The green line - Moorfields to Old Street

The line is intact at the Moorfields end, running parallel to the "no smoking beyond this point" outside the eye hospital. Further on, we noticed that it makes quite a hump along its length.

I discovered it in 2010 and have blogged about it several times, thinking to use it for an art project to fit in with "journey lines".

These latest photos don't record every inch of it, just some of the interesting textures, marks, juxtapositions, wear, accidents ... deletions ...

Day of delights

A series of lists has been helpful in recent days to untangle the various strands of Life and keep tabs on the important(?) things that need doing -

 At times of low motivation or energy, having the necessary tasks written down, the night before, is so helpful in getting them done first thing in the morning. But I must guard against turning on the computer because there's often an email than needs not just reading but responding to, and that can lead down unexpected paths and take lots of time.

Perhaps the day's list should state "no computer before 10am"?

One event was a business meeting at the studio, which involved a shared lunch -

That sorted, I was off to coffee with a friend, who mentioned the green line from Old Street to Moorgate - we hopped on a bus to go see it, and indeed some of it has been cleared away -

Unexpected things encountered while walking west ...

Street art on Old Street -

 Jolly stools in a Clerkenwell design store -

 The tranquility of Clerkenwell Green -

 A plaque hidden behind a bus stop on Kings Cross Road -

 There was time for a drink before the talk at the British Library -

After the talk, a chance to have a quick look at the exhibition (more on that later?) and to encounter the sounds and lights and "gosh what is this all about" of the world's largest Algorave held in a national library(!) -

Home quite soon to find that a secret plumber had replaced my annoying kitchen tap (thank you Tom) -

All in all, an interesting, productive, varied, enlightening, friendly, explorative, relaxed, surprising, delightful day.

The green line again

Some more photography along this line, somewhere between Old Street station and Moorfields Eye Hospital, at a point where water from a construction site had made a large puddle in the gutter, which some vehicles drove through, and some pedestrians got soaked as a result of the spray.

A bit of searching for the history of the green line reveals that it was painted by an artist named Warren Neidich. In an interview he said:

"since I began as a photography I tend to think of all mediums in terms of photography. For instance, in London I did this project called Blindsight in which I used the machine they paint streets with to paint a green line from the subway station to Moorfields Eye Hospital, so that partially sighted people could find their way there. It was a kind of Situationist project about nested perceptual realities within the larger framework of the urbanscape. In the end, however, the line became something that I photographed and that generated images. Beyond the photographs of the document of my performance I actually made images that recounted the very nature of what it is to be blind and described the limits of the camera as image machine. Could the camera act like touch and construct a total image from a multiplicity of possible focal points in time, in memory?"

In this video you can see him painting it -

Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as primary visual cortex or V1, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see.