"We're here because we're here" #Somme100 #wearehere

Yesterday morning in Belfast a group of men dressed in WW1 uniforms quietly marched down the Stranmillis Road and stopped outside Queen’s University, leaning against bollards, lying back on the wrought iron gate. After a while one soldier struck up the song “We’re here because we’re here” – sung in the trenches – and the other voices joined in.



When approached by a member of the public, rather than speaking they simply reached into a pocket and handed over a white card bearing the name of a local soldier who died at the Somme on 1 July 1916.

The squad moved throughout the city, appearing in Great Victoria Street bus station, outside the Europa, in Victoria Square, the MAC, the Big Fish and even caught the train to Ballymena. Another group were based in Derry. And across the UK, similar uniformed soldiers – ghosts of the war – appeared in railway stations and public places in a moving tribute to the losses at the Somme.

The juxtaposition of khaki onto the modern colour palette was striking. The sound of boots marching in formation down the footpath.

Last night, after the ghosts had disappeared from the street, the back story to the event was explained. The local volunteers, organised by Lyric Theatre and The Playhouse were part of a UK-wide collaboration that saw 1400 men appear dressed in replica uniforms. The modern memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme was commissioned by 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts programme for the First World War centenary, and the work was conceived and created by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller working with Rufus Norris, Director of the National Theatre.

“The project breaks new ground in terms of its scale, breadth, reach and the number of partners and participants involved. This is the first time three national theatres have worked together on a joint project, and the first time so many theatres have worked together on a UK-wide participation project.

“The participants who walked the streets today were a reminder of the 19,240 men who were killed on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Each participant represented an individual soldier who was killed that day. The work is partly inspired by tales of sightings during and after the First World War by people who believed they had seen a dead loved one.

“The participants wore historically accurate uniforms, representing 15 of the regiments that suffered losses in the first day of the Battle. The soldiers did not speak, but at points throughout the day would sing the song ‘we’re here because we’re here’, which was sung in the trenches during the First World War. They handed out cards to members of the public with the name and regiment of the soldier they represented, and, where known, the age of the soldier when he died on 1 July 1916.

“The day long work ran from 7am to 7pm and covered the width and breadth of the UK, from Shetland to Penzance. Sites they visited included shopping centres, train stations, car parks and high streets – taking the memorial to contemporary Britain and bringing an intervention into people’s daily lives where it was least expected.”

For further events commemorating the battles of the Somme, check out History Hub Ulster’s Belfast Somme 100 programme, supported by Belfast City Council.

Cross-posted from Slugger O'Toole.

Tall Ships Races 2015 - Parade of Sail

Tens of thousands of people took a chance on the weather - a good bet in the end - and flooded Titanic Quarter and the Belfast Harbour this morning to see the Red Arrows fly past and the Tall Ships depart to the north coast start line of their race.

Crowds lined the shoreline as the event seemed certain to hit its target of half a million visitors to Tall Ships events in and around the LIDL Belfast Titanic Maritime Festival.

Soon the ships were motoring out into the lough to get into position for the Sail Training International race start off Portrush at 10am on Monday and heading to Ålesund.

Ships like the Guayas started to unfurl and set their sails - wouldn't fancy being the sailor at the top of each mast!

Other vessels kept an eye on the ships ...

Heading back into Belfast Harbour just before 5pm, the crowds had gone, the blue t-shirted volunteers and liaison officers volunteers all but two tall ships had departed, stalls were being disassembled, the Belfast Telegraph souvenir programme sellers had given up flogging the good-but-overpriced brochure [£6 on Thursday, dropped to £5 on Friday and £3 after the Red Arrows had flown over this morning] and Belfast was returning to normal.

Autographer: serendipitous photographs of variable quality with buggy software (PS: not waterproof)

Despite the occasional inane tweet may appear on my timeline to suggest otherwise, I’m not really into life-blogging (or lifelogging). But I was curious about the Autographer wearable 5 Megapixel camera, which clips to your clothes or hangs round your neck and takes photographs at a predefined rate without intervention.

