As a continuation of my Personal Statement, here is a suggestion for the kind of project that I would be interested in producing. This is a rough draft, and requires refining (and may not be the project I work on in the end), but I think it gives a framework for the direction of my practice.

Aim: To aggregate a city's life (key identifying parts of the city) into a single point without intervention beyond initial set-up. The single point would thus become a representation of the city at any given point in time. The piece is driven by concepts of unity and diversity, and of community.

Method: A number of sensors located around the city connected to a central hub via mobile phone technology and/or WIFI (perhaps using a mesh network). As I envisage it, the sensors would be of varying types:- traffic, noise, air quality, temperature, weather, light, video, still images, and so on. The data returned by these would be aggregated into an installation piece, which could, for example, be represented as a grid of wooden pillars, where the height was based on the data for that sector.

Obviously the form of the aggregator representation may change, perhaps it might be a physical model of the city, with sections rising and falling. Maybe it would use a piece of fabric, stretched to different points that rise and fall, allowing images to be projected on the stretched fabric. The piece could be horizontal or vertical. Also the sensors may be set up to sample all of the aforementioned data, or perhaps just a single type. If all, then there could be different aggregators for different data, or a single aggregator with multiple forms of representation? Also perhaps the sensors could actually feed back either the aggregated data, or data from another part of the city, in some way (reinforcing the notion of unity and diversity within the city community).

The key principles in a piece like this are the fact that it is concept driven - it is a representation of unity and diversity in the city community, and the physicality of the representation. Clearly the representation would be more easily done on-screen, but this would deny one of the fundamental characteristics of a city; it's physical presence.

Comments welcome!!