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this week at school i am currently involved in a mandatory group project involving space intervention under the guise of social capital. the project involves several students from the MA courses of CSM school of design and school of interdisciplinary studies, including the Textile Futures MA students, Design Studies MA students, our colleagues at Industrial Design MA, MA Design by Project and of course, the MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments posse. wuzzup.

so far it has been an intense 2 days of lectures, workshops, field work, research and meetings… lotsa, lotsa meetings. the project occurs in span of three days and in this time we are suppose to do all that and a bag o’ crisps… on top of getting to know each of our cross-discipline MA fellows, do an ethnographic study AND present an investiture of some sort. tomorrow is the crit. poo.

what we decided upon for a space2place intervention was to seek out and define the areas that were monitored by CCTV within london; something pretty easy to find, actually. the average londoner is photographed 300 times a day by CCTV cameras, not to mention some commercial spaces are even being audio recorded now so that conversations can be listened into in case of dissident smalltalk and flirting… i’ll let you chew on that for a moment.

using 2 inch wide yellow packing tape we marked out on the ground of covent garden, an area that was being monitored by CCTV. we choose covent garden specifically because it was at a crossways of several pedestrian walkways and roads, and was a meeting place and also a place for tourists and locals to work, shop and be at leisure. also using the same tape, we wrote out in plain english, signs on the ground denoting areas that were in and out of CCTV range.

our goal was to make apparent the actual boundaries and physical areas that were being monitored and vise versa. working differently then just a simple warning sign, people now had new perceptions of where and when their actions were being recorded.  along with the experiment, we also conducted surveys and a small anthropological activity to create a more rounded ethnological study. as the day progresses tomorrow, i will update this post with more materials and findings.

here is a photograph gallery of our field research day in covent garden.