Project Context
Placing Spaces is an ongoing practice-research project I’ve been developing with my 7-year-old daughter Poppy. Together, we are testing a process of intergenerational collaboration, and attempting to use creative technologies to explore intergenerational/technological/place-based entanglements from a child’s perspective.
In November 2023, Poppy and I moved from the northeast of Scotland to the southwest of England. To reflect on this life-changing transition, in the summer of 2023, I asked Poppy to take me to her favourite places in Dundee, where we lived at the time. I asked her about how these places made her feel, what they made her think of and significant memories she attached to them. I documented our intergenerational father-daughter conversations through audio recordings and photogrammetry scans of these sites.
At a sharing of the project at the TaPRA conference at the University of Leeds in August 2023 I worked with these documents to install a series of geo-located augmented reality encounters at various site-specific locations around the conference venues. In this iteration, users were able to explore and interact with the 3D scans, whilst proximity triggering our audio conversations. Part treasure hunt, part site-specific performance for one, and part unreliable oral history, Placing Spaces in Leeds aimed to explore the affective potency of photogrammetry, the layering of space and collapsing of geographies, and the ‘productive disruption’ of collaborating with children.
Placing Spaces, TaPRA, University of Leeds
The workshop
On 21st July 2024 Poppy and I led a Centre for Creative Technologies ‘Alternative Technologies’ workshop funded by the Brigstow Institute and hosted at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. The workshop was designed for intergenerational adult-child participants. We were supported by socially engaged artist (my partner, and Poppy’s mum), Tashi Gore. The aims of the workshop were as follows:
- To share the creative process and tech workflows of Placing Spaces with other intergenerational participants.
- To understand more about the significance of working with place and creative technologies through adult-child relationships.
- To test the concept and process with participants with a view to developing a future iteration of the project with participants in communities across Bristol.
In the workshop we installed the AR scenes of Poppy’s favourite places around the studio and gave each adult-child pair one smartphone device linked to two sets of headphones.
Following a demo of mine and Poppy’s AR scenes, we then introduced the free photogrammetry app Scaniverse to participants and invited them to try it out by scanning objects they found interesting around the PM Studio.
Once everyone felt comfortable with how to scan, we sent the pairs of participants out into the Harbourside area around Watershed with the following instructions:
- Choose a place or location to walk to within 5 minutes’ walk of Watershed.
- Select an interesting landmark or reference point within that location that you think would make a good 3D scan.
- Using the Scaniverse app on your phone, make a 3D scan of the landmark (you can try this a couple of times taking it in turns and play with processing if you feel confident).
- Find somewhere comfortable to sit or stand in your location.
- Start your voice recorder using the Recorder app on your phone and take it in turns to ask and respond to the questions below.
- Can you tell me a little bit about where we are – what you can see?
- What can you hear?
- How does this place make you feel?
- Why have you picked this place?
- Did you know this place before today?
- If so, do you have any memories from here?
- What kinds of things do you think people do here?
- Repeat the process if you have time with another location, don’t worry if not.
Following this process the group gathered back in the PM studio, shared their scans and fedback about the process and the workshop. We viewed scans of an ice cream van, a concrete block with a face, a statue of Neptune, the wall of a fountain and Bristol Aquarium.
2 weeks after the workshop I sent participants a QR code which allowed them to view their 3D scan with their audio recorded conversation layered into the scene.
Outcomes
Participants reflected that they enjoyed the opportunity to spend one-to-one time with their adult, that they found it interesting to hear the recorded sounds layered on top of the 3D models in the Placing Spaces demo, and that the workshop prompted some interesting conversations about significant places in the participants’ lives, about the limits of technology and how that reflects on memory.
The CCT workshop allowed me to test a structure and process for sharing the work with intergenerational participants. We were able to test the possibilities of demo-ing freely available tools for 3D scanning (and whether these were user-friendly enough for diverse ages to be able to make something in a workshop context). I was able to learn more about how this model could be used as a method for developing the work with intergenerational participants in the future.
The workshop has also prompted ideas for how to present the project to audience-participants as a shared encounter that is navigated between two people sharing one device. I found something interesting in how this pairing of audience-participants encouraged a negotiation between adult and child and drew attention to the movement of differently aged bodies in relation to the virtual models. This is an aspect of the work’s presentation that I hope to incorporate into future iterations.