School’s (Not Quite) Out for Summer 2015
art.park.data
24 Sep to 19 Oct 2015
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
Westfield John Lewis entrance
Directions and Map
Artist Stefanie Posavec has created art.park.data for the East London Canvas, a 32.5m long data visualisation, drawing from data collected by children taking part in School’s (Not Quite) Out for Summer.
The children became ‘data explorers’ in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, collecting measurable information, or data, with creative technologists Codasign.
Using Raspeberry Pis (credit card sized computers) fitted with special sensor HATs, they gathered the data and then explored how it would be possible to present it in a pictorial or graphical format.
Schools
Bow School, Tower Hamlets
Brookfield House School, Waltham Forest
East London Science School, Tower Hamlets
Eastlea Community School, Newham
Stoke Newington School, Hackney
The City Academy, Hackney
Art.park.data was commissioned for School’s (Not Quite) Out for Summer, the annual programme created and delivered by SPACE for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Summer School, in partnership with Foundation for FutureLondon, the new charity created to help realise the potential of Olympicopolis and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
First set up in 2013, the programme engages up to 300 children with artists and technologists, and takes place in the Park and at SPACE’s White Building in Hackney Wick.
Queen Elizabeth Park Summer School is an educational initiative that uses the Park to provide an inspiring, fun and creative learning environment for east London children from the boroughs of Waltham Forest, Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.
Taking place during the summer holidays, the project focuses on children transitioning from Year 6 to Year 7 and helps prepare them for starting at their new secondary schools in September. Children’s holiday learning is enriched, and they gain new skills, developing their talents and expanding their horizons.
This year the Summer School expanded to include performance, with Random Dance delivering contemporary dance activities alongside SPACE’s art & technology programme.
East London Canvas is commissioned by Lendlease and LCR and is delivered by Foundation for FutureLondon.
Fiona Fieber, SPACE Head of Learning
fifi@spacestudios.org.uk
‘Collecting moments, not things’
Stefanie Posavec
When playing outside in a park, children often pick up stones, shells, insects, and flowers to take home with them, sometimes adding to a larger collection. While it’s usually younger children who create natural collections of found objects, this scavenging habit is one that many people hold onto even as adults, as they wander through the outdoors.
The children in the Summer School did a similar type of collecting in the Park except they approached it using technology. In today’s world, we collect data and leave nature untouched.
art.park.data functions as a collection of these moments, where the data becomes a souvenir of the children’s experience in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
It explores ways of ‘recreating’ the Park landscape from the data the children collected, alluding visually to the slightly imperfect aspect of this task: while data can provide insight, it doesn’t fully illustrate the emotional experience of being outdoors in a park. Instead, we make guesses and try to re-create it as best we can, but the outcome will be diffuse, blurred, and hazy.
