Mersea Circles


'Masaki Fujihata Masaki Fujihata / 'Takeshi Kawashima Takeshi Kawashima

Mersea Circles is a project to form collective memory with archived video images mapped into geographical space.

In the summer of the year 2003, a two day public event was organized at the small island of Mersea near Colchester, Essex. It is about a one and a half hour drive from London and is known for its oysters. Some 120 people participated in this event and several groups of them walked at the edge of the island with DV cameras and GPS to capture with position data their activities, talks, interviews, and images of what they saw. The project has two separate phases; one is an event for recording data in the real location, and the second phase is post-processing for showing in the gallery. After the event, whole data were post-processed in the studio to construct 3D cyber space. In this space, each video sequence is placed according to the position where the video was shot and is seen as a hanging picture in the middle of the line of GPS data. When the viewer/user moves toward the video frame, the video image will be played and moves according to the position data, which means the video frame itself as a screen for projection moves around.

A special aspect of the project Mersea Circles is the shape of the GPS line which extruded vertically according to the duration of time. Lower positions are the past, upper positions mean more recent than the past. And then the shape of the island forms a spiral from top to bottom. Currently there are 6 or 7 cycles. I hope the line will grow round and round in the future by the organizing of the continuous activity of data recorded at the same location.

Digital technology gives us an opportunity to use an external memory device which can store our activities as an image or sound with some other data as digital numbers which can be used for post-processing with mathematical functions. These numbers as a memory can be seen on the screen and can be used as a tag to remind us of what we did when we were there. This project is a challenge to build a moving image archive to form collective memory in cyber space.

Coast Digital is the first phase of the Coast project and commissioned and produced by Future Physical/Shinkansen and Firstsite for COAST, an Essex County Council Initiative.