Writing Response
My initial approach to Camden market was to record my feelings and thoughts in a completely new space by way of Mitchi Miller’s ‘dialectograms’ like mapping.I followed Perec’s process of ‘Practical exercises’ in ‘Observing the bouldering walls, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps’ (1974). Marking out the trajectory of my purchases in the market in the hope of finding graphic design elements in my purchasing trajectory in this market, I gradually realised as I was mapping the records that this area was in fact a gathering place of consumerism, where every purchase was stimulating the consumption of everyone in the space. Every ‘thank you’ was a point of increased desire to buy. So I critically recorded the number of ‘thank yous’ and ‘sorrys’ in audio form, and recorded every transaction that was mine, extracting keywords for a mixed-media representation, similar to Larissa Fassler’s Kottbusser Tor (2010).
In progressively capturing the spatial audio, I mimicked the system of the one-music score envisioned by Munsell (1915) and attempted to describe the spatial sensations of a person in Camden market through the three dimensions of hue, lightness, and colour, where colours communicate and collide. By combining this with the audio elements I have extracted, I am able to convey the rising pitch and intensity of the ‘mood’. In the colour scheme of the audio processing, I categorised them into 8 different colours of red, representing the frantic buying desire of people in the market due to the influence of external objects. I recorded each of these colour sensations in correspondence and attempted to post-produce the album.
Agnès Varda documented the process of picking up in The Gleaners and I (2000), and I also extracted the colours from the audio in the space for artistic picking up. I think I applied this artistic picking by filtering the audio for visual features to detect visual elements of the scene or the people in the scene.