Do Your Feet Hurt????

Over the last 54 weeks, I have walked more than 3 million steps.....

This made me start thinking about my shoes. Personally, I don't care for shoes. They feel unnatural to me. I feel like my feet are entombed and doomed to an eternity of solitary confinement when I wear them.

I love to feel the connection I have to the world around me through my feet. I can't explain it, but if I'm having a bad day, a few minutes of foot to earth contact makes it better (well, that and red lipstick - red lipstick makes any day a better day).

It turns out I have been into earthing since childhood. I grew up in a rural area where going outside barefoot was no big deal. My mom hated shoes as well, when I was growing up (and then she asks where I got my hippie ways from), so it wasn't forced upon us. If you wanted to go outside without your shoes on, hey no big deal. God made dirt, and dirt don't hurt... was a mantra with me and my brothers (this applied to getting dirty, covered in mud, eating food that dropped on the ground, etc. - we likely had insanely great digestive biomes).

I wanted to make something more personal than a map for my personal geography. I started thinking about the shoes I have and the wear and tear they endure day in and day out. How our shoes wear tell a lot about us.

Even though I don't like wearing shoes, I have connections to those shoes. I remember the shoes I was wearing when certain events happened (the orange ballet flats that became the "lucky" shoes during the 2010 World Series), my husband's graduation party/our engagement party that was the last time I wore my black patent pumps, the hiking boots I carried through Yosemite when I had such a reaction to bug bites I couldn't keep my shoes on...

The point being, our shoes are an extension of us in some ways. As much as I love being barefoot, I no longer live a life that allows that (living in SF is a dangerous place to barefoot).

I took photos of the soles of all of my shoes, mocs and slippers and am going to create an image using the soles.

My goal is to create an image that contains 3.3 million shoe soles (this probably will not happen before this is due, but I can try to get a move on it.

I will create brushes out of each sole so I can paint with the images. Eventually I want to print it at 4'x6' (there's a printing company in my building that may be able to make it a canvas for me).

Here is a random sampling from my shoes...

Personal Geographies.... Revisited.

Ugh.

I am completely drawing a blank on how I want to revise my personal geography (superimposing my weekend driving to go to Fort Bragg over Ireland).

I could do the whole virtual tour thing and make a video in Google Earth, but I don't feel that is what I should do.

I looked at my stats on my fitbit the other day and in the last year and 20 days, I have walked approximately 965 miles (I say approximately because there are a lot of times I forget to put it back on after charging and there was a 2 week period where it appeared to have died but then was fine). In all likelihood, I'm well over 1000 miles at this point.

That's a lot of walking.... and a lot of wear and tear on shoes (when I choose to wear shoes).

I'd be barefoot all the time if I had my choice, but living in San Francisco does not allow me that luxury. I'm barely comfortable wearing flip flops for fear of being contaminated. I also prefer minimalist footwear, so I have an insane fear of stepping on needles as they would pop right through a 2 mil footbed.

Being self-employed and a student, I don't have a lot of money and I can't remember when I last bought a new pair of shoes..... I have a surprising number of shoes for a person who can't stand them, but I haven't picked up a new pair since before I started tracking my walking.

This got me thinking about a physical piece I could make instead of a virtual tour... While I am very comfortable working with technology, it doesn't feel like a "personal geography" with the direction I was headed.

I think I am going to make a piece that uses the worn treads of my shoes to create an image or texture. I think I will use black paper and white powder (likely diotomaceous earth or corn starch since I have both of those on hand already) to make the marks.

I briefly considered paint, but then got to thinking about my soft soled mocs and that would totally ruin them (the other shoes could handle rinsing washable paint from them).

I haven't quite figured out the layout I will use, but I will try to capture the wear and tear of my feet and my shoes. Perhaps this will become and ongoing thing where I capture the wear and tear from new to the point of discard for shoes going forward.

Personal Geographies

Okay, I remember why I hate google earth SO much.

It never seems to work the "right" way even when you follow tutorials.

I had originally planned to use my yoga mat as my personal geography but struggled with how I was going to execute the idea.

I happened to go to Mendocino over the weekend and did yoga outside on the deck, which left dirt impressions on the underside of the mat. They were very faint, so I nixed that idea.

I did leave the GPS running as much as possible over the weekend. (my car broke down and I left it in the car overnight when it was at the garage) We went through a lot of places where signals were weak and we went through a lot of batteries, but here is an image of "most" of our driving between Thursday night and Monday night.

It was a lot of driving. This didn't capture the drive too my mom's house in Pollock Pines or parts of the drive throughout. This is the satellite capture...

I was curious as to the actual mileage and routing and put it into google maps as a multi leg trip....

