Manston Murmurations

This project was submitted in two parts - here, they're combined - and as such some of the information is reproduced at different points in slightly different ways.

I prefer not to alter my academic work and instead present it mostly as-submitted, however, due to COVID, this project was extra challenging and I think requires some reflection.

Our whole cohort worked almost entirely remotely for this project's second half, and some of the first half; like many of my fellow students, I found myself somewhat throttled and disenheartened by the loss of access to quality computers, rendering machines, and software. My system simply could not produce anything in 3D without crashing; my licenses for Rhino and Revit went totally unused. To produce something in 3D I resorted to wireframe modelling in AutoCAD and then colouring these 'by hand/mouse' in vector software (I used Affinity Designer, which is very similar to Adobe Illustrator) which was a very time-consuming process, though oddly satisfying.
As such, I don't feel this project quite achieved what I wanted it to. A bought of illness during the second half of the project only compounded my problems as my time-consuming solution to my lack of hardware required time I did not have, and due to this there's a few things distinctly missing in the second presentation; my experiments with mixtures of the different densities of plot in grasshopper (it crashed a LOT even in 2D), the long process of tweaking I went through to reach decisions on Manston's guidelines, and the research into infrastructures, advocacy planning, rhythmanalysis, aural architecture, human traces and desire lines, debates around context, and other related topics could have made an appearance.

Generally, my favourite thing about this project was the uncomfortableness of pushing against the borders of what a drawing is or can do - I want to explore this more in future.

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Part of our initial brief involved producing audiations for the site - music or field recordings or other audio work - along with a graphical notation system. I adapted a notation system I had invented as a kid for recording how a song should sound, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

My project proposal included the installation of a 'murmuration loop' which would draw in the local populations and encourage them to explore and reterritorialise the site. This was inspired in part by Basinksy's Disintgration Loops - the idea was that listening ears would collect sound from intervention points, and continually overlap these recordings, degrading them and overwriting them again and again over a 24-h looping recording. You can listen to the sounds I produced here and you can listen to my final audiation here.

Because of my illness, I was recommended to focus on producing a video to explain or introduce many of the topics I was dealing with in the final portfolio (and include some appendices). I had originally made something of a video love-letter to the bleakness of the site, which was just the time-lapses you see in the background of the final video, the murmurations, and the music and murmuration loop. All of the additional information was just layered over the top, as something of a nod to my initial concept - manipulation/superposition/degradation.

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