Coded Secrets

Second Order Visitor’s Guide to London

Second Order Visitor’s Guide to London (2024)

by Inge Hinterwaldner / COSE

Second Order Visitor’s Guide to London (2024) is a physical, built multi-modal stratigraphic object with 8 removable layers. It is supposed to map the equally multi-layered network of Visitor’s Guide to London (1995), a personal journey the British artist Heath Bunting offers online since the mid-1990s. A print of the whole map provides an overview and a combination of three layers. The three-dimensional model allows superposing several more semantic dimensions of the artwork. In the analysis, both is needed: the distant view and the close view. Eight panes can be arranged in the order the user finds useful to find out about correlations. The descriptions of the panes reveal our mapping strategies of the artwork’s structure as well as more interpretative layers.

Photos by Christoph Engel, KIT and Inge Hinterwaldner.

Zooming out

  • street view: This view shows photos taken by Heath Bunting in London in the 1990s. The artist linked them with clickable buttons for cardinal directions placed within the images: north, northwest, west, southwest, south, southeast, east, and northeast. Using these buttons will change the location, remaining in the same street view level. In the reconstruction, the direct reachability between two locations is indicated by a single arrow, always adhering to the direction shown on the button. As a consequence, distances between the photos in the resulting graph are distorted. The artist has provided a map too; see the site plan.
  • text messages: When starting the work Visitor’s Guide to London, front.html is the entry point for the user. From there one can click on “A” in order to enter the realm of text messages. They are single expressions or two words, sometimes augmented with special characters (!, ++) or numbers (1, 2). They are always framed by arrow signs (<>) harboring links. The text messages form chains of associations. The reconstruction uses different colours for the links: red for links to the street view, umbra for links to the chalk tags, and shades of purple for the links within the text messages.
  • chalk tags: Some photos of the street view give (non-obvious) visual cues pointing to a realm of symbolic messaging. These are images showing chalk tags resembling contemporary street art interventions by Bunting. They serve as pictorial connotations for certain street views or text messages and evoke contexts and topics. The reconstruction uses different colours for links: red for links to the street view, purple for links to the text messages, and umbra for links within the chalk tags. Arrows shown point from certain regions within a chalk tag image to certain (other parts of) chalk tags, street view images, or text messages.
  • site plan: At certain locations in the street view, and through front.html, the user can dive into a diagrammatic site plan provided by the artist. There are nine partial maps in total. The reconstruction fuses them. While there are only four entry points to this built-in overview (indicated by blue lines), all locations on a partial map have active links pointing back to the street view. A targeted navigation becomes possible. The site plan has considerable similarity with the street view. To disambiguate names shown on the nine partial maps with respect to file names of photos, blue identifiers are added in the reconstruction.
  • semantic fields: The semantic fields below are identified in the street view analysis. They are highlighted here using a colour schema where lighter tones reflect less evidence. They are: artist’s private surrounding, IRA bombings / attempts, waterways, street violence, art institutions / culture, secret service facilities, skip raider culture, subways / ground transportation, Londinium – Roman city.
  • reenactment: In April 2023, Inge Hinterwaldner and Daniela Hönigsberg explored the British capital (mainly walking) following Bunting’s Visitor’s Guide to London. Equipped with the artist’s map, and employing further digital and analogue means including Google Street View, it was possible to retrieve a good portion of the locations. Some matches are more speculative than others as some city regions underwent considerable development. The reenactment is depicted with documentary photos trying to mimic the street views taken about 30 years earlier. They are put next to the originals to facilitate comparisons.
  • geographical map: The photos produced during the reenactment were geo-tagged and mapped with QGIS into OpenStreetMap. The locations of such reenactment photos are here indicated with pink dots. Lines are connecting them to the correlated pictures (which are placed next to the historic street view). This reconstruction shows how the locations the artist had chosen for his Guide are distributed in terms of geography. When the relation between the reenactment and the original picture was not considered a perfect match, a blurred area around the pink dot indicates the level of precision. The larger that area, the lower the confidence.

Zooming in

  • close up: This plate presents a detail of the mapping of Visitor’s Guide to London, combining the three levels of street view, graffiti tags, and text messages. While the street view is ordered along the rigid logic of the cardinal points, the other levels float more flexibly, mainly seeking to avoid optical overlapping. All fields are accompanied by the file name the artist gave them. The colours of the arrows indicate to which level the respective link is leading. Some arrows start from the center of the images, thus indicating where the sensitive spot was found. More about it in link structure.
  • link structure: As with the colouring of the arrows-as-links, the levels got an arbitrary colour attributed: red for links to the street view, umbra for links to the graffiti tags, and shades of purple for the text messages. The reconstruction shows rectangles that represent the click-sensitive areas. Their colours indicate to which level this link leads. It becomes obvious that the cardinal point indications are always red and thus leading to the street view. However, there are further specific details (invented traffic signs, iconic objects, emphasised planes, graffitis) in the photos that secretly contain portals to another realm.

The visitor to this model can choose and combine different layers of information to find out about correlations or the lack thereof. Several more interpretative layers could be added, the structure is meant to be open-ended.

Material: Lightbox 70 x 50 x 10 cm, customised Plexiglas construction, 8 printed Plexiglas panes.

On display:

Acknowledgement:

_The Plexiglas construction was built by Jürg Abegg, Zurich.

_The prints were done with Sauter Copy, Zurich.

_Many thanks to Collegium Helveticum for their support of this project.