The following pieces emerge directly from research conducted through the mechanism of this blog.

• First Person Rambler - A piece for Artranspennine ‘08

This work involves the walking of a section of the Trans Pennine Trail, starting near Stockport and heading East. Fred McVittie will be carrying a stick over his shoulder, to the end of which is attached a video camera that will record his progress. The viewpoint of the video recording will echo that found in ‘first person shooter’ video games. Whilst walking Fred will also be speaking aloud whatever occurs to him at the time; this forming a soundtrack to the moving image.

The project is a bringing together of two ideas; firstly that of walking through a landscape as a metaphor for the bindlestiff ramblings of thought and feeling, and secondly the sense of being outside of oneself. This second sense is most vividly exhibited in the avatar relations of video games and online virtual environments, but also features within a wide range of discourses, from spiritual practices and psychotic episodes to the ideals of empirical objectivity.

• Before and After Physics - Gallery Exhibition

(From the exhibition catalogue)
“Some of the ideas behind (and in front of, and to the side of, and pervading the space between and inside) this work concern consciousness, evolution, and the interplay of feeling and knowing and being. These are big ideas, and are worthy of the attention of brains bigger than the ones possessed by we humans; we ‘medium sized mammals moving at medium speed’, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins. Since these stone-age hunter-gatherer brains are all we have, and since we are bound by the Cognitive Imperative hard-coded into our DNA to restlessly pursue the thought fox, however elusive and imaginary it might be, so the lure of the big idea draws us impossibly on beyond the physics of our embodiment. There before us is the light of the moon, and our studies point like a finger in its direction, and if we must mix metaphors to approach that light, then so be it. Here are some shadows; a tree, a rock, words fading on a wall. Some are almost realisable as objects and can be easily seen and touched, some seem objective but are really only collections of words. Other collections of words make no pretense of objectivity but flow between the fingers uncontained, and all around is the white space, glowing and vibrant and eyeless.”

Alsager Arts Centre Gallery, Wed 5th - Fri 14th Mar 2008. (Further documentation HERE)


• The Conference Centre - An ongoing hypothetical conference.

(From the Welcome Page of the website)
“Welcome to the website for Space Metaphor Consciousness, the first annual hypothetical conference on everything. If this is your first exposure to the conference then an introduction is in order. The First Hypothetical Conference on Everything is an ongoing discourse emerging from a wide variety of anonymous contributors and multiple personalities. Out of this cacophany of panspecific voices we, the organisers of this meander, have drawn representative straws to cast into the wind. Ideas emerge and confuse, and in this mutual raucous fusing we have tried to hear the chords of a relatively coherent melody. This is expressed in the form of the abstracts, sylph-like shards of conceptualisation that point in the direction of knowledge the like of which we can only guess at, like a finger pointing at the moon. This limited and barely (but significantly) coherent set of abstracts has been selected to both determine and represent the theme of this, the first conference of its kind.”

• The Salt Walk - A piece for Google Maps (work in progress)

  This piece loosely refers to the famous ‘Sand Walk’ which Charles Darwin is supposed to have spent much time on, and continues the exploration of the relationships between walking, thinking, knowledge and place.