tim wright: digital writer

27/03/11 Moongolf Hole #3: join us for 'a good walk spoiled'

So I’m setting off on another golfonthemoon mission on Sunday 27/03/11. Do join us if you can. Yet again it has been organised by gonzogeographer extraordinaire Gordon Joly who is using this walk as an excuse to celebrate Gonzo Mean Time. We assemble at 1pm at North Greenwich Station.

My chief aim will be to map out Moon Golf Hole #3 here on earth. The results of our last walk were excellent. By mapping out our route, documenting our progress and gaining much insight from my fellow moongolfers along the way, I came up with Moon Golf Hole #2:

It reminded me very much Google’s map of Apollo 14’s famous moongolf expedition (note pin number 20):

And now see how well these two maps work together. Uncanny!:

For this Sunday I’m looking not only to create a third hole (and then find the right place on the moon where it fits), but also to meet new people who might be useful for my mission*.

As we walk and talk, I’m hoping to document our conversations, learn about others people’s lives here on earth and generally use the civic (and sometime privately-owned) space we're traversing as both a playground and a space research lab. As fellow Splacist and sometime moongolf collaborater Paul Conneally has described it in the past:

"The game of 'golf on the moon' involves a hole being set up somewhere, and a tee being set up somewhere some distance away with a particular significance - a place where ley lines converge, perhaps.  

The players tee off and then pick up their balls to walk back by whatever route takes their fancy to the hole location - along the way they are encouraged to talk to each other and engage with their surroundings - they too become looked at a little more than usual as they are carrying golf clubs.

When they reach the hole location they put their balls back on the ground and putt until they hole out. Everyone wins."

I would add that dressing up as an astronaut, wearing a GPS device for mapping our course and practising a few golf strokes along the way is (for me) also part of the game, but I appreciate I may be playing at a more advanced level than the rest of you. 

DON'T LEAVE SPACE TO THE PROFESSIONALS!

*In case you’re new to my lunar obsession, I should remind you that GolfontheMoon is a long term & resolutely amateur project of mine to get to the moon before I die without the aid of any corporate or government support (aka interference!).

When I finally get there (preferably with David Bowie as my wingman or caddie), I will do what human beings have always done with new wild frontier landscapes: I will create a golf course. The name of my project is Play Golf On the Moon! (with David Bowie). 

Obviously there are several stages to this rather complicated and deliberately ramshackle mission. 

For the moment, I am following NASA’s original plan for its Apollo astronauts; that is, to ‘pretend’ to be on the moon whilst actually goofing around on Earth. I'm also talking to people who can help Bowie and I live long enough to complete the mission. And we're always on the look out for rocket scientists who might build us an affordable mode of transport - preferably out of Lego and the other cheap play components I have at my disposal.

Insync Xmas party

On the back of the fab PlayTime event, I was very honoured to be asked to be part of the Insync Xmas party, developing some of the ideas for my MoonGolf project as a set of simple and discreet exercises that people could engage with whilst also doing all that stuff that people do at xmas parties (i.e. drinking).

Here's a Download golfonthemoon_summary2.pdf with info about the different exercises I'm developing for all budding moongolfers.

Here's the flickr set from the evening (you'll note that I have a number of 'action man' re-enactments to think about)

Here are some YouTube videos that demonstrate that Bowie simulation can be fun and telling. I'm particularly pleased with my own 'Fantastic Voyage' recital:

AN IPOD SHUFFLE GOES TO THE CREATOR OF THE BEST MOON/GOLF/BOWIE IMAGE SUBMITTED BY XMAS

To celebrate the success of the PlayTime event and continue Tim Wright’s mission to play golf on the moon (with David Bowie), XPT is offering a iPod Shuffle to the person who comes up with the best photographic simulation of a particular aspect of the the 30-year plan.

As Rob Bevan has already commented: ‘Simulation=Solution”.

Rob Bevan's PlayTime post

"Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth. But you could argue that these techniques - and especially montage/manipulation (cf. the history of collage, Eisenstein etc, blah blah) - allow us to see other, new truths (all that nonsense about MegaWords was a joke about quantifying this). And the things you need, stock imagery, skills, tools etc. are becoming more available and affordable all the time: see all the examples of the web services* I mentioned. So we’re going to see a lot more of it, especially with the YouTube generation, and it’s also something that we (XPT and everyone else) are going to continue to have a lot of fun with…

*Most of the links to these are embedded in the PDF, but for convenience here are the best of them: Worth1000, Photoshop Tennis, iStockPhoto, Snipshot, Tourist Remover, Riya Visual Search, Lazy Mask, Zonetag, scanR, retrievr, Mappr, Ning Photos and Google Moon.

http://robbevan.com/blog/2006/11/22/playtime-playing-with-pictures/

Gavin Stewart's PlayTime links

A poem from Poorly Pets called Fish
A games/poem project called Mystery Museum
Also Gavin's digital art: - choice/cuts -
And the flash poem Slippage

All of Gavin's photos of the day can be found in the golfonthemoon group.