About 950 all told.... Including the back and forth when my car broke down and going back and forth for that.. In fact, there were so many stops on this tour, Google Maps wouldn't let me add any more destinations.

I ended up exporting the tracks as svg files using gpsvisualizer and decided to see where that trip would have taken me elsewhere in the world.....

I decided on Ireland since both my husband and I are of Irish descent.

I used the svg to create a transparent PNG to place into Google Earth and as I was looking at it, I decided to see what I would actually see if I were there. That is the only cool thing about Google Earth. I basically got to take a tour of Ireland through the eyes of others.

I started thinking about what I would like to see and found a map of the Celtic High Crosses so I decided to see if any of it matched up. A few way points did.

I added points at places where the crosses come close to the traveled path and had inserted images in to the points. I can NEVER get the tour to pause and show an image. It just stops at the spot and moves on.

In fact, I hated this so much last time I used GE for a project, that I ended up using google maps and screencast o matic to make my video (which was great because I could do the voice over work later).

COnsidering the amount of time the GE takes to get a handle on, I am not certain as to "what" I am going to make as an art piece.

So it's called...... data bending....

I'm still playing with placing data into Audacity to create sounds.... And it's a thing. A thing called "data bending".

I'm still working out a standard setting to use, but have been getting interesting results when running filters...

Today I isolated the image (graph image of speed from my GPS ViewRanger experimentation) and created a transparent .gif in photoshop so I only had the line (no white background).

Original Data Image

.gif transparent image

video of image imported as mono sound at 8000Hz, 32 bit float.

I'll be honest with you, I have no background in sound/audio so much of this is jibberish to me, but I'm going to continue playing with this to see what happens.

ViewRanger App - Another look

I signed in to viewranger in order to have off phone access to my mapping.

What I learned is that viewranger does not immediately make your tracks available on the web, you have to "share" the tracks in order to view them. This involved going to view your tracks on the app, using the menu on the right and selecting "share".

This will ultimately upload your tracks to the web version.

When viewing your tracks, it not only shows you where you have been, but the altitude of that trip, speed and distance in a separate graph.

This was my trip to campus last week. I took a slight detour and got off at stonestown to get some iced tea and walked the rest of the way.

I never really thought about the fact that this is a shorter trip distance wise than driving but it can take like 3x longer than driving (depending on how you hit traffic on the highway).

The only disadvantage to using apps like this is that I forget to turn my gps on..... and it kills your phone's battery.

I've been playing with the standalone gps unit Paula loaned out and found that it's hard to get a good read in SOMA. When we used them over at SFSU, I don't think I lost satellite contact, but couldn't keep a read here. My neighborhood's buildings aren't even that tall.

Apps that Map(p)

I have to say this was a bit harder than I thought....

There are a ton of apps that do basically the same thing and I don't have a ton of storage space on my phone (the existing apps are my work apps).

The fitbit app (you need a fitbit to work with it) is sort of a mapping tool, as it maps your activity (see my exercise one post to see an example) in a graph to visualize how active you are. Unfortunately, I have a fitbit, but my phone is not compatible with the app (my previous phone was), so I rely upon using the fitbit desktop to sync my data.

January 26, 2015 Daily Activity Graph - Fitbit

Unfortunately a lot of mapping apps require you to sign up for an account. I get tired of being forced to sign up (and provide my data), so that eliminated a lot of the apps I looked at (like map my walk, map my ride, map my run, etc.). I used to use a lot of these apps years ago when they didn't require any form of sign up. They basically use your phone's gps data to keep maps of where you've been and the duration of your "trip". 

I no longer keep my gps enabled at all times (or really even remember to turn it on unless I'm using navigation, which is rare), so not a lot of use to me there. 

The 3rd I tried was Viewranger. When I opened it up, it did give me the option to check it out without signing up.... That was a plus. ... The initial location was really accurate. When I turned my GPS on, it then placed me in the last place I used GPS (about an hour away in Brentwood). After a few minutes, it found me back in SF and was only one house off from my actual location. 

I set it to record my track on the way to school so we will see what happens. 

Exercise 1 - A Year in Steps (audio file)

I've been wearing my fitbit tracker for almost a year (there have been some times where I go to charge it and forget to put it back on and there was a week or two it seemed to stop working) and was looking at the data from it.

I decided to take a screen clipping of the last year and see if I could map that data into an audio file... Guess what, I did it.

I started by reviewing my data in the fitbit dashboard and took a screen clipping using Microsoft oneNote (if you aren't using this you should be).

I took the image into Illustrator and used stars to map the points of each week.

I did a couple of tests to see what would work better for the audio translation and the star points worked better than the graph itself.