Wednesday, 12 November 2008

Door to door

Boltondoortodoor More like this please. A thirty minute film featuring social housing tenants at their front doors, neatly linked together - 'a patchwork of doors,' the images projected onto and illuminating public buildings in Bolton.

Think of all the connections and conversations in the making of it, and add the connections and conversations in the street every evening this week as it is being shown. Brilliant.

Image from Bolton News article.

Guardian article and film clip.

12 Nov 2008 15:49:33 | Information and communication, Space and place

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Encounters with strangers Here's today's social capital topic. I went to the station this morning for a train to London and the service was disrupted with cancellations and delays. A few others milled around mulling the options - alternative routes, waiting around for a surprise train appearance, trudging back home? As I chatted with Joe in the ticket office, a man came up and asked if I'd been planning on going to London - 'I was,' he said, 'and I went home to get the car to drive in, just thought I'd stop by and see if anyone else was stuck here... Can I give you a lift?' (NB it's not like this is remote outback: just 15 miles from central London). I thanked him for his generosity but had already taken the decision to abandon my attempt to get to a meeting. Questions for students of social capital: Was his offer (and presumably his diversion via the station) a moral adjustment sparked by guilt at using unsustainable transport? Would he have made the same offer to a woman? To a hoodied youngster? If I had accepted, should he in turn have accepted my offer to contribute to fuel costs? How much would I have offered, and would I have seemed sincere? Would he have felt obliged to discuss options for liaising on the return journey? What do you talk about to a stranger cocooned in a car with the prospect of a traffic-harassed 90 minutes on a miserable day? Meself, I don't take a sceptical view, I thought it was a generous and considerate gesture, and partly I regret not celebrating that by having taken it up.
PREVIOUS POST
On a postcard please The postcard format is one of industrial society's simple-and-smart inventions - a handy size, with room for a readily-digestible amount of message, scope for expression in choice of image, and, crucially, very shareable. It symbolises non-essential but often emotionally-prized communication. I have a few exquisite ancient examples picked up in junk sales, and I help create them too, having had three hundred printed just this morning, as it happens, for a charity job. One of my favourites lying around near the surface of my desk shows George Elgar Hicks's 1860 image of London's general post office, at one minute to six in the evening as people watch their messages about to be taken on their way by the mighty system. We forget too easily that there is a huge amount of technology implied in this image - not just the technologies of printing and of transport, and the administrative systems of a global (well, imperial) communications network, but also the primary essential technology of the alphabet and all the educational effort invested in ennabling citizens to use it. So this is a delight to me - Send with Peggy, a service for sending postcards from Facebook, currently for free, with a pre-addressed, pre-stamped reply included (UK and Ireland). Via Tim Davies.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments