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

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.

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.

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.