We asked someone how long it will take us to get to the top, the prediction was 3 hours.
So we started on our journey, which turned into a day hike and took more like 8 hours. Robert who was on the hike with us, recorded our route with a GPS device. That is the red line you see. I was taking pictures, so I pinned some of them on the location they were taken at.
11-11-08
Locative Media?
I have done the first half of my residency in the Banff New Media Institute working with Locative media. It has been an amazing experience so far, and like many of the times when your days are packed with excitement and new things, your perception of the time passed changes and a week feels more like several months, your memories of the world outside of this place start to fade. This is one of those cases. I am surrounded by people who are brilliant and have a lot to teach me. I will write a little about them later but first thing first. By now you are probably wondering what is locative media?
And just to assure you, this is a question that we (me and the other 10 people doing the residency) try to answer about 20 times a day, and usually feel weird explaining. It feel a bit like the kids that could never explain to their relatives at the Christmas table what they really do. Everyday, at lunch, at a communal dinner, or at a party we find ourselves explaining locative media. The explanations vary and we realized we all give a different one. Which is perhaps the beauty and the confusion of this media. The explanation I found in Wikipedia is.
‘Locative media are media of communication bound to a location. They are digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions. While mobile technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), laptop computers and mobile phones enable locative media, they are not the goal for the development of projects in this field.’
After this wonderfully broad description you might understand why we have trouble describing what we do here.
Basically, place is not really just a geographical location, while a place could be described as longitude and latitude, it is a much more layered and complex phenomena. Each one of us has an intimate connection to a place and each place has stories, cultures and histories attached to it. While we don’t see this overlayed stories they are intrinsic to the way we connect to a place.
Locative media often overlays the stories and experiences about a specific place with the place itself. Imagine being in a boat in a dammed lake. While you are cruising in the boat, imagine listening to the stories of old timers who lived in the land that got flooded, on your multimedia player. The stories tell us of the life in the villages that are still beneath you, but under the water. You start understanding the layers that exist in that space way beyond what you can perceive or see. Creating media (in this case audio) like that, is an example of a locative media project.
I am working on some more blog posts that show our advetures in a locative media fascion, so keep tunning in.