HOY, HERE AND THERE

Hoy, Here & There (or, where you are)

alistair peebles

Hoy, Here & There (or, where you are) Hoy, Here & There (Or, Where You Are) gathers together a number of linked projects, collections and interests of mine. The main element is a series of photographs of Hoy, begun in 2008 and taken from various viewpoints: mostly in Orkney, but also in Caithness, and from the sea and air.

It is largely a matter of chance where and when the Hoy photographs were taken, and what they show – apart from Hoy, of course – however they do all share the same compositional pattern. The valley between the Ward Hill and the Cuilags is in the horizontal centre of each frame, and the vertical centre is approximately at sea level. The selection here from several hundred is again more or less at random.

This is a first, trial attempt at combining these images and other material. Text and images not otherwise acknowledged are by Alistair Peebles. All material is the copyright ot the author or authors and may not be reproduced. Thanks to all who have supplied permissions. For futher information, please write to info@braeprojects.com.

Hoy Labels, Alec Finlay, 2011

Hoy’s twin hills the heart’s atriums – ventricles deep in the sea

Hoy, Alison Flett, 2011

Diagram showing the location of Robert Rendall’s house in Birsay, 2008

Marker stones on the boundary of Harray and Firth, 1990

Dunter (Eider duck) nest, Copinsay, 1991

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

WELCOME TO ORKNEY

Westray, 2010

Gomringer on Hoy

luz

light

light

luz luz

light light

light light

mar

sea

sea

mar mar

sea sea

sea sea

hoy

day

Hoy

hoy hoy

day day

Hoy Hoy

The original text of the first part of Eugen Gomringer’s trilogia with two translations, one Orcadian, by Harry Gilonis, 1995

Diagram showing some places of interest in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, 2010

“If/Then: A Walkthrough Fiction” “If/Then” is a multimedia piece in the form of an architectural walkthrough. Typically, a walkthrough is a navigable three-dimensional virtual space designed to showcase a building or structure’s particular set of features and amenities. “If/Then” plays on the trope of the walkthrough by replacing the guided tour with a series of characters and narratives culminating, in the final version of the project, with a layered story space in which users will (via avatars) be present as agents in the unfolding narratives underway in the rooms they explore. “If/Then,” then, is planned as a project in three phases. In the first I will undertake scripting, modelling, rendering and presentation of two virtual spaces. Phases two and three involve the addition of a dedicated MOO space (electronic virtual environment) and a Wiki-based open-source narrative interface.

“If/Then” takes place in several virtual spaces based on real buildings and peopled with characters and narratives which will blend “found” archival testimony and fiction. The reader/user will begin with an orthodox walkthrough or guided tour of the space; for instance, a World War Two mental hospital, by an unnamed narrator employing familiar, second-person address. As the “tour” develops the reader/user will be introduced to a number of patients resident in the institution and begin to connect their particular stories to the larger history of the institution and well beyond. The logic is one of narrative repetition and proliferation, with each story strand hatching another. Characters speak, drift away, and return, moving farther and farther from the original walkthrough and opening up the narrative as a structured but dynamic space in which the reader/user plays an active, even defining role. Further experiencing these spaces will involve navigating with keyboard and mouse and clicking on various embedded objects (a chair, a window, a book) which will trigger narrative segments in the form of Flash animations or QuickTime movies. Initially, navigation of the space and the nested narratives will be linear; the reader/user will follow a specific story route.

With the addition of more sophisticated coding the reader/user will be able to move between rooms and exert greater control over the narrative. In this way, “If/Then” will become a fully interactive fiction, one of the first of its kind anywhere and perhaps the only one in which the writing – its quality, invention and range – will be the primary engine of the work.

The second phase of “If/Then” involves blending rendered spaces with an open-source game engine/library (Unity or the Irrlicht Engine are possibilities) in order to make the spaces fully navigable and, eventually, to open them up for outside collaboration. The third phase comprises developing these as online MOO spaces and, eventually, producing architectural models for the purposes of a gallery installation. Antecedents here include Janet Cardiff ’s “walking tours” of Whitechapel and other locales, in which the listener both follows the guide’s explicit instructions and joins her in a wayward, richly personal journey. Thus, the walkthrough allows for a highly-personalized readerly experience, one that is dense in visual and (in the case of “If/Then”) auditory data, permitting the kind of textual immersion that has in my view largely escaped internet fictions up to this point. Many accounts of fictional authorship and consumption rely in the main on the model of author-text-reader and have perhaps not fully engaged with the possibilities of new media to complicate and extend each position in this model: multiple authorship, dynamic text, participatory reader. To this end, the final phase of this project will include monitoring (via keystroke and captured video) of the reader as s/he navigates the fictional world.

S, University of Winnipeg, Canada, 2009

Birsay, 1991

Pentland Skerries, 1991

Diagram showing some places of interest around the M60, 2008

Corrigall peat bank transect & Dale of Corrigall diagram, Dan Lee, 2010

Names found along a system of bogs, ditches, burns and lochs in Orkney’s West Mainland; postcard 1992, revised 2008 (unpublished)

Some street names in Stromness, from signs painted by Alistair Isle, c. 1990; postcard, 2008

Thomas A Clark with Alistair Peebles and Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology, Ha’Breck Excavation, Wyre, 2009

Instructions for the Minor / Major Disappearing Act, c.1970