On the go

 

Aims and Objectives

We are On-the-Go, dedicated to expanding our local landscapes of habit in imaginative ways, building larger environments of knowledge through sensory experiences sampled from a global menu. What we arrive at are the imagined geographies of our desire. The context for these 'On-the-Go' Landscape and Environment Workshops is the examination of this desire.

For more details please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

Workshop One – ‘Landscape, Mobility, Performance' – brought together an international group of 35 Practising Artists and Arts and Humanities scholars to share their approaches to and understandings of landscape, mobility and performance. The day successfully brought together practising artists and academics to discuss the place of performance in landscape and mobility studies, and also identified a number of thematics for further discussion and development.

The day was structured around six presentations, with a particular theme being how the performative lenses of music, drama, dance, writing and film can allow understanding and representation of the imaginative construction, embodied experience and material forms of mobility.

• Ergin Çavusoglu (practising artist) discussed his recent pieces ‘Quintet without borders' and ‘Fog walking': the former emphasising how sound and its movements can escape ordered and bounded conceptions of place, representing and enacting more mobile cultural identities; the latter, extending ideas of landscape into more phenomenological concerns with the senses and the imposition of the environment upon the human subject.

• Kevin Hamilton (practising artist and Chair of New Media, University of Illinois) focused on mobile technologies and ‘interfaces'. He identified the current vogue for using mobile technologies in engagements with landscapes and places – both in performance per se and in ‘performative' ‘lay' experiences such as geocaching – but also sought to move beyond this particular focus in our accounts of contemporary technological interfacings of subject and landscape.

• Ginette Verstraete (Professor of Comparative Arts and Media, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) concentrated on the video arts project ‘Corridor X', counterposing its representation of European mobilities with that promoted in official EU discourse.

• Stephen Hodge (Drama, University of Exeter) discussed a range of his practice, from the mis-guides of ‘Wrights and Sites' to work in ‘second-life', pursuing questions of site-specificity in performance and its development into works based in landscape practice.

• Peter Merriman (Geography, University of Wales, Aberystwyth) focused on the collaborations of the Halprins – landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and dancer Anna Halprin – using this to raise wider questions about landscape design and the architectural recognition and engineering of mobility and the affective components of environmental experience.

• Simon Whitehead (practising artist) developed this theme further in relation to his practice and his interest in using walking as a means to explore and amplify the sensory life of public space. In particular, he discussed his recent project ‘Lost in Ladywood', and the use of this in the neighbourhood masterplan.

Workshop two-- On-the-Go at Heathrow Terminal 5 -- looked to progress these themes in part through itself adopting a site-specific and performative format. Moreover, if the first workshop had looked to focus on mobility, performance and its relations to landscape, this workshop also shifted the emphasis, turning directly to consider performatively the places and landscapes of mobility. Backgrounds included Drama / Theatre Studies (e.g. Professor Baz Kershaw, Warwick), Architecture (e.g. Professor Ann Boddington, Brighton), Archaeology (e.g. Professor John Barrett, Sheffield), Creative and Performing Arts (e.g. Dr Mark Hunter, UEL) as well as Geography. Activities included a presentation on Terminal 5 and its archaeology; a performative ‘I-Spy' engagement with Terminal 5; and discussion sessions. The group was the first to work in the newly opened ‘Heathrow Academy' near Terminal 5.