Listed below are some notes and responses. This string of ideas will grow and mutate as the project progresses. The most recent notes are posted first, for earlier notes, please scroll down.

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Notes Update, March 16th 1998

1) I am in the process of waiting (so far unsuccessfully) for responses to my research questions, bulletins, emails etc. which were sent in a dozen directions.
So in the meantime it is probably worth posting (and exposing) some excerpts from my attempts to find an australian sheep farmer via an agricultural chat channel.
One reason why my chat channel attempts may have been so hopeless - even when I used Matilda chat (apparently Australian) has probably much to do with timing (first communications hurdle), I really need to be doing this at 8am to catch a farmer after he has finished work, and before he goes to bed (assuming he's wired, and I have yet to establish whether this is even common or rare), or perhaps this weekend I'll get lucky.....

2)This all raises 'time' as an issue, and has sent me back to look at the National Maritime Museum site. I haven't actually visited the Maritime Museum for a long time...the last time I went was to the Queens House for the Tatsuo Miyajima site specific piece "Running Time", which was extraordinary...a sea of red LED's on wheels that glided across the floor, always turning before colliding, creating a choreography of their own while they spun through numbers 1-9 at different speeds. The viewers entered the work from the gallery, encountering a pitch black space, with just the animated numbers below as points in space. As one walked around the gallery towards the exit, ones eyes began adjusting to the dark, and slowly a sense of the room emerged (steeped in history, paintings and laid floor)...over time....colliding with the present and/or future (the LED's)....
I have also had a couple of friends over recently from Bonn, Germany, who went to visit Greenwich while they were here, they came back and told me of the Camera Obscura there, projected onto a table, which made a convenient connection for me with my 'net' camera obscura idea (see "ideas"). So I think I will visit Greenwich soon, and perhaps to get in the mood will finally get around to reading "Longtitude" on the train (the science-made-digestible-for-the-non-scientist book on the search to solve the Longtitude problem by Dava Sobel).

3) I am finding this 'tumblong' process, or perhaps more the fact that the process is so open very curious, and very exposing. It brings up so many issues of control (are these personal or cultural or both??). On the one hand I'm relentlessly retaining control by making my own island, floating off the coast of the main Tumblong...a little post-colonial outpouring, a piece of the net that is 'forever england'? What is Geography after all? The Mappa Mundi (the medieval map of the world to be found in Hereford Cathedral) located countries and sized them in order of perceived importance (Jerusalem is at the centre) rather than attempting a physical/geographical accuracy......on the other hand I'm delivering incompletes....letting people in on the streams, links, coincidences and flights of fancy that precede any work or any working process, but in attempting to articulate this it becomes self conscious, and possibly redirects the work itself. What is the work? Possibly in this case it is the sketchbook, the process, the 'tumblong' or meeting place.....
The links themselves become part of the articulation, an echoing of not just the structure of the web, but of people, encounters, connections, serendipity......


First Notes and Responses, February 1998

1) The first question I asked when approached to be part of Tumblong was would I get to visit Australia. Apparently I wasn't alone in asking that, and no, it seems that a physical visit isn't on the agenda, so I feel an honest response would be for a part of the work to be about plotting a way or ways to get there, a route, a set of possibilities, and a fantasy about what I will do when I get there, eventually......

2) In even beginning to think about this project I am painfully aware that my knowledge of Australia is entirely second hand, a mixture of friends, soap operas, news stories and documentaries. So wherever I have a sense that something may have happened, either through rumour or imagination, I will ask questions, both through this site, but also out there on bulletin boards etc, to unravel the facts from the myths and sterotypes, and perhaps create new ones in the process.

3) If Tumblong means meeting place and the project is about a kind of cultural exchange, either comtemporary, or with historical roots, or both, then what kind of cultural exchange becomes the norm at the end of the millenium?
....I mean to do all my research purely through the net itself (email, search engines etc).....and use the broadest interpretation of the notion of meeting place/cultural exchange (whose culture? what constitutes a cultural artefact?) which brings me to....

4) Sheep.
(please see questions also)
I feel the need to start with sheep, as I have used them as metaphors in work before. The idea of collective behaviour (as choreographed through sound in the Woolwich foot tunnel in 1993), and also as evidence of an idealised landscape (Still, 1997) among others. I sense that possibilities may emerge through regarding sheep as a kind of live cultural artefact common to both countries (among others). It may also be possible to draw a correlation between sheep, humans and rabbits - the artefact supplied by Artec, London - in terms of breeding, displacement, and the indigenous versus the imported, and the subsequent results (this also relates loosely to the contributions of the Migration Museum and the Golden Dragon Museum, Australia - see Artefacts on Tumblong main site). It is these interweavings and correlations that I hope to follow up and eventually find a form for. The only reference material I might use that is not using the internet is a book I was given, "Sheep of the World in Colour" (pictures to follow), by Kenneth Ponting, this will help identify the differences between breeds.