ARTMAP, 2004 - 07
Artist Placement at Countryside Council for Wales.
ARTMAP + LANDMAP
An interactive exhibit created for the Ynyslas visitor centre on the Dyfi estuary.
Artmap came out of a residency with Countryside Council For Wales in 2004-7. The placement was to explore the creative potential of the national landscape database LANDMAP. Artmap research and media was exhibited at the European Parliament Brussels and to many landscape organisations and national parks in Wales, South Downs Park in England and Donana in Spain.
Artmap contained an interpreted three dimensional landscape model which could be explored by visitors interactively by walking an avatar character around the park. At different scales the avatar altered its gaze on the reserve. At his smallest scale, access was given to film screens which arose out of the digital landscape.
Media, modelling and film by Glenn Davidson, Wyn Mason & Mark Palmer
ARTMAP was exhibited at Wales first Digital Art Festival Mayouliveininterestingtimes by Chapter Gallery and Bloc 2009.
Working with stakeholders in the LANDMAP public engagement process, led to the making of two films which drew their content from LANDMAP.
“Blodeuwedd” is a film made to speak back, in an eloquent, daring, visual and even humorous way, to the powers that be and the agencies that measure and regulate our landscape and to the tourism campaign that presented Wales as a theme park! It is proposed as a way to generate greater democracy, perhaps
even to promote peoples' involvement in politics and to enable government to listen back to individuals and interest groups.
Blodeuwedd is intended above all, to create a narrative that speaks of lives lived here in this landscape known as Wales.
The Movie “Fire” features images taken of specialists from Heather Trust, Brecon National Park and CCW creating a heather fire on Mynedd Garn, the hillside above Bleanavon. The controlled burning is used to regenerate and rebalance growth of three types of plants and are featured in the Landmap Data base in the biodiversity layer.
Conceived / Filmed / Edited by Glenn Davidson
Sound recording Keith Munro
Sound edit Tom Owen
From the Land map database, socio economic and biodiversity layers were used.
This exercise: finding new creative uses for data.
This film was an attempt to bring two different points in a map containing different types of data together to see if spontaneous or none designed meaning could emerge. The idea that latent meaning might lie between unconnected parts of a database. The burning of heather is edited in equal measure (A/B cut) with sound samples taken from Bleanavon Town reflecting the socio economic data in Landmap.
Humberto Maturana and F. J. Varela -
Autopoiesis is both a concept about self-maintaining systems, especially biological ones, and an epistemological theory about cognition and self-reference.
BBC Wales coverage.