#digitaldeath

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Now that this project is nearing an end, I am stepping back from it for a critical reflection upon our design journey and its destination. We explored a vast array of possible themes, and chose to zoom in on the themes of past-present-future, ‘dumb city’, tiny monuments, nostalgia, death and loss, and forgotten and fabulated narratives. We illustrated the evolution of our creative process, as well as its final results, using physical and digital pieces of work.

Image: From the early variety of themes to the final proposal.

Challenges we faced

The challenges to our creative journey were numerous: embracing and controlling the complexity of the subject matter; finding access to the foreshore; researching the elusive mudlarks; finishing the project remotely in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. The latter was especially tough for us, as our proposal was rooted in physical space. We accepted compromises to ensure that the project was still deliverable, such as abandoning any physical printing, giving up foreshore visits, choosing not to ship across our ‘mudlarking finds’ and instead simply to photoshop them into the image of the final interactive soundboard. We communicated through Slack and held our final meetings on Hangouts and Zoom instead of in person. My own working hours were severely affected by losing access to childcare in lockdown. On Twitter, I joked about needing a new ‘smart city’ invention: an army of remotely operated robot nannies to help self isolating parents cope at home. Perhaps this is for my next project.

Image: My ‘robot nanny’ Tweet

The changing meaning of physical and digital spaces in a pandemic

As I write this, London is in its fourth week of the lockdown. Access to many parks and recreation areas has been prohibited in order to control social distancing, while the PLA has blocked all recreational access to the Thames foreshore. A police helicopter hovers over my local area of East London multiple times per day, on the lookout for illegal social gatherings. The level of regulation of public space in the UK has taken a leap well beyond my group’s wildest fabulations.

In his documentary The Century of the Self, Curtis discusses the rise of individualism and consumerism in the Western world: “Although we feel we are free, in reality, we — like the politicians — have become the slaves of our own desires.” Today’s pandemic feeds on this Western individualism and consumerism, driving many to panic buy essential goods and to ignore social distancing for their own selfish reasons. In parallel, there has been an explosion of spontaneous individual surveillance activities: neighbours spying on neighbours, lone walkers taking pictures of groups in parks, public naming and shaming of panic buyers. Much of this activity is immediately uploaded to social media, which is fast becoming a live monument to our complex relationship between individualism, consumerism and regulation. My group’s regulated mudlarks seem tame by comparison.

Since the lockdown, the Facebook mudlarking community has had a sway of posts urging its members to respect the law by forsaking their visits to the foreshore. A few posters have shared that their friends or relatives have died of COVID-19; these posts have been immediately flooded with an outpour of digital messages of support and love. Undoubtedly the Facebook profiles of the deceased are now full of posts and comments, grieving for them and promising to remember them forever. What I have started researching at the start of the project, has now become a daily occurrence.

All the while the Thames still flows, still is. The river's iconic silhouette, devoid of boats and people, now regularly featured in the drone news footage, serves as a symbol of nostalgia for our lost freedom, our lost access to public space. The humanised Thames has changed to reflect the change in us.

Who is this project for?

Our brief encouraged us to embrace the mindset of “artist-designers”, in the words of Bill Gaver. Our project therefore took a meandering route that did not have a specific group of users in mind, unlike the more conventional HCID projects. We made the mudlarks centre-stage, honouring the bottoms-up ‘dumb city’ rule we had set for ourselves from the get-go. We decided not to be limited to designing for modern-day mudlarks, instead taking a longer view and speculating on how they could fit within a possible future. We were adamant throughout our design process that we were not offering solutions and were happy to leave open-ended strands, embracing the uncertainty of our speculations.

So if not modern-day mudlarks, who is this project for?

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By this point, our group gathered enough information to start finalising our collective proposal. We felt that due to the physicality of our project we should create some physical objects as part of our submission. At the forefront of our minds were the motifs of memory and death, ‘dumb’ small scale physicality in contrast with the polished smart cities or monumental interventions, the flow of time, forgotten and fabulated narratives. My earlier musings on the re-imagined ‘task-artifact cycle’ (post 03) led us to blend the historic London - the mudlarks - with the technologies of the future.