Tom Hume's links from PlayTime

Here are my URLs:

http://www.asterisk.org/

http://www.yac.com/

http://www.gnokii.org/

http://www.clicktell.com/

http://www.mxtelecom.com/

http://www.scoopt.co.uk/

http://www.shozu.com/

http://english.ohmynews.com/

http://www.futureplatforms.com/

http://tomhume.org/

rocket scientists

How intense and energized people looked at PlayTime when asked to get serious about playing with Lego.

Stuart Nolan is just so good at getting people to use this classic toy as a means to explore metaphor and build concrete models of people’s emotions, memories, relationships and concepts.

In this case people were asked to build something that represented an idea or memory associated with travel, and then they had to talk about their construction in terms of what it represented.

Notice how keen people are to protect their creation with their hands as they talk, and look at the object with a great deal of warmth and intensity.

Take the soundtrack and context out and I realized that what I was looking at could just as easily be a bunch of scientists or engineers demonstrating their latest designs – for a rocket, maybe?

Or component parts of a rocket?

So here I have my first team of rocket designers – and since Lego is made up of very basic components, I can in most cases, straight from the photo or video, construct my own pretty close versions of whatever my scientists design.

Perhaps I can fit them together in some way to create the full scale *big* rocket that will take me to the moon.

BTW have you tried Lego Digital Designer yet?

Becoming an action man

One of the images to come out of the PlayTime event that I liked the best was one where Rob and I are lying on the floor holding hands.

We look quite camp and a bit floaty and doll-like, don’t we?

Why are we doing this? Well, the idea was to leave my two Action Men (the old one that looks like me is now being referred to as Minor Tim – geddit?) lying around for anyone to play with throughout the day. I’d then take a picture of them in any pose or situation they happen to have been left in – and then Rob and I would then re-enact that pose or situation and have our photo taken. Basically we would be snapped ‘being Action Men’.

Subsequent to this I have used this photo to show Rob & I “floating in a tin can/far above the Earth”.

Gradually the simulation is becoming more ‘real’ .

Now take a look at this amalgamation of images to show me and Rob and the Action Men *and* Bowie *and* a golf ball all floating inside a spaceship. This part of the mission is really starting to take shape, no?

What I need now is more opportunities to allow people to play with my Action Men to create a library of poses and situations. Can you help?

the first hole

As you can see from the previous blog entry, I did make some attempt at PlayTime to get some golf played.

Many many thanks to both Rob Bevan and Paul Dornan (pictured left) for being game enough to not only get out on the street, but also to dress up a bit in silly gear and even attempt a very basic Bowie simulation both in terms of make-up and singing (more on this in the weeks to come…)

It strikes me that it should be possible for us to design and simulate many and various moongolf course holes here on earth – in much the same way as the Apollo astronauts had to spend time plodding around old Icelandic lava fields to get some idea of what the moon surface might be like.

All we need to do is define the location of the tee and the location of the hole and decide how many shots one should normally take to get from tee to hole. Budding hole designers could take mobipics of their designated tee, a view to the hole and hole itself, plus perhaps snaps of the location of the ball after each shot.

Ambitious hole designers might even make a video walkthrough. I've already taken snaps of the first hole in Soho that we played at PlayTime - and I even have a video of it on YouTube:

In this way we could put together a whole collection of moongolf holes scattered across the country for anyone to play at any time. Perhaps we could use GoogleMaps to log them all.

One minor quibble I’ve had from friend Phil Dolman to this idea is that the earth’s terrain is nothing like the moon’s. This we can change.

Once a hole has been designed and mapped, there is absolutely no reason why moongolfers couldn’t bring their own terrain with them. Perhaps one by one we could take small piles of moondust to the designated site and leave it in the appropriate place (a bit like the prisoners in The Great Escape shaking out tunnel dirt out of the bottom of their trousers in the exercise yard…).

This leads to the exciting idea that a call could go out to all registered moongolfers to come and deposit moondust in a particular area with a view to a full simulation taking place at some point in the future.

For example then, I’d like people to start dumping small deposits of moondust at the end of Peter Street, Soho, roughly here please (or better at the end of the alley near the two white paving stones), with a view to us having another go at simulating a moon golf hole on 13th December 2006 at 7pm.

If each moongolfer contributed just a handful of sand or dust or whatever, we could end up with quite a pile in a few weeks time and therefore achieve a much more accurate simulation of golf on the moon. Now all we have to consider is the low-gravity/weightlessness issue…