On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

This exhibition, running in April-June 2007, investigated the whole process of ‘mapping’, and showed how contemporary artists have abstracted it and expanded it into art. The show featured ‘maps’ – ranging from representations of a geographical territory to schematizations of thought processes embracing many other disciplines – into loose categories illustrating the themes or processes behind the production of such diagrams.

‘Landfill‘ by Paul Matosic is a monumental piece where spare computer parts are arranged onto a printed map matching the coastline of Britain, with an ironic title to comment on Western consumer society. The work exists in different versions, adapted to match various sizes and ‘territories’, while its construction (sometimes collaborative) can even be the purpose of a performance.

In ‘Berlin Map‘, Armelle Caron re-ordered blocks of the city by size and shape, thus creating a simili-alphabet where the blocks, loosing their functional constraints as separators of streets and avenues, display a stangely coordinated stylistic unity akin to a set of glyphs. This shuffling of parts of the city is somewhat reminiscent of Debord’s Illustration de l’hypothèse des plaques tournantes en Psychogéographique (The Naked City) published in Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

Below: Satomi Matoba Utopia

In a particularly influential study about city-planning, Kevin Lynch conducted methodical interviews of inhabitants in three major US cities, asking them first to draw a mental map of the city, and then to give detailed descriptions of their trips as well as an account of the parts they felt to be the most distinctive. The results of the survey were then analysed, and Lynch identified how some aspects of the city were the most readily represented: He came up with an interesting classification system for ordering people’s “readings” of a city, composed of five items:

1. Paths. Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves […] People observe the city while moving through it and along these paths the other environmental elements are arranged and related.
2. Edges. Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer […] Such edges may be barriers, more or less penetrable, which close one region off from another.
3. Districts. Districts are two-dimensional sections of the city, which the observer mentally enters “inside of” and which are recognisable as having some common, identifying character.
4. Nodes. Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is travelling […] Nodes are related to paths, since functions of nodes are typically the convergence of paths, events on a journey.
5. Landmarks. Landmarks are another type of point reference but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external. They are usually a rather simply defined physical object: building, sign, store or mountain.

(Lynch, 1960, p. 47)

Lynch’s primary concern is the Image of the Environment: “Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings.”¹ The subject orients him/herself according to a visualisation of their environment in map-like form, heavily tied to the legibility of the city: the ease with which parts can be recognised and organised into a coherent pattern.

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¹ Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960, p.1.

http://turbulence.org/works/garden

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants’ interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym “seeds,” each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants “plant” their interests, each becomes a tree that “grows” over time. Each organism’s leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants’ trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

The [meme.garden] software was created by an eclectic team of artists and scientists: Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, and Kay Chang.

[meme.garden] is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support from the PSC-CUNY research fund.

The Folk Songs for the Five Points project was exhibited as part of SUM(1,4,6), the closing event of Node.London ‘06. In this interactive piece, users compose a ’sound-map’ by movings five plots around an onscreen map, mixing field-recordings and sounds taken from the area.

Folk Songs for the Five Points was created in response to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s invitation for a project which responded to the request for works that explore contemporary immigrant experiences in New York City. The Museum has dedicated the Digital Artist in Residence Project (DARP) as a medium where digital artists can raise questions and suggest various perspectives, ideas and interpretations.

“Folk Songs for the Five Points is a celebration of cultural diversity and change, using “folk songs” as a metaphor to explore immigration and the formation of identity in New York’s Lower East Side.
The project isn’t about absolute answers or clear definitions. We are celebrating the unexpected richness that confronts you at every turn – from the many languages of Canal St to the endless complexity contained in words like ‘immigrant’ and ‘folk song’.”

www.tenement.org/folksongs/

Medieval maps like Paris’ Itinerary typically only featured straight paths of trails, along with stages acting as operational indications for the purpose of pilgrimage. They were more like memorandums prescribing actions to be done.

The rise of the modern scientific discourse between the 15th to 17th century saw geographical maps progressively moving away from depicting itineraries and suites of actions to a more “theatrical” view (Atlases were then called “theaters”) where different elements are juxtaposed and are the product of an observation. Itineraries disappear, and heterogeneous elements are gathered to form a picture of the “state” of current geographical knowledge. From then on, maps have been red as a system of isolated geographical loci, and no longer as a series of operations retracing a narrative or helping way-finding.

