You Are the Journey: North Staffordshire

You Are the Journey (YAJ): North Staffordshire was a £10,000 Arts Council funded open-call commission in response to the environmental, social and economic changes taking place in North Staffordshire. The research builds on a former £10,000 Arts Council Art Plus Award to develop the Hythe to Southampton Ten Journey Ferry Ticket as a site for public art (continuing in circulation to present). The research considers how the conceptual structure of ticket production can be likened to the punch hole cards in a Jacquard loom; an ordering of many parts and actions is simulated by the ticketing processes while the term weaving is historically used as a metaphor for ideas about community.
Working with cell ‘phone text messages and thermo chromic inks and in partnership with bus conductors, ticket distributers and ticket manufactures, the final outcome resulted in over 700 000 interactive bus tickets released on the First Group fleet of buses leaving the Hanley and Adderley Green depot (2009). The project explores the way modest and disposable forms of public art can prompt reflection, or curiosity, on the part of the traveller, during, or after, a bus journey. Using old-fashioned ticketing processes, the project exploited tactile and recto-verso qualities by printing messages on the back of each ticket, which are only revealed upon rubbing its surface.
The investigation considers the function of transport tickets as a conceptually important way to produce meaning, employing the use of print on the thin paper of a transport ticket as support for the actual form, which is the social interaction.