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B

Some thoughts about Bradford

Week Two- Bradford

My head is currently mirroring the pages of flipchart paper that are taped up around the small dressing room we are working in. These are full of things we have learnt, semi formed ideas, histories and geographies of Bradford, and ideas or tricks we would like to implement.

Polaroid pictures that are both a key, and a light switch, and perhaps a voice that can guide you. Ghosts pleading for clemency, woolsacks providing protection, tongueless boars, the black plague, mythical weavers, photographic tricks, duping fairies, and perhaps even satanic halls with links to Jack the Ripper. And wool. Lots and lots of wool.

In my head all of the ideas and snippets of nformation dangle on the ends of long lengths of wool, they are tangled, twisted and look like a bowl of spaghetti. In my head the wool is red, but it probably won’t be.

In order to clear our heads a little, get a bit of perspective and most importantly have a closer look at the city we are trying to create an adventure for, we decided to have an afternoon stroll around Bradford. Bradford is not a city to stroll around, it’s one to look at despondingly and sigh and think in the words of George Best’s Bellboy “where did it all go wrong. Where did it all gone wrong?”

Normally I have a sense that by travelling forward in time we have progressed. Apart from the occasional misty eyed reverence to Halycon days and an England that only ever existed adorned on biscuit tins, I think it is generally agreed that at the beginning of the millennium we have advanced. We are dying older, surviving more diseases and we can now watch tall blue aliens in 3D*.

A walk through Bradford dispels all of this. Sitting in the still very beautiful Wool Exchange in the centre of Bradford, which is now an impressive Waterstones, I flick through a small book of pictures of Bradford at the turn of the century, (is it still referred to as the turn of the century, am not sure?). Compared to how Bradford looks now the difference is incredible. I imagine a resident of Bradford, a Bradfordian if you will, strapping themselves into a Jules Verne inspired spaceship and blasting off into space. “Oh Bugger” they cry as there antiquated ship crash lands on a strange planet. A land of strange people wearing brightly coloured attire wandering through a frightening post apocalyptic land. Grey faced aliens pass by through streets upon streets of boarded up buildings. Little is for sale and it would appear as if two meteorites have smashed into the city, pock marking the landscape. Cranes and diggers stand abandoned their workers fleeing from the terrible creatures that must have emerged from the night and created this devastation. But life will out, trees are growing through once handsome buildings that still stand defiant against this backdrop of rubble and misery. It is at this point that our Victorian astronaut turns the corner and looks up and sees standing as it always has in the middle of this alien landscape his beloved Gothic and Sweepingly impressive town hall. It is now that just like Charlton Heston he falls to his knees and cries out in despair “Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. [screaming]You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Except of course it hasn’t been blown up, what happened to Bradford is unclear, from what I gather it is death by a thousand cuts. Certainly Bradford 1890 looks far far more opulent than Bradford 2012. The description above is not exaggerated, and I have no desire to be cruel about my home town, however walking through Bradford is a disheartening experience. A day later I had to visit Leeds and the comparison makes it even more depressing. Bradford was already pretty dilapidated before the recession hit, and has long been a city of pound shops and rubble. About 4 or 5 years ago some consultants were brought in and came up with a radical plan to regenerate Bradford, this was in essence to remove all the hideous post war buildings and replace them with parkland. They realised that a large majority of property was standing abandoned and that rather than invest in new buildings and infrastructure they would be best served by repopulating the impressive architecture it does own and losing the rest. Whether this ingenious plan was ever taken seriously I don’t know, what did happen was half of the city was bulldozed to make way for a spanking new shopping centre which five years later remains an abandoned building site which no one has any intention of rectifying. Attentions have now been turned to the area surrounding the town hall, which has also been bulldozed with the plan to turn it into a lake that I have been informed can also transform into a mirrored skating ring or something akin.  Around this site are posters designed by the children of local schools which all appear to use the language of life after a bereavement or tragedy, promoting this new council initiative. Sprawled between these two sites are streets gasping there last breadths and at 4.45pm on a week day the city seemed to have already shut up shop for the day/year.

10 ft above eye level there is another city. And what a city, an ornate, beautifully crafted metropolis, gargoyles, statues and balconies preside over the broken concrete arteries of the town below. Street after street contains architectural monuments to a bygone age when the town was being provided for from the hills and mills that surround it. The landscape and the city were entwined, one sustained the other. Currently the city now looks more like a boil on the shoulder of a colossus that can’t shake it off, and each time it is pierced it only serves to irritate at the centre.  As we wandered the streets and I thunked these thoughts I Imagined myself charged with the city’s revival, and what I would do both romantically and constructively to resurrect it.

