Mapping Otari School

First session of the year and the students and I spent the afternoon mapping the School grounds in various ways, texture rubbings, sounds, drawing and photographs. Our first test map is of the textures around the school, they are a mixture of surfaces such as the playground matting and wood on the fence. Over the next few weeks will refine the maps into a series including the sounds and photographs that have been collected.

Update

I will be starting back with the students this week and planning the next stages of the project. The marble run sections of the fence are being made at the moment and once a few things have been sorted out we hope to get them up in the next month.

Image via Mapping Weird Stuff

The first workshop with the fence group will be making a map of the school site, this will allow us to explore and discover other areas of the grounds that work might be made for and that link to the ideas we have already developed for the fence. The map will have some traditional bits in it such as layout of buildings and paths but also, using ideas from psychogeography, which we will incorporate into the map. This might include sounds, textures, rubbings and other things we discover.

One idea that we will be working on is the design and making of a series of tiles to go on the top of each of the fence posts. The plan is to involve the whole school in coming up with ideas for the tile designs and this will involve a design competition and the fence group deciding which tiles to use, but all the designs will be used as part of a large collaborative artwork to be hung in the school.