Communing: Place, Time and Mood – Wandering with my iPhone

"It's a striding kind of morning, listening to S W R – eastward ho"

I just finished reading @Marousia’s brilliant blog post on wandering with a camera. As an academic, it’s @Marousia’s wont to be reflective about what she does and her way of doing them, and she’s taught me so much about the value of doing this, that when she wrote the post, I was really inspired to try and think reflexively about my practice of picking a part of a city, walking through it, taking pictures on my iPhone and tweeting them, along with the GPS location and some commentary.

There’s a sense, when I’m walking around with my iPhone, taking pics and tweeting them, that I’m walking with a crowd of blind people. I feel as if the people on twitter are with me, not as audience but as companions. Like there is a whole crowd of us strolling along the water in Regent’s park, talking amongst ourselves until something beautiful or interesting pops up, and then I’ll take a picture and call attention to it. I’m careful about the words I tweet with the picture. I’m not interested in being journalistic; I don’t just want to communicate the visible, but the way the scene affects me viscerally and emotionally. I’m trying to push all those things through the technology and into the minds of my companions.

"waterflowers – pink and wet and wonderful"

Some days, when I do this, I get a rhythm going and a sense of exhilaration sets in. The closest thing I can relate it to is my past experiences when I used to sing in a band. It would be easy then to frame this as performance and place the people reading and looking at my tweets as audience. But anyone who has ever been in a band on stage knows: most of the time it’s a ‘you play, they listen’ dynamic. But on occasion, something deeper happens. The distance between the audience and the stage disappears, it stops being a simplistic sender-receiver experience. It becomes a communing, a conspiracy, a fully interlocked experience. If you’ve never been a performer, it’s very hard to understand this phenomenon. You can’t always make it happen. It takes a surrender on the part of the performer to take off the mask and the armor of stage mannerisms and a surrender on the part of the audience to allow their consciousness to jump the gap. It suddenly doesn’t matter what lyrics  you’re singing, they stop being words and become the vehicle by which emotion is carried back and forth, like bridging a synaptic gap. It’s a kind of translocation.

"Begging to be pressed – then run away!"
The same thing happens, from time to time, when I’m doing my twitter walks. Although I’m physically in the place I’m photographing and tweeting, my consciousness is flitting back and forth between the real world and the virtual one, populated with all these personae who are communicating with me about what I’m sending. And I have to believe that, on occasion,they feel the same. That they are, in their mind’s eye, traveling from their own space to mine, traveling through the virtual and into my world. I don’t think people are lying when, from time to time, someone tweets ‘I feel like I’m there, walking with you’. Because I feel them too, walking beside me. Taking in London’s brisk, damp morning air, and drawn to some odd bit of architectural decoration, or flowers struggling through the frost, or down the sleeping street, or hearing their footsteps echo on the flagstones of an ancient church.

Until recently, I’ve had to use Twitpic to upload my images, which meant the only way to see them after was by browsing through the pictures page by page, either on my twitpic account (which isn’t very easy) or when I upload the product of my days photos on my Flickr account (which doesn’t contain the text tweets).

But in future, I’m going to try and do all my uploading to a place that records both the tweet, and the image, and displays them in a reasonably easy to navigate sequence.


Comments

6 responses to “Communing: Place, Time and Mood – Wandering with my iPhone”

  1. RG,

    I think that while reality, and minds-eye, are different implicitly…there is a fog that joins the two periodically. When this is “defined well” meaning when this chasm is somehow joined, but not beyond the eye..it is truly a beautiful experience.

    In less broken thought…Life, reality, and dreams are sublime, and that is the texture of a life well lived.

    M~

  2. I love that you do my travelling for me <3

    1. No! I don’t. You’re there!

  3. Many times I have been walking alongside you, loving when you point out something I hadn’t noticed, sometimes telling me things about what you’re focusing on that I would not have known otherwise. There is a rhythm to it that comes through. You succeed in pushing through the technology until it’s unnoticed. I have always “heard” each person’s tweet as if spoken in their voice (or my idea of it formed from the tweeter’s personality.) I do not mean that I literally hear voices, but my imagination always supplies it without any effort on my part. I thought everyone did this. I only mention it because it makes it easy for me to feel that I am walking with you because I’m already hearing you as you speak. Since I’m in the western United States, the time difference means that I often miss your morning walks, but I’m sure there are many other people right there with you who enjoy and appreciate it as much as I do. Thank you for taking us along.

    1. Thank you for walking with me. 😀

  4. William Ferguson Avatar
    William Ferguson

    I’m not too handy with a camera but the vivid portrayal presented with each walk is indeed an extravagant treat. Look forward to them everytime.

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