Not-Fig

The first practical methods project I am undertaking on MA Interactive Media involves observing and recording the Media Ecology of a coin laundry / launderette with the aim of intervening or interfering with this ecology using art methodologies and / or a data jam.

A data jam is an event composed of people passing, digesting and remixing content or data in order to explore the potential of that content provided by (and existing in) a live environment. As far as I understand it so far, the media ecology of some thing or place is the independent parts and processes that make up the system and its communication channels. The analogy to a natural ecology implies and equates to the levels of complexity in assessing and understanding the layers which make up a media system or ecology. One other aspect of the project which I have excluded so far is that there is also a requirement to hold this live event across a couple of launderettes simultaneously, i.e. synchronizing our event across remote locations.

As my background is in programming and coding I make my own associations to this area to try to understand media ecologies within this context. In programming, good practice is to create classes, which can be interpreted as systems or ecologies in this analogy, and they have their own methods and properties. Some of the methods/properties are only usable within the class itself and are hidden to any other class – private – and others are intentionally made accessible to other classes and are thus visible and accessible outside the domain of the class – public. In the case of the coin laundry it is my understanding that we are trying to use art methodologies and a data jam to reveal some of the private methods and properties of a the launderette and make them overt to the general public. Perhaps at this point I have strayed away from my coding analogy.

In Matthew Fuller’s book on Media Ecology the foreword states that the study in this area involves purposefully ‘colliding’ these complex structures in order to get ’strange and interesting things to come out of the wrong end’. This is by far my favorite description of what is required of my first project at the prestigious Goldsmith’s of London.

In our analysis of generic coin laundries so far we have returned again and again to the theme of romance or more broadly of connecting people. What was initially a joke now potentially could result in a live installation in less than a month. We observed that there are, amongst others, quite a lot of potentially single people who use a launderette. We are assuming that people living alone are less likely to have the facilities at home. We are yet to complete our initial research but we are predicting that a lot of the people you stereotypically see reading, listening to music or looking at the walls are going to be unlikely to see the launderette as a potential place for romance or friendship to blossom although that does not mean that they would be adverse to it if it was thrust upon them (almost) unwillingly.

For my first post on this subject I think I have gone into enough detail and plus I’m running late so i’ll rap it up but stating my personal aim for this project:

To break down people’s personal barriers and social anxieties by enabling them to use a coin laundry as an place for informal communication. To give people the ability to talk to someone else with dirty clothes in common and who exists in a remote location (somehow connect two or more laundries) to them without potential embarrassment and/or face to face rejection. We will do this by subverting the Coin Laundry as an existing space of comfort, calm and solitude and turning it into the set for Blind Date – or something like that.

Check back for more updates and photos soon.

G

Tagged: coinlaundry, maim, project