Game Over

Just checked bin HQ again and i was right to be worried about the last development. The Blog has not been updated since the television crew left. So thats the end o that, back tut drawing board.

Problem

After a recent visit of the BinCam blog, to begin trying to actually locate the bin, i have discovered that the blogger himself has now proved successful in his mision of raising awareness of the badly kept bin issue and the local council have arranged an extra mid week collection and that itv have even done a story on the whole thing. This is very annoying as it takes an awful lot of the intrigue out of my idea. Plus i will simply be unnecessarily adding to a problem that doesn't really exist anymore.


http://bincam.blogspot.com/2011/10/bin-emptied-friday-19th-october.html

http://bincam.blogspot.com/2011/10/binhq-on-itv-daybreak.html

pissed off, fuckin ITV

1st panel

This is the first pannel in the series, painted onto a large sheet of scrap cardboard to stay in keeping with the idea of waste and so it will not stand out too prominently against all the other rubbish around the bin.

Sketches

these are the rough sketches for the various different panels of the mourning coffee madness/bin hero story.

I chose to break the story into 5 panels, one for every working day of the week, again to reference to regular style of publishing associated with the newspaper business. 

Searchin for Subject Matter

I have looked trough all the current archive posts on the BinCam blog and decided on the most appropriate one to act as subject matter for my serialised cartoon.

in this post a man is seen borrowing a shovel from a worker across the street and using it to scoop all the crap, including a bag of nappies his parter previously dumped, off the pavement and put it in the bin. the worker eventually comes to help with a brush.

http://bincam.blogspot.com/2011/09/bin-hero.html

This man is refereed to on the blog as "bin hero" for his actions to clean up the area surrounding the bin. I like the bin hero idea because its very in keeping with the comic idea i had and also means i might be able to end the piece with a positive message which again reflects the sentiment of the blog.

4 days later there is another bin hero incident in which a man clears the top on te bin of an accumulation of discarded coffe cups and places them in the bin.

http://bincam.blogspot.com/2011/09/morning-coffee-nightmare.html

although this incident is not as dramatic as the previous bin hero incident i think it lends itself better to the serialized narrative format i want to accomplish. Especially as all three coffe cups were left within around 2 hours prior to heros arrival.

Idea

After thinking about how to utalize the west hampstead BinCam for use in this project I have had the idea using the webcam to indirectly publish my work onto the interent. Seeing as how the bin cam was set up to highlight the issue of fly tipping at the site of the bin and the failure of the counsil to dispose of such waste I feel that i can play into this idea by using the site to dispose of large scale pieces of work. The idea being that by choosing this bin to dispose of pieces of work they will in adversely wind up online and therefore accessible to the whole world.

To further play on the interactive nature of the situation i think it would a good idea to produce work which illustrates the themes pressent on the blog. I think it would be a good idea to take one of the incidents archived on the blog and to produce a large scale illustration it to be left on the bin. I have also had the idea of producing a series of pieces with a narrative element running through them to fully illustrate one of the blogged incidents. This would mean i could leave a new piece every day in a similar fashion to how some papers and magazines publish serialised cartoons and further emphasizing the idea of using this particular bin as a publishing outlet for my work.

Bin Cam

After spending some time following the build up to this weekends protests, specifically in birmingham, I found a group of people discussing using existing city webcams to get around the main stream media censorship of the protests. Apparently Brum is the most webcam covered city in the uk but after scouring google maps for webcams i then turned my attention to London and came across this blog.

http://bincam.blogspot.com/

The blog contains a live video feed of a bin in west hampstead, and was created by a man who lives in a flat overlooking the bin. He claims it is the worst kept bin in london on account of how rarely it is emptied, the councils regulations on clearing the bin the irresponsibility of the people using it to dispose of their waste. He has set up the webcam as a tool to make a point of the issue both to the council and the community aswell as shaming those who use the spot for fly tipping.

The blog also contains posts which document past incidents and act as an archive of bin related events since the camera was installed. The videos contained in these posts are uploaded at full frame rate as oppose to the live feed which only updates once every minute and are accompanied by the bloggers thoughts on the incident. Most archive posts refer to incidents of people abusing and misusing the bin/space around it although there are also quite a lot of posts just showing unusual events caught on camera that have nothing to do with the bin other than they take place next to it.

I think this webcam could be a useful tool for this project if i can think of a way to utilize it for my own needs. The main advantages being it is located just a few tube stops from where I live and the sheer amount of attention the blogger gives to even the smallest incident means it would not be hard to feature myself/my work in his blog.

Virtual Tourism

For this project i am going to be looking at the idea of virtual tourism, using features of the internet to simulate some the experience of going on holiday without even leaving my room. I will mostly be looking at features of google maps or more specifically google street view to explore new places as well as webcams give real time and more genuine sense of what a place is really like. I want to see how much of sense of place i can gather from the online representations of somewhere and see how useful these tools are for exploring the world from an armchair.