ponder: Revisiting land of fire & ice (i)


Courtesy of Super-Collider


So, I'm heading out to Iceland in just under 2months which I super excited about and the group Im tagging along is also a 'super' prefixed group, none other than Super Collider. They describe themselves as:
'an independent agency based in London and Hong Kong. working in and with people from the creative industries, we explore science from a pop cultural standpoint – bringing its wonders to new audiences through projects, events, publications and curated products'
I've been wanting to join this yearly exodus to Iceland for some years now and wasn't able to go in the past few years due to college. This years group itself is a total mixture with folk from art, advertising, science and tech backgrounds and working in varied sectors which is great and look forward to meeting them all in September. 

Though the trip is fairly short - roughly 5 days, I wanted to use the opportunity to try and do some form of research/collation of 'data' and/or documenting the trip. I'm also likely to extend it for a bit for extra research!

My last trip to Iceland is partially documented on this blog here where I did the Gullkistan Art residency for 2 weeks - which is by far no no way enough time. Most of the others there were doing around 3 months which is much more like it! As this was some years ago and I wasn't really sure how to tackle an art residency as it was my first one. I was also torn as really wanted to also just get out there into the landscape and savour all the sensorial treats.

In terms of arty activities then, I did watercolours, a lot of photography (you just cannot not take photos there!) where asides my smartfone, I also had a Polaroid camera and restricted myself to 1 shot a day.  Photos from the smartfone were then compiled when I got back into a book which I had made through the self publishing platform - BLURB.

This trip is even less time so was wondering what the best things to take or what fast/easy things I could do whilst out there.

Whilst on a jaunt to the library a few months, rummaging around some books I found this number: 


The lil A5 hardback book pretty much does whats it says on the tin. 
It could be seen as a prescriptive manual almost and presents a short series of pointers to engage with the landscape and is  organised under chapters such as Sensing; Reasoning; Showing; Changing; Testing. Each pointer also has a few recommendations for further reading. Like the one book wasn't enough or me!

So for instance under Sensing there is a pointer 'Take time' - under which there is a short blurb about the why's behind this point and how to 'do' it as well as a quote. Ive never really followed a set of ideas/rules/lists  presented by a 3rd party as a form of art practice or alternatively engaging with something according to something predetermined.

So am going to try and follow these 50 steps in Iceland and document somehow the remnants of the steps. Due to the shortage of time there, I may have to do about 8-10 steps a day!

However as they say and quoted within the book:
"He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it in abundance' 
- Aldo Leopold


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