French artist Pierre Joseph constructed ‘memory maps’ of Japan and the Paris métro without prior consultation of actual maps of the area. They are not maps to be followed literally, but, in common with the mid-thirteenth century mappamundi and contemporary Matthew Paris’ Itinerary Map showing the route to the Holy Land by depicting stage points along the journey, they are an aid to “self-distancing from the world in preparation for the contemplative ascent” ¹. These itineraries engage the viewer’s subjective interpretation, and reverse modern habits of map-reading: “instead of moving from the map to an objective world, we move from the map to a deeper textuality.” ² Indeed, reading a map can be an extraordinary vehicle for the imagination and multiple interpretations.

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¹ Marcia Kupfer, quoted by Tim Scott, Next on the Left, or: ‘What Good is a Map if you Know the Way?’ in Media Mutandis . London : NODE.London, 2006, p.102.
² Michael Gaudio, quoted by Tim Scott, ibid.

“Mapmaking fulfils one of our deepest desires: understanding the world around us and our place in it. But maps need not show just continent and oceans. ¹” By nature maps are inherently spatial, yet they are often used as a metaphor for mental processes. Ultimately, maps are a mean to an end: unlike mere pictures, they carry additional functions and purposes, they transmit information. “Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, processes, conditions, or events in the human world. ²” Most importantly, all maps are ‘indexical’, i.e. their meaning is dependent for their truth on their context. A Ptolemaic map from the second century A.D. (illustration) looks remarkably accurate for its time whereas the Ebstorf map featured in the illustration below presents a somewhat malformed view of the world, apparently against the sense of progress. Yet it serves religious interests as well as topographical ones; it is embedded in conventions and symbolism of early Western Christian mappaemundi (maps of the world). Such maps, dubbed ‘T-O’ divided the world by three major waterways symbolising the cross, with east at the top and Jerusalem at the centre.

Mental maps versus physical cartography

Mental maps are a personal way of representing geographical space: instead of considering a place in its absolute sense, a mental map looks at it in relation with other places emotionally close. Each mental map is particular to the the environmental perception of its author, the images they have of their own life, known places and the way they are connected.

Cognitive maps shows not just where we are and what we know, but who we are. Because of their serendipitous quality, they have a great potential for the discovery of relationships not explicitly intended; they allow appreciating the internalised spatial structure upon which a person is operating. The most significant differences are those between people (or the same person at different points in time) of the same places. “It’s possible to take one geographical area and to demonstrate that it really consists of a set of overlapping places depending on which group of people we are considering. ³” Mental maps are thus interesting indicators of how we interpret our neighbourhood.

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¹ Katharine Harmon, You are Here, Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination . New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
² Harley and Wooward , The History of Cartography , 1987, p.16 quoted by David Turnbull, Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas. University of Chicago Press , 1994, p.3.
³ David Canter, Psychology of Place. Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, p.68.

Parkinson’s geographical analysis of social class and movement in Britain ¹ shows a sarcastic picture of England projected into social space – a humorous expression of how the country’s regions are prone to encourage social ascent (or descent), from desperation to privilege either side of a line drawn from Hastings through London to Liverpool

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¹ Quoted in Peter Gould & Rodney White (1974) Mental Maps. London: Penguin Books, p.43.

Lars Arrhenius’ A-Z was first shown at PEER gallery (London) in 2002. The gallery also produced a book that borrowed its design from the popular London street guide. In this work, 18 characters evolve in scenarios through more than 250 illustrations arranged horizontally, vertically and diagonally against the backdrop of the London map and intersect in an apparent randomness.

The book adopts the non-linear grid reference format of a street atlas, thus highlighting the city’s fragmented nature. Like in Debord’s Naked City, The narrative potentiality of the city gives ground to a rewriting of the map, overlaying social narrative with geographical narrative. Despite holding imaged storylines and being bound, Arrhenius’s A-Z cannot be read as a book; it has no actual beginning of end. The reader is led into turning pages, back and forth, ‘up and down’, to follow each story, ‘traversing’ the map rather than following it.