Back to Square 1: Going to SF

Looks like im going to have to go back to my original idea of virtual tourism and using the interent to explore a strange place. I have chosen San Fransisco as my place of choice for my virtual holiday. I chose SF because of lots of reasons. Te massive physical distance between SF and my actual location of London means i dont fel like im cheating at all, it also somewhere i have always wanted to go although never have. Having never been there is important because i wouldn't want any previous experiences to enter into my virtual experience. San Fransisco is famous for its great deal of history, culture and architecture and i want to see how well these aspects come across over the online mediums i will be using. Also being in the states and being a big city means it will likely have a large amount of webcams and a more comprehensive representation on Google street view. Also the predominantly English speaking nature of the US means reduces the chances i will stumble onto websites i cannot read.

Havving said all this it would also be a good idea to try out the same experiment somewhere more obscure to see how the online experience compares. However i feel like starting relatively simple and easy is the best way.

I wanted to find an online guide book to the City with walking tours. This seems like the most logical and tourist like way to start my journey (ignoring any idea of taking a virtual flight to cali) and make sure i actually see some of the stuff people would likely go to see on holiday. However no such website appears to exist and so it looks like im gonna have to buy a book.

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.