Noticing the Ignored

In the early stages of my MA, we were often encouraged to go out into our neighbourhood to take inspiration for work. One particular task was to go out and seek out what others might miss in everyday life, acknowledge the seemingly mundane and to ultimately, notice the ignored.

I found myself in Abdoun in Amman, walking down Ismaelia Street – a mainly residential street which was new to me. This is where my obsession with pavements in Jordan first began (you can read about my Walk Amman project here). But it was also the first time I involved my children in my work, seeing the ignored through their eyes. It was fascinating as my eldest observed different sounds, colours and even saw patterns in this street that I’d never considered.

My project ultimately was about finding or even creating patterns in something that you see everywhere in Amman - telephone numbers. There are so many all over the walls of the streets in Amman that ironically, the sheer volume of them mutes themselves. In fact on this relatively short street, I found 77 of them. They are mostly I’m sure ignored.

I logged all 77 of them both the digits and geographically. I wanted to see if I could make something interesting and almost beautiful with this data so as a first port of call, I added the numbers into Excel and graded the colours depending on the value (the darker the higher the number)…

Whilst I enjoyed this visually, I wondered if there was a way to show the random connections between these values and their location on the street. I attached a colour to each number in the phone numbers (e.g. the 1st digit was red - which was always 0; the 2nd was orange and was always 7 or 9; the others varied but often threw up random patterns).

I loved this and was so happy with the final outcome. Creating something beautiful with data that nobody would be able to guess what it was made from. Below is my representation of Ismaelia Street in Abdoun, Amman, thanks to the hard workers who want people to notice their telephone numbers for work.

And from this exercise, I also learned to ask my children their opinions more. They notice and observe things completely differently. And often for the better.