Gradually, we settled on producing two primary pieces of group work: a narrative piece explaining the progression of our research and ideas, and an interactive digital device (interactive soundboard). These would be accompanied by a written narrative that would pull them into a coherent whole.

The narrative piece

Evolution of the narrative piece: 

Image: Evolution of early ideas about the format and presentation of the narrative piece. Numbers are referred to in the text below.

Our early ideas included everything from dramatic performances to QR codes scattered around city locations (1). With the emerging focus on the Thames, I was keen to use the iconic river silhouette as part of the imagery. My initial idea was a giant poster of the Thames with zoom-in sections for specific locations (2). One of our group was keen to incorporate a ‘hidden’ quality to the piece, so we experimented with various ways of folding the paper (3, 4). Another of our group introduced the idea of a booklet - a series of large translucent pages which would initially show a jumbled up overlay of many images detailing our design progression, but would gradually become clearer and clearer as the viewer would flip through the pages, until finally ‘The Proposal’ would be revealed (5). We settled on this idea, thinking that we could print the pages on A1 translucent paper, to form a booklet with a solid cardboard backing (7, 8). Unfortunately, due to the pandemic physical printing was no longer possible, so we settled on a digital version of the booklet instead. 

Final narrative piece:   

Image: a snapshot of the final narrative piece.

I volunteered to build the booklet using Photoshop and Indesign. These are the visual techniques and sources of inspiration I have used, while regularly communicating with my group for feedback: 

The underlying structure of the booklet is the geographical map of the Thames.

Using word shapes to convey meaning and create art. This was inspired by the work of Paul Soulellis and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky and the Constructivists.

Image: examples of word shapes by Soulellis and Mayakovsky

Using the Doves font to invoke the spirit of mudlarking and to reflect on the Thames’ rich history. The beautiful, filigree font is perfect for creating word shapes. The way it is laid out on some pages invokes the Doves type being scattered down the river.

Creating a visual structure and content with juxtapositions and combinations of images and text, to convey our group’s story to the viewer. The pages start off as a jumble of overlaid images and text, and gradually become more ordered to reflect the narrative of confusion giving place to order as our group thinking progresses. The silhouette of the Thames starts off being barely visible, and is revealed through the progression of the booklet.

Four geographic locations are highlighted on the map: these are the real places where access to the foreshore is possible, and/or where we have visited in person. The locations are poetically and visually associated with the design stages of our project:

Location 1: Wapping - Brainstorming and the Underground 

Location 2: Greenwich - Diverging Themes: Critical Fabulations

Location 3: Silvertown - Death

Location 4: North Woolwich Pier - The River 

The visual style of the location signs mimics the iconic Thames Path signage

The interactive soundboard

Evolution of the interactive soundboard:

Image: Evolution of early ideas about the format and presentation of the interactive soundboard. Numbers are referred to in the text below.

This piece of work was spearheaded by one member of my group. He designed and built the first prototype that reacted to hand touch, producing a sound as it did so (1, 2). During a pub session, he drew a quick doodle in my sketchbook (3) and this became the basis for the final design (4). It includes a cut-out silhouette of the Thames, as well as several cut-out spaces that correspond to map locations. 

Once a physical object  - a ‘mudlarking find’ - is put upon one of these spaces, it interacts with the conductive paint and produces the sound of human voice, telling the story of the object and its previous owner. The interactive soundboard allows the user to feel like a mudlark who has found the object and is able to listen to the memories attached to it. 

My role in the production of the piece was sourcing the modelling materials, setting up the A1 pieces of card, cutting out the shape of the Thames and the spaces for the ‘mudlarking finds’, and painting the piece. I then sent it off to the fellow group member who assembled the final electronics and filmed the piece in action. 

Image: my work-in-progress interactive soundboard, and a work-in-progress picture taken by my fellow group member

Image: a snapshot from the video of the interactive soundboard in action

The imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’ of the future:

Each member of our group selected two or three objects to be the candidates for the ‘mudlarking finds’ to be used in the interactive soundboard. These are documented below:

Image: our group’s imaginary ‘mudlarking finds’

The objects each of us chose were meaningful to us personally, and were a mixture of historic objects (such as the real mudlarking finds from our trips to the Thames) and modern ones. For example, I chose my son’s toy Lego car as one of mine. We were imagining that these objects would be deposited in the river in the near future and would be found by the mudlarks of the distant future, becoming future cultural probes. We broadly wanted to stay true to the spirit of mudlarking - not making the objects too easy to find or to interpret, instead allowing the mudlarks to enjoy their craft of finding and researching. However, in our future world view, the amount of regulation of this activity will increase - in line with the current trend - and therefore the mudlarks will operate under a governmental framework rather than as individuals. 