A black box 9cm tall x 3.5cm wide x 1cm thick and weighing only 58g, there are sensors at the top left to defect changes in lighting and colour, and others inside to detect shifts in movement, direction and temperature. GPS coordinates are stored for each photograph if the device is outside and can pick up a fix from the satellites above.

The top left has a simple display hidden behind the casing to guide you through the configuration menu, and two buttons to switch the device on and off (and trigger a sequence of nine photographs in a row if you think something noteworthy is about to happen).

The bottom third of the device houses the 136° wide angle lens in behind a rotating lens cover that can be quickly spun to guarantee privacy. With 8MB of memory the Autographer’s capable of storing 27,000 images internally, and the internal battery lasts for 3-10 hours depending on the frequency of shots, though that capacity is greatly reduced if you switch on Bluetooth to connect to an iOS or Android device.

Mac and Windows software is provided and hooking the device up using a USB cable allows you to import your photographs, tag them, and create stop-go films and animated GIFs. I found the Mac version of the software very unintuitive and avoided it at all costs. (Due to the folder hierarchy on the device – a deliberate design decision – the Autographer isn’t detected as a camera when you plug it into a Mac/PC and your favourite photo programme won’t automatically import all the images.)

The iOS app promised everything you’d need to manage the Autographer device. You could preview the pictures, favourite the good ones, delete bad ones, select multiple ones and transfer them into your photostream, as well as create the short film clips.

Vine and Autographer seemed great companions. Up to 50 images could be exported into a short film, 48 at 8 frames a second (24 at 4fps; 12 at 2fps) matches the 6 second Vine limit. Although the app allowed an audio/music track to be added underneath the footage – the Autographer has no mic – I never got round to finding a way to record a short clip on the iPod Touch I used and get it into the music library so that the Autographer app could access it.

Taping the Autographer to a speaker stand at the side of the TEDxStormont stage captured images of the speakers throughout the day. Stick it to the window of a train and you can compress the ride from Lisburn station up to Central in six seconds. Clip it to your car’s sun visor and it records the journey into work.

However Autographer was let down by few things. Firstly as a camera it didn’t consistently capture very good images. Photography's an art and requires practice. But pointing and clicking your smart phone with no thought would often generate better pictures.

The colours and exposure were awful. Everything became blurry in dark or artificial light (ie, everything inside, early morning or in the evening). Wear it inside St George’s Market and one in ten shots might be usable. Here's the best three from the market a couple of days before Christmas and one from Divis mountain last week.

Secondly, Autographer was let down by its Bluetooth. Connectivity would frequently be lost while browsing through captured images or while exporting them to the iPod Touch to make a clip. You’d lose 1 minute or two turning Bluetooth back on on the Autographer, allowing it to reconnect, then manually selecting the photos you wanted to export again.

The Autographer was also let down by the firmware/iOS software. My mode of working managed the device from the iOS app alone. Photos could be marked for deletion through the app and when Bluetooth next disconnected, the Autographer would process the delete requests. However, while the images were deleted from the device, the record of the images was left in the index file. So next time I reconnected it to the iPod Touch, there would be lots of greyed out photos displayed and OMGDeviceErrorFileSystem error messages if I tried to click on them.

A bug that was reproducible and should have been fixable.

Three days into ownership (6 September 2014) I reported this to Autographer Customer Support and we conversed fairly regularly for the next four weeks, supplying screenshots on request. The most helpful suggestion back from Autographer was an auto.ini file that I could copy from the Mac onto the Autographer that would trigger it to reset and reformat itself, removing all images and removing all ghost images too. But if a new picture was deleted, the problem would reoccur.

The last communication from Autographer Customer Support on 30 September said:

Thanks for that information and feedback. I’ve passed this information on to our developers. As soon as we get a response from them, we’ll be in touch.

They never got back in touch, not even when I chased them. New versions of the app didn’t fix the problem; neither was there a firmware upgrade to address it.

Autographer is a great idea, though its maker OMG/Oxford Metrics Group seem to have had a change of heart, or at least a change of direction away from consumers. Half way through this post the tense switched from present to past as I stumbled on the notice on Autographer’s website.

