TIM BOUCHER, FALL 2010

Sorry for the lengthy title. This is what it looks like when I try to boil down big topics into a few simple sentences. There’s a weeding-through process which occurs. You start very generally with your interests and inspirations, and then gradually begin to construct something out of that which can work and walk around on its own in the real world – so to speak.

Have been exploring psychogeographical spaces lately, with a special focus on the intersection of web-based data with the real world. Through the Monument City project, we’re creating a methodology, workflow and toolset which I’m hoping can be reproduced by independent teams of amateur historians the world over.

I have been partly inspired in this project through the Street Level view offered in some locations by Google Maps. The street view option comes to you courtesy of cars sporting equipment which looks like this: a weird globular-looking camera module popping up out of a variety of different car makes and models.

Investigating the subject in greater detail, I found a number of websites with photos claiming to be (not sure how real they are…) pulled off Google’s street view. Some of which are quasi-scandalous in that purely American way:

What you witness in these photos – whatever their authenticity – is simple human drama. I like these photos because they *could be* real. There’s no reason they wouldn’t be, that a Google-matic recording robot wouldn’t see all the things we see (or fail to see) around our neighborhood: both for the good and for the bad.

Began outlining a sci-fi story recently I was trying to pitch to a fellow-folksinger around town, loosely based around this concept outlined above, but more personalized to my experience and viewpoint: a guy who drives around the Google (or similar behemoth tech company) recording vehicle all day long but making hardly any money, and spends nights playing folk music. The ironic twist, I guess, would be that he has this ability during his day-job to document history with this technology everyone uses – but that he’s forbidden from injecting his own music and art into the datastream. Though he continually dreams of getting out of the car and performing in different spots for the street view maps.

Which brings me back to what I think a folk musician, outsider artist, or street-level historian is really for – especially in this day and age. It’s for keeping other ways of being and doing alive by actively living them – even if the rest of the world considers them kind of pointless and obsolete at best. Been thinking a lot about people like Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie: both of whom were doing the same thing, but on a different scale and sort of along different ends of the spectrum or axis of media and memory.

I’ve spent a great deal of time listening to old mp3 recordings out of the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Folkways archives, along with a massive amount of indigenous music from around the world recorded in the field by anthropologists who were allowed, in some cases, to witness and partake in rituals and ceremonies.

I see some kind of middle ground forming amidst these various interests: that a viable business opportunity is opening up around the notion of having street-level human recorder/participant/witnesses as a complement to services like Google’s street-level view. Humans who can go places and see things that a machine can’t or wouldn’t be allowed. Human sousveillance agents paid for not by foreign or hostile governments, but by corporations who are hellbent on collecting all data in the world for their own purposes – but maybe that’s still only in the realm of sci-fi. This is, after all, just a thought-experiment to deconstruct cultural potentialities around things like location-aware technologies and the psychogeography of everyday life and not necessarily meant as a prediction of the immediate future.

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• On Sacred Geography & Embedded Geomantic GIS Songlines
• Why Street Performing Is Essential