Our ‘mudlarking finds’ attempt to subvert the taboo of talking about death as they will tell the story of their long-deceased owners. This ties in with the themes from my digital death study in post 05. They play on the idea of nostalgia, where in the future even the most mundane objects such as a Lego car from 2020, could become infused with interest and mystery. In the words of Milan Kundera, “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” The mudlarking treasures become tiny monuments to individuals - small scale, personal, ‘dumb.’ 

Image: My Photoshop of the finished interactive soundboard to include the groups ‘mudlarking finds.’

The written narrative

This accompanies the primary pieces of work and describes a speculative future in which imaginary commercial or government entities attempt to shape and control the human relationship with memory, digital death, and with the river itself. The distant future is framed within increased regulation, in which even the free craft of mudlarking is heavily dominated by the government, and the mudlarks are employed and trained by the so-called Ministry of Memory to track valuable finds. The Ministry of Memory is hunting for a ‘sunny glow of yesteryear’ in an attempt to sate its population’s craving for packaged nostalgia. Their ‘yesteryear’ is, in turn, defined as our own near future, populated by enterprises such as the Mori-Industries - a tongue-in cheek representation of our current corporate and consumerist reality, and a reflection of the very human desire to be remembered after one’s death. It is Mori-Industries that place the ordinary citizens’ ‘mudlarking finds’ in the river for the future entities to discover. 

Image: A diagram of future inter-relationships, a Mori-Industries calling card and a Ministry of Memory form that the future mudlarks must fill in to document their finds (created by my fellow group members).

One member of our group has created the story and named the key players in it, and we have all contributed to editing it. The illustrating artifacts were created by two of my fellow group members.

Supplementary output: the video

A fellow member of our group has produced a video which was presented at our final crit.

Image: A still from our group’s final crit video

The video has served as an intermediate point of reflection on our progress. It has been made in a documentary format inspired by Adam Curtis, the music videos of Bill Wurtz and old footage of Silvertown and Woolwich, among others.

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Access to the Thames foreshore as an act of spatial occupation

The Thames is a tidal river. Its foreshore goes through daily cycles of being fully submerged to being partially exposed. While the tide makes going to the foreshore potentially dangerous, it isn’t the primary reason why access to it is limited – private land ownership of the river’s banks and the management of the river are also to blame. The Port of London Authority (PLA) merely ‘tolerates’ public access. Nevertheless, it is possible to get close to the foreshore safely by consulting the tide tables and by knowing the limited number of places where it is accessible. 

Image: A document listing all the places where the Thames is still accessible; a page from the tidal tables published by the PLA

Ordinary members of the public rarely visit the foreshore because of the lack of obvious access and the effects of PLA’s policy. While there are many campaigns and proposals to reclaim the Thames, it is not looking likely that the PLA will embrace them any time soon; all the while the increasing density of private developments along the banks makes it harder and harder to do so as time goes by.

Our team has been able to go down to the foreshore on two occasions, in North Woolwich and in Wapping (my own visit is documented in post 06 of this blog). I recall that standing on the deserted foreshore felt rebellious. In the spirit of Sara Heitlinger’s talk on subverting public space at the March teachout, my presence on the foreshore was an act of spatial occupation, albeit a modest one. 

Shortly thereafter, London shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and further visits to the foreshore became impossible for us. 

Mudlarks: regulated rebels

Unlike ordinary citizens, mudlarks access the foreshore regularly. Through doing so, they are reclaiming the ‘lost’ river by defying conventions. Mudlarks have come up in this blog a few times, and are fast becoming a focus in our group’s thinking. They scavenge in the river mud for items of value or historic interest, and have a rich history in London, coming into prominence in the 18th century, and experiencing a revival in recent years. The context and the reasons within which they operate have evolved over the centuries. The original mudlarks scavenged as a source of income, and were often children. Today’s mudlarks are mostly middle-class adults who engage in it as a hobby, while their interest is archaeological and personal rather than monetary. 