Autographer has been pioneering the wearable camera market since the launch of the world’s first wearable camera in 2012. As a result of the rich user feedback from our community we’ve been rapidly evolving the functionality, product design and applications that are required to bring the benefits of companion cameras to the wider global market. Our dual focus on solving the underlying technical challenges of the category whilst also developing the market and our commercial operations have been gaining strong traction but stretching our resources. Based on our learnings from the last few years we believe we can achieve more for the market by focussing our efforts on creating the enabling technologies for the category and working through large global brand partners to bring future devices and functionality to the market.

This means that we will no longer be manufacturing and selling the Autographer device in its current guise. We remain committed to support our existing Autographer users and collaborators and are very proud of what we have achieved together so far. You’ll see less of us on our social channels for now but rest assured we’re busy acting on all your feedback to enable the next generation of companion devices and services.

Simon Randall, Managing Director

It’s a shame, as capturing serendipitous photographs could be a great application, particularly when out for a long walk where Autographer tended to get its best shots. Or when a rogue firework went horizontally into a tree during a local Halloween display!

But perhaps it’s no real surprise that Autographer have abandoned their current consumer wearable camera form factor and software. Despite good reviews from tech journalists who trialled the camera for an hour or two in London Zoo at its launch, the reality of using it in the wild generated photographs of variable quality and it was a hassle to manage the device.

Currently: Importing 2860 photographs taken by my Autographer while in Thailand. Suspect only about 300 are any good, if that
— Sophie Warnes (@SophieWarnes) January 2, 2015

Autographer’s main competitor was Memoto, renamed Narrative which takes a different approach. Their smaller lighter device with a tiny lens clips onto your clothes and takes a photo ever 30 seconds (or immediately if you tap it twice) but you need a Mac/PC to extract the photos, upload them to Narrative’s cloud, and sync them over the web to your mobile App. All this requires an annual subscription. Their second generation device – Narrative Clip 2 – will launch in 2015 and offers a 86° wider-angle lens with a 8 megapixel sensor, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity and a range of mounting options.

My Autographer days seem to be over.

It was sitting on my knee last night while I used the iPod Touch looked at photographs it had captured while out for walks over Christmas – keeping the two devices as close together as possible to prevent the Bluetooth timeout – and the shiny slid off my knee and plopped head first into the cup of tea sitting beside me. Despite the lens and USB socket not being submerged and despite being fished out within half a second and dried out, I can confirm that while the Autographer is splashproof, liquid obviously leaks in via the buttons and top sensor and it’s not wanting to switch back on or recharge.

Which explains what would have happened if I'd attached it to hang under the dog's collar and it drank from a puddle ... 

Outburst Queer Arts Festival (14-22 November): theatre, film, photos & even some Doctor Who

Outburst Queer Arts Festival aims to bring “world class and new local theatre, performance, film, visual arts and discussion” to Belfast.

In the eight years since the festival began – never mind the 24 years of Belfast Pride – the city’s attitudes towards LGBTQ issues and communities has matured enormously. (Though many acknowledge that the Equality Commission action against Ashers Bakery could be a backward step in good relations as some conservative-leaning groups are choosing to fall out of relationship with LGBTQ communities.)

While not everything on the programme may be to everyone’s taste, there’s certainly a lot to make you sit up and think. Some notable events from the eight day Outburst programme:

Damage is a new play by Patrick J O’Reilly (Hatch; Emcee in Cabaret) that deals with the practice of “gay reparative therapy and the damaging effects of sexual repression and identity”.

Robert doesn’t want to be gay. Louise doesn’t want to be married. Meeting each other to find the reason why it’s all so very wrong.

Damage runs in the Brian Friel Theatre Studio (QFT) on Friday 14 at 7.30pm SOLD OUT and Saturday 15 at 7pm and 9pm. Tickets £12.50.

Regarding Susan Sontag is being screened in the QFT on Tuesday 18 at 8.30pm. The film studies “one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation”.

Aunty Ben is a play written for audiences from 7 years old and up looking at the experience of nine year old Tracey and her Aunty Ben.

It doesn’t matter to her that Aunty Ben is actually her uncle, or that he’s a drag queen … But when Ben meets her school friends, Tracey is shocked to discover that other people’s families can be very different to her own.

