9th Apr 2008

Well as most of those who know me will have gathered, mum unfortunately passed away on the 22nd of March, which is why there's a big gap between my last blog and this one. Still life goes on I suppose, I'll continue to grieve for her, she was a wonderful woman and I'll miss her greatly. However, for now I need to start getting my life back together. As April comes around again its time for the dreaded Tax Return, eeek! Actually it's not too bad really. I also have decided to reduce even further the information I intend to gather for the installation, I'm going to go with a single question of "Who lives here?" with a page of options which should hopefully give me a good idea of the demographics of Heaton, and having just a single question, I think, is more likely to get a response from people. They can just point at an answer and tell me to go away. I'll be taking the more detailed questions with me and ask them once they've answer if they'd consider answering more fully, should the be open to the possibility.

20th Feb 2008

Things are not going so well at the moment, with my mum in hospital I've found it very difficult to concentrate on work, mostly I've been burying myself in programming to help ameliorate the pain - that's the problem with living with depression, it eats up your life so completely when even small things go wrong, but when something large happens you just go almost catatonic. I have however managed to reorganise the technique I'll be using on the doorsteps to get information. I figure the questions I was asking are going to be way to complicated and open to elicit a good response, so I've reduced down the scope a bit.

I'm now going to be asking some very simple quetions which will hopefully give me the same sort of information. I also hope that it'll be more statistically useful information, in that it'll be a lot easier to bring all the data together to give me an overall picture of the area. The questions I'll now be asking will be simply how many people are there in this house, what are their age and sex, how are people related to each other (such as brother, sister, father, mother, lover, boyfriend, flatmate, friend) and what sort of occupation do people do (full time work, part time work, self employed, unemployed, home maker, student, school pupil). This should provide categories of answers which I can then collate into data about the whole area.

14th Feb 2008

Well things are starting to move along now, so I've decided to turn this into a kind of blog. I'm not that hot on diaries or journals generally, but hopefully I'll be able to keep this up and current

I think I've solved three of my major problems, first, how to go about putting the installation up. I've been quite nervous about how I'm going to do this cos I'm a bit worried about vandalism. I don't really know what to expect of peoples reactions to this installation, particularly the kids of the area. However I think if I start by spending a week going out in the afternoons putting the pieces which are on the periphery, the smaller pieces which will be tucked away at the edges of the park, so few people will notice them that they'll survive long enough to take a weekend putting up the larger pieces and have it all assembled at once, so I can maybe do some sort of opening thing, maybe get some newpapers to take an interest.

I think I've also solved part of how to make money from the project. Initially I've been thinking about selling photographs but it occurs to me that there are people on eBay selling computer images for tiny amounts of cash, so the images could go up there, there's a surprisingly large market for small, cheap items like this mostly because people buy them to help increase their reputation with eBay, but it would be nice to do it properly and give people imagery they might actually keep and use, it could also act in a way as advertising which pays for itself (which I find a bit of a peculiar idea).

And I might even have solved how to fasten the smaller pieces to the ground (the restrictions for this means they have to be removable, but it has to also be a big hassle to remove them - I dont want these pieces going up for one night and then being removed to a light fingered someones back garden, maybe I'm too paranoid). I thought about using tentpegs buried quite deeply and then attaching a metal rod with a hole in through the hook at the top, and then while on site, epoxying the rod through a hole in the piece to the inside of it, that should keep them relatively secure. I still need a method for securing the larger pieces, my only current thought its hammering metal rods into the ground and the epoxying the piece on, on site, but I'm sure more refinement of that is needed before it'll really be a workable solution.