Today started off with twisting my ankle on a run that lasted about 10 minutes before I tripped on a cut off sign post on the sidewalk and fell flat on my face.

I was on my way to have a look at the coast, or some bit of water that I was traveling toward based on my map.  Fortunately, my ankle wasn’t too bad and after some ice and more walking around, I had another chance to see the coast as it turned out to be the first activity for the day planned by DM Labs…

…After breakfast, we all walked toward the coast where I had been trying to get on my failed run.  We were then put into pairs and set off to go to charity shops to spend 10 quid on stuff to experiment with for the day.

Interjection ]]] Most excitingly, Xavi and Mark arrived at the train station after a long journey from Newcastle!  They joined us at the shops and for the experimentation phase back at Octopus [[[

Neil and I were paired and we ended up buying a large fan, a “grabber”, some shiny fabric and 2 barbie walkie-talkies.  This led to a future scenarios performance that we enacted after lunch in which we wore the fabric as invisibility cloaks and I used the large fan to waft peoples identities toward Neil who grabbed them with the grabber and placed them in a plastic bag.  This was all based on a future scenario in which we had returned to 2014 in order to capture people’s senses of self at a moment before they had been fully corporatised, commercialised and proprietised.

The idea that we liked around the walkie talkies was that they serve as an off-grid communication device.  This led to Neil and I deciding to continue working on a series of off-grid communication devices that allow for communication to happen in different ways around the park.

We have begun by making a list of technologies that we would like to play with:

LCD Screens, Servo Motors (remotely controlled with arrows attached), RFID, Large-Scale projection tied to translation, Tin Can Telephones

And ideas that we hope to explore: Off-network communication, distributed maps of the entire system for visitors to the park, booths that offer certain experiences that are tied to computers that we will man handing out maps and introducing people to the “game”, Anonymity and randomness, playful ways to communicate, communicating at a distance, communicating over time, things that are lost in translation, unclear or non-linear communication, using space and spacial metaphors to explore communication, off-grid un-monitored un-tracked communication, going back to early-Internet ideas of playing with identity, a meta-identity that emerges, wearing a mask in a public space, loosening up social rules and expectations, invisibility, setting up a system that opens up new channels of communication.

And off we go!