Theatre can be used to open up conversations and help people of all ages understand issues they face – or will face – from safe perspectives. After Belfast, Aunty Ben is heading to London. Sunday 16 November at 3pm. Tickets £6, £3 for under 12s.

Belfast Feminist Network are screening Derby Crazy Love in the Black Box Green Room on Sunday 16 at 2pm with a look inside “the adrenaline-filled world of women’s roller derby”. Tickets £5. It’s followed at 3.15pm by a craft workshop and at 5pm by adults sharing their most embarrassing teenage writing: teen diaries, bad poetry, love letters, the lot! And if roller derby’s your thing, In The Turn is showing in the QFT on Saturday 15 at 3pm.

A Week in my Homosexual Agenda is a photography project running in The Black Box’s Green Room café throughout the festical, with an interactive exhibition and a chance for local photographers to upload their shots as the phrase “the homosexual agenda” is explored.

And for anyone mourning the end of the latest Doctor Who series, as part of BFI’s Sci Fi Days of Fear and Wonder celebrations, The Black Box are screening some favourite episodes from Doctor Who on Saturday 22 November between 11am and 3pm. The title Gayllifrey: a queer celebration of Doctor Who reflects some people’s sense that sci fi mirrors the “otherness” of LGBT experiences. You can agree or disagree with that at the panel discussion and the team quiz. Tickets £5.

On top of the world ... looking down from Divis and Black Mountain over Belfast and beyond

While the Belfast Hills dominate the landscape, looking over the city, I’ve spent very little time exploring them. Today I headed up to the Divis Road and the new Ridge Trail that was being launched by Outdoor Recreation and the National Trust.

During the Troubles, much of the mountain top was off limits to all but the military. But with its purchase by the NT and the development of over 10 miles of maintained pathways across the top of Divis and Black Mountain, the area is no longer inaccessible and is open to locals as well as tourists wanting to get a bit of exercise and check out the stunning panoramas over Belfast and County Down.

The new Ridge Trail is a gentle and circular 4.2 mile walk over gravel, limestone slabs, board walk and a short section of tarmac.

It’s not at all steep, and even though it was fairly overcast this afternoon, the views were stunning.

There is a complete absence of traffic noise and the normal sound of city life. Yet down below – even on an overcast day like today – you can make out landmarks stretching from Lisburn to Belfast city centre, the shipyards, and beyond.

Allegedly on a clear day you can see Scotland, the Isle of Man and Cumbria from the highest point. The circular viewing point just below the Black Mountain trigonometry point/standing stone helps set the scenery in context.

Outdoor Recreation NI (WalkNI.com) developed the trail, with funding from the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (through the Lagan Rural Partnership), NI Tourist Board and the National Trust totalling £459,700.

At the launch, the phrase “tourism is now more important than agriculture” was quoted several times.

NITB CEO Alan Clarke spoke of the focus on attracting tourists to Northern Ireland for short or additional holiday breaks, and the need to be able to offer outdoor pursuits as well as urban activities. The NI tourist portfolio still faces difficulties with Sundays, evenings and public transport … though the trail is open all week long, will be great for a summer evening walk, and the number 106 bus from Europa bus centre to Crumlin can set you down on the Divis Road!

After the launch I spoke to Heather Thompson (National Trust director for Northern Ireland) and Gareth Evans (DARD) about the vision of opening up the Belfast Hills to the public and DARD’s involvement in the funding.

listen to ‘Heather from @nationaltrustni & Gareth from DARD at launch of new Divis Ridge Trail’ on Audioboo

Long term, the plan is to be able to walk from the Lagan/Lady Dixon Park, through Colin Glen and up to the Belfast Hills, with paths leading across from Black Mountain/Divis to Cave Hill and beyond. There are still some gaps, but the vision is not too far off being complete.

Practically, as well as the existing car park on Divis Road, there’s a new smaller car park up the lane opposite the Long Barn visitor centre (which offers refreshments too). I suspect I'll be back over coming months with family to revisit the Ridge Trail and make our way up to the summit.

[Click on any of the photos for higher-res versions.]









And if you've ever wanted to get up close to your Freeview transmitter ...