youarehere.png

I just wanted to share an interesting book by Katherine Harmon in which she presents many different types of maps - real and imaginary. She wrote in introduction to the book: “I sense that humans have an urge to map - and that this mapping instinct, like our opposable thumbs is part of what makes us human. (…)

Maps intrigue us, perhaps none more than those that ignore mapping conventions. These are maps that find their essence in some other goal than just taking us from point A to point B. They are a vehicle for the imagination, fuelled up and ready to go. We look at these maps, and our minds know just what to do: take the information and extrapolate from it a place where they can leap, play, gambol - without that distance province of our being, the body, dragging them down.” (p.10-11).

Reading these lines, I was wondering if that was true only of maps, or if this could also be true of texts - novels, poems, etc. that can let our minds wonder… and maybe leads us to create our private maps which are referred to by Hall (whose essay is published in the book):

“We are all creating our private maps. Like Mercator, we are not discovering entirely new worlds; rather, we are laying a new set of lines down on a known but changing world, arranging and rearranging metaphysical rhumbs [compass points] that we associate with successful navigation. To each, her or his private meridians. To each, a unique projection.”

Reading Hall’s and  Harmon’s quotes in the light of our discussion on physical and virtual spaces, I asked myself if the choice of virtual space, and the frequent metaphors to maps (site maps, navigation, etc.) is not related to our attraction to maps. Of course, it also points to the constructed aspect of space, and how many layers can be intertwined in our experiences of spaces (physical and virtual). One visitor was telling me the other day that the installation made him thought of how in some ways despite his physical embodiment, his attention is most of the time focused on virtual spaces (emails, chat, blogs, online forums) in which he interacts, often several at the same time… and how he realized that he thought of himself as more present to these spaces that the physical space he was located - a theme richly documented by Turkle (1995).

Last, Harmon’s book contains several examples of maps made of text : Howard Horowitz’s maps  and Edwin Morgan’s map of Scotland which of course resonate in the context of this conversation on space and discourse.

al