Sprint3_Week6#pre-fieldtrip research and document the experience

Learn from Pre-fieldtrip research

By watching the video of Williams, L. “Sugar, ships and science: The City Observatory and Caribbean Commerce” (2020). [Online} Collective, I learnt the role of the city observatory in shipping to and from Leith. The City Observatory site also has a long history as a crucial provider of accurate time to the city of Edinburgh and the Port of Leith. Historically observations made from the City Observatory on Calton Hill, have re-shaped how we view and relate to the world around us. It is where astronomers observed and calculated accurate time, aiding ships docked in Leith to navigate and connecting Edinburgh to the world.

Document our experience

After reading and watching the past and present of the site, I found that the city observatory, the whole Carlton Hill are more like witnesses. The topographic advantage of Carlton Hill does not exist because of the shaping of human beings. The city observatory we built is just “dependent” on its objective existence. This also makes me think about “inhabit”. As described in the video of Critical Modes of Listening, we are in a relationship. Of course, we can speculate about the relationship, but we cannot really tell what the relationship is.

There’s also an interesting topic about creating citizen space through indigenous soundscapes. We should decentralize and maintain a sense of humility towards non human cross species existence. Human beings are always used to interfering in the world where human beings exist. Therefore, when we were climbing the mountain, I suddenly had an idea: we and Carlton Mountain are particles in the universe in essence, only symbiotic as independent individuals, rather than the relationship between colonization and colonization, domination and domination. So when we feel Carlton Mountain, it also feels us. I think of Basho and Carlton Mountain as “flattening”. To put it another way, you can imagine Basho and Carlton Mountain as two centers. The process of trip is the process of two centers gradually approaching, overlapping, and then moving away from each other. In this process, we focus on listening. Therefore, our record of trip is a process of sound becoming stronger and weaker. When we approach Carlton Mountain as the center of a circle, we receive the sound of the mountain becoming stronger and stronger: wind, leaves, grass rustling, birds chirping, etc. The role of people in the mountain becomes negligible; This makes us start to think that, as the center of the circle, Carlton Mountain receives our footsteps, conversation, clothes rubbing, electronic communication equipment, etc. in the process of going up the mountain, which is also a growing process. These two synchronous processes decrease with us going down the mountain. Our trip records are enriched by our thinking and observation of the senses after the decentralization and decolonization of the subject.