#archidat

[digitalartstudent-blog]

St Blazey archiDAT idea development

Idea - Digital community garden!

When Paul went to St Blazey to visit the site, the one thing he noted is that the locals loved their green spaces. With the Eden Project right around the corner, ecology and the environment are at the forefront of village life. Whilst the Eden Project's biomes create environments that are not usually found in the UK, our project is more locally driven... the garden becoming a micro-environment of the area outside of the installation.

Here are some photos of the town taken by Paul:

St Blazey, (Cornish: Lanndreth), is situated in the Deanery and Hundred of Powder. It is bounded on the south and south-west by St Austell, on the north by Luxulyan, and on the east it is separated from Tywardreath by the River Par. The parish is named after Saint Blaise, and had been known as Landrayth until the 16th Century; various spellings of Landrayth such as Landrait may be found. The village lies on the main road to the east of St Austell. It is on the eastern edge of the china clay workings around St Austell and the village probably owes its existence to the industry. It is now a satellite village for workers from St Austell, and is closely linked to St Blazey Gate, which is that part of the parish on the western side towards St Austell. The parish is hilly with some woodland on the valley edges. The parish of Biscovey (Par) was formed out of St Blazey in 1847.

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/Cornwall/StBlazey/index.html

When the China Clay mines shut down, St Blazey could be said to have lost it's purpose. Many of the villagers were clay miners or involved in the industry in some way. Another problem the villagers face regularly is flooding. Here the BBC have some film and a St Blazey resident describing the floods in late 2010.

St Blazey and Par have set up a system of Flood Wardens who are members of the community which:

Raise awareness of local issues

Reduce the likelihood of flooding by reporting blockages in drains and water courses to the responsible authorities

Assist the Emergency Services with local information during a flood event

Help to alert the community in the event of a flood evacuation

Support the community after a flood event

We're thinking of aiming our garden at the environmental aspect of St Blazey, specifically looking at flooding and flood risk. The Environment Agency provides regularly updated data on flood risk at the St Austell river at Molingey (click the image to visit the website):

[digitalartstudent-blog]

MemoryShadows - QR Code wall

In MemoryShadows we planned our project as a walkthrough, to go from past through to present and even on to future. For the end of the installation, we were thinking about how people could add their own stories, and memories to the wall. A form of digital tagging. Almost like graffiti tagging!

So we came up with the idea of having a space at the end of the walkthrough where there would be shadows painted on the walls, and people could print off their own unique QR codes on stickers and add their picture and a story to it using Tales of Things, then they can stick this QR code to the wall. That way leaving their own story for others to scan with their phones and read.

This posed quite a few logistics problems, so we came up with the idea of having a sort of vending machine there. You could pay a small donation, and like a photo booth the machine would have a camera inside it and take your picture, then you could add words to it using the keyboard, and then it would print out the QR code for you. Alternatively, you could choose to print out a blank QR code and use the Tales of Things app on your smart phone to do it yourself.

Here Karla made a physical mock up of the QR code space.

The stickers placed on the wall in the space will not be permanent. Sometimes the stickers may fall off, or someone might stick another QR code on top of your one. We quite like this, because memories aren't permanent either. But so we can retain this information somehow, we thought that through the vending machine and Tales of Things, we could, using the twitter account @WallOfDevonport, tweet all of Tales that get posted. Therefore we'd have a timeline of all the stories people attached to the wall, that would be there even if the QR codes weren't, we'd still have a record.