Ideas on Travel / Ideas on Sight Seeing
Discotheque, Nottingham
2006
As part of 'NAN-NANA' - an artists' group networking event scheduled to coincide with Nottingham's hosting of the 'British Art Show 6' and the city's alternative art event 'Sideshow' – the artists collective Discotheque undertook a geo-conceptual mapping project of Nottingham. The base for this project was a suitcase containing the apparatus required for a series of city-wide experimental interventions and dialogues, which utilised both public spaces and Sideshow participating galleries. The apparatus inside this suitcase were created by a number of artists.
For this project Emma Smith produced the following work:
Experiment
Smith spent an intensive day interviewing inhabitants of London on the street in order to explore their levels of awareness and knowledge of Nottingham. Smith asked passers by to mark where they thought Nottingham was on a map of the UK, to suggest the best way of getting there and a recommended sight to see on arrival. From this Smith produced a travel guide: Ideas on Travel, detailing the interviewees’ advice.
Discotheque mappers were then given the cards and invited to act upon them in order to test their validity, endeavoring to travel to Nottingham via the routes advised (no matter how illogical), and to visit the attractions suggested, recording their successes and failures in the process.
Traveling on an in-direct route Discotheque arrived in Nottingham and attempted to find the listed attractions. Their attempts, successes and failures were recorded in a second guide book; Ideas on Sight Seeing.