Image: A page on historic mudlarks from Peter Ackroyd’s London Under; a modern-day photograph of mudlarking finds

The level of regulation of this activity has evolved, too - previously unregulated, today it requires an expensive license issued by the PLA, whereas items of high value must be handed over to the authorities, else the finder would be breaking the law. There is a paradox in this situation - an act of spatial occupation that is regulated by an official body. 

Getting under a mudlark’s skin

To learn about the mudlarks, we have tried several approaches: joining online communities on Facebook, contacting the London Docklands Museum, contacting individual mudlarks, as well as studying books and online resources. Obtaining direct contact proved tricky; our desktop research pointed at the fact that mudlarks tend to be elusive. Nevertheless, one member of our group was able to talk to one in person, and another managed to communicate with one briefly via a mutual friend. Even despite this limited research, we were able to gather some insights. One important insight was that mudlarks viewed their hobby as a craft to be honed and to be proud of. They kept their favourite locations secret, and did their own research into their finds. Some kept their finds to themselves, whereas others chose to post pictures and videos - the Facebook mudlarking group had daily posts, mostly to ask for information about their finds, but also to boast about them. 

The classroom session 4 and the article by Bill Gaver on cultural probes provoked a group discussion whether devising a cultural probe for the mudlarks would be plausible. We decided against it due to the time constraints and due to the fact that we could not easily get access to them. 

Yet, I mused about devising a hypothetical cultural probe, based on our research into the mudlarks so far. What would work in such a probe pack and what would not?

Maps - no. The mudlarks are specifically against revealing their favourite foreshore locations

Postcards - possibly. Gaver states that “postcards are an attractive medium... because of their connotations as an informal, friendly mode of communication.”

Photographs - yes. Many mudlarks love sharing photos of their finds online.

Videos - maybe. Some mudlarks put videos of their finds on Youtube.

Diaries - yes. Many mudlarks like to document their finds.

Blogs - maybe. Some mudlarks already keep them.

Image: My hypothetical cultural probe for a modern-day mudlark.

Meanwhile our group discussed how throwing an object into the Thames for a future mudlark to find could be seen as a sort of cultural probe. As the mudlarks in the distant future discover these objects, the ways they choose to treat and document them could be the subject of a study by a future sociologist or designer.

The Doves font

Lara Maiklem’s book Mudlarking includes the incredible story of the Doves font. The font type was thrown into the Thames by its creator in 1916-17, and small portions of it were rescued by a team of PLA divers led by a mudlark in 2015. Maiklem met the font rescuer on the Facebook mudlarking group, and was later able to uncover several type pieces herself and use them as part of her book cover. The font now exists as a digital version, which I was able to track and buy for our group use. 

Image: Doves font

The humanised river

The relationship between individuals and the river is small-scale and bottom-up, a sort of ‘dumb’ approach to the smart city - in contrast with the top-down, giant engineering scale of Silvertown’s High Line (post 04) or with the sanitised, smart cities of the Gillian Rose critique.

The river itself, as a physical and geographical entity, simply exists - it is, was and will be - without any feelings or memories of its own. It is us humans who inject all these themes into the river, humanising it to make it meaningful to us. Through the gradual progress of my group’s thinking, we are now close to defining what we want our own meaning to be. 

Mudlarks humanise the river in their own unique way. They are finders of the lost stories of the Thames, generators of fabulated stories (as per Maiklem’s book in post 06) and a link between the river’s past and present. For us, they are also a link to the Thames’ future.

The river is a medium within which the physical and the digital can intermingle within the framework of death and loss, pulling in the themes I have previously researched (post 05). The key elements of this narrative are the powerful physical presence of the river, the objects and stories that it embraces, swallows and releases, the digital tools of the future mudlarks (akin to the metal detectors that some use today). The timeline of loss and grief uncovered in my digital interviews - the past, present and future journeys of remembrance - has fed into the project title proposed by one of our group: ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone.’