What
is Global Fragments?
A
collaborative art project which re-presents the world through the
fragmentary responses of individuals scattered around the globe. The
project is funded by an award from Arts Council England, Yorkshire.
How
was the material created?
All
the material on this site has been generated by participants who have
been guided around their local environments by the sound of my voice.
They have each visited one or more locations of their choice and walked
around it following instructions mailed to them on a CD, cassette,
or minidisk.
The
instructions are in the form of a short tour and come in four versions:
1.
General Tour – for use absolutely anywhere (15 minutes)
2.
Shopping Tour – for use in any location where it is possible
to shop (15 minutes)
3.
The Mission – an adventure for any well populated location (10
– 15 minutes)
4.
Video Tour – for any location where it is possible to walk around
and shoot video (10 – 15 minutes)
The
first three tours give very general instructions and leave the participants
to make all the detailed decisions themselves. They also ask the ‘tourist’
a lot of questions about both, the physical nature of their surroundings,
and their subjective responses to it. There are two versions of each
tour: one for use with a camera, and one without. After the tour each
participant was asked to answer a short email questionnaire and to
send this and any photographs back to me.
The
Video Tour was a late addition to the project and is much more self-contained
as it guides the user in the making of a short film of their chosen
location. There are fewer instructions and at the end the tourist
is asked to turn the camera on themselves and answer a few questions.
The experience is the making of the video, and the feedback is the
video.
Background
to the project
I
began working with the audio-tour format in 1996 with "An Interactive
Tour of Mothercare for Men, Part 1" a tour designed to guide
men around any branch of the UK’s largest chain of Mother and
Baby stores. I had been searching for a way to make a direct intervention
into these shops, and audio-tours provided an effective method of
inserting my own statements into the stores without the knowledge
of the staff. They also meant that men could participate without my
asking them to put themselves at risk.
Shortly
afterwards I used the method for “Knowing Looks” a project
which responded to the opening of the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds.
In this instance I created a tour which was far more like a traditional
museum tour. I designed it to guide a number of visitors (each of
whom had direct experiences of weapons in some way) around the building
in a pre-ordained route. I asked them questions about how they responded
to various exhibits and also about their own personal histories and
experiences. Their responses formed the basis of text banners intended
for display in the museum but ultimately exhibited in the neighbouring
Leeds Parish Church.
After
these two projects the audio-tour format remained on the back-burner
of my art practice for a number of years, until in 2001, I was given
a Year of the Artist Research & Development Award by the Yorkshire
Arts Board. This allowed me to develop a number of tours which would
work as artworks on their own terms – without reference to any
other project or venue. Over the following six months I experimented
with a whole range of ‘generic’ tours – constantly
sending friends and students out to test-drive them for me. This process
culminated in two tours titled “City Walks”. For a public
test-run I gave them out to visitors to Leeds City Art Gallery one
Saturday afternoon. As each tourist returned I conducted a short video.
I was very relieved to find that people generally enjoyed the experiences
they had had but I was also fascinated to hear people talk about where
they had been, what they had done and what they had thought about
along the way.
These
two tours and the feedback process provided the starting point for
Global Fragments. I now wanted to provide the tours to people I had
never met, in places I had never visited, and I wanted their responses
and the tours themselves to be made available to a far wider public.
This project is a first attempt to do some of these things.