3/10/24
Unit 1 / Methods of Investigating
Notes after tutorial 1
Location choice: Frome Skate Park, Mary Berry Playing Fields, Frome, BA11
Rationale: I have never skated and have general assumptions of skate parks as associated with antisocial behaviour. This lack of connection with the subject made it perfect for me to study, a blank slate which would challenge those preconceptions and encourage me to look deeper. It was also close to where I live, essential to have ease of access with my commute to London.
The area has interesting architectural elements in the form of the ramps , which are adorned with dense graffiti over the last 20 years or more. It consists of 4 skate elements:
– Bank with cop quarter, with guard rail
– Pyramid with ledge
– Bench
– Flatrail
– Bowl corner with guard rail
– Double Vert ramp with spine ramp
Located within a roughly 30m x 50m2 concrete area. The also uses 5 benches, 2 bins. Set with grass around it. More context of the area is available.
Initial research included sitting in the space at various times of day. I did rough sketches of the forms people took whilst skating, waiting, playing. Situated close to a school, there were inevitable peaks in how busy the skate park was which was also weather dependent. Sketching and noting down a flow of words associated with the site gave me a feel of connection to it, the emotions it evoked in its user. I recorded atmospheric sounds including playing, wheels on the ramps, shouting, parents talking, an ice cream van. I photographed the site, in broad context and in more detail, cutting up the pieces of graffiti on yeti sides of the ramps, which brought an interesting angle of study. Something to pick up later.
The first weekend of the project, there was an event organised by the Frome Skate Park campaign, which aims to develop and improve the site. I attended, repeating the same process of sketching, recording, noting, photographing people. I also interviewed stakeholders in the project including organisers, families with kids, an attending photographer, local councillors. I transcribed these interviews and picked out evocative phrases and sentences which spoke to me as a raw material.
Alongside my broader research, including obtaining plans for the old and new skate parks and the above interviews, I mined social media content form users of the park. They contain thoughts about the park, and are interesting in their use of language. All these gave me a very deep engagement with the emotional links of the park to the people, positive and negative.
After gathering this material over a week, I started to look ahead to experiments such as a stencil overlay of the positive comments to be used subtly in the space. With the permission of the park keepers I started to spray paint these as an experiment. I also took the audio I recorded and placed it with repeating images of the social media messages in Adobe Premier, which I hadn’t used before. As a medium it’s quite exciting but the results taught me little I didn’t know already, the ‘seeing’ the brief mentioned was elluding me.
After my first tutorial, it was clear that I had engaged deeply with the site and its meaning, but not in its physical form enough, its inherent information or patterns within it. I tended to reach for an outcome rather than concentrating on the process leading ME. This is not surprising after a long career creating outcomes sometimes at the expense of process.
With that in mind, I have made a choice to concentrate on a single ramp to narrow the study. I will be looking at two routes over the next week to look more deeply, one involving deconstruction of the graffiti and another the social observation and patterns therein – how people physically use the site. Therein I hope to choose a single direction and have a data set of sorts, with no attention given to an outcome as yet.
I was advised to look into the dialectograms of Mitch Miller and Oliver Kugler’s environmental portraits as reference points.