Some all or all of the following

1. Stick to the original plan and pull down all the postwar atrocities and replace them with parks and romantic meeting places.
2. As Leeds has done with the Victorian Quarter and Medieval Towns on the Continent have done, enforce a shop front guideline that must be adhered to so that the outlets below reflect the buildings they occupy.
3. Offer all of the empty city centre spaces as free studio space on 6 monthly leases to artists, giving priority to filmmakers to reflect the cities new cultural status as UNESCO city of film. As has been proved in the past, once the artists move in they bring about a natural regeneration to an area.
4. If in doubt perhaps build a perimeter and drown the city to just below first floor, and create a walled city of canals and gothic buildings with balconies providing drop off points for the cities watermen and women. Maybe grow mussels in its water.

Whether this has helped clarify my thoughts on the piece we would like to make I am unsure, however it has made me reacquaint myself with a city I thought I knew, that  has deteriorated more than I imagined,  which bearing in mind what is on offer when you turn your eyes skyward is a great shame.

*a wander round the National Media Museum informs me that we have been able to see them in 3D for over 100 years.

Rich

Google Map of hour route draft 1

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?hl=en&safe=active&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=215710664054174437851.0004a14499236b313d0dd&ll=53.792235,-1.75159&spn=0.006363,0.019205&z=16

RFID for tomorrow and a cat not helping

In the foreground is an example of our basic RFID rig, powered by an arduino and an ID12 module, just got it all powered up and they re very quick and powerful.

Will post demos soon of it in action. Next step is tag recognition, and sending data across a city wide network.

In the background is Claude, he isn t helping. At all.

B

Some maps and bits from the archives

Some photos on my phone from a early visit to the Bradord Archives, nice 300 year old maps and the beginning of some trails of hidden histories…
B

Pictures from nmm

games/history

over a month we’ve been working with a history class in a secondary school teaching the pupils game design and working with them to produce a series of games designed to help them explore specific historical events within their syllabus.  In a preliminary meeting i mentioned to the history teacher the example of Brenda Braithwaite’s Train part of her ‘the mechanic is the message’ series, and fired up by this it was sort of decided that the period in question we were going to explore was going to be the rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and the persecution of the Jews.  Intense.  Perfect in terms of what i feel the potential of game design in an educational context can achieve.

Five games, all looking at different (or at least in different ways) aspects of a horrific period of history.  I have gone on at length in older posts about notions of being able to use games a vehicle to understand and recount difficult narratives.  i have looked a lot at representations of contemporary warfare but feel like it can be extended above and beyond, in a manner far less elegant that Brenda Braitwaite’s work in the link above the aim of the whole exercise was to create a series of games that allow the kids a chance to learn not just by ultimately playing but also making, having to consider perspectives on events, causes and consequence and variables and timelines.

All of the processes for each team have been narratively led, using specific events that they have covered or that they are finding out about as starting points, and the mechanics and forms have come out of that really,

meaning first – nuts and bolts later.  Which i think is appropriate for both the imposed theme of the games and the outcomes, which in this case is creating a series of experiences.

An experiential take on design has been where i have found myself drawn to more and more recently especially in view of the ever encroaching rise of psychologically driven game design.  This is possible because of the route i have taken to game making as part of my practice (via theatre and installation theatre) or maybe just because i think of games in terms of participation and individual tactile interactions.  Either way the five games i’m polishing up over the next few days  fall into four key categories;

 

- a resource management game, players progress along a track drawn in a large courtyard, progressing through time rather than space.  They play a family and at the beginning of the game are allocated a series of large cardboard boxes which have images pasted onto them representing their physical possessions and have to physically move these boxes with them along the track, with time relevant events and a dice roll system deciding what they can and can’t bring with them, affecting their strength and wether they eventually have enough to continue as a group or if some of the players are gradually unable to continue as well, as each stop on the track cripples them more and more.

- a CYOA style click through adventure looking at the Warsaw Uprising

- a ‘re-skinned’ very expanded take on Werewolf looking at identity in the early stages of the Jewish persecution.

- a QR driven adventure similar to a CYOA but with a series of variables based on two real attempted escapes from Warsaw, one resulting in an escape to Denmark the other capture and the life after, initially designed as a trail around the school’s ground is perhaps more sedentary with the codes as cards that can be scanned .

- a card driven digital board game, looking at the full expanse of the war trying to escape across Europe as borders shift around you, playing real life event cards and trying to survive the conflict.  The design is influenced by Labyrinth a game of speculative history about the War on Terror

Interestingly most official Holocaust memorial organizations official stance on attempts to simulate the Shoa is that they do not endorse or recognize them as a way in which to teach about the holocaust, and a quick internet search will  reveal a bunch of terrible attempts to ‘role play’ with kids that have backfired.  i think any notion of role play and immersive simulation is redundant within a context like this, there is nothing to be learnt by ‘experiencing what it was like’ because it is simply impossible to fully imagine the sheer horror.  However through an interactive medium such as games the students can create experiences where they have to make a series of decisions and take a conscious participatory role in the unfolding of a narrative or meta-historical-narrative which permits them a new engagement with the subject matter.  Even if the games are almost ‘un-winable’ in a traditional sense and the balance in the games are often so heavily skewed, all game play considerations must serve the theme, often subverting the expectation of the game model, frustrating or unpleasant to play.

Game-undesign?