Wherever You Go, There You Are — Humanist Map-Making and Cartographies of the Self

Part Three: Down the Rabbit Hole

Over the Fall 2022 semester, my work in Art-making as Experimentation and Research centered on testing the outer limitations and parameters of mapmaking. My project, “Wherever You Go, There You Are — Humanist Map-Making and Cartographies of the Self” asked of my viewers (in its process and its final form) “What counts as a map? How does the form of a map influence its utility, its user, and the terrain it measures? When certain variables are changed, how do those changes impact the final form as a whole?”. Each map I charted measured the mile of land between 216 South Professor Street and the Oberlin Reservoir-011. Besides being an investigation into the core tenets of cartography from an arts perspective, my project was a tool for me to learn about my new home in Oberlin with a direct sense of purpose. Research and art on emotional cartography and psychogeography greatly informed my artistic choices for this project — since the only constants in this series were myself and the stretch of land, the difference in my chosen mediums served to emphasize just how drastically a map’s subjectivity can influence the information it conveys. In the four-dimensional iteration of this assignment, I moved far away from familiar forms of mapmaking. While my film collage is a document of a biking expedition along Morgan Street, it can’t replace or perfectly represent the reality of this bike ride. In a way, I’ve made two maps: a document of my navigational process, and my own private map, a lived experience. The authors of Mapping Emotional Cartography write that “...the process of participating in emotional mapping exercises (i.e., the mapping process itself ) increases a participant’s level of engagement with and sense of ownership of places and cities” (Caquard et al. 2019). I personally gained much insight from physically engaging with the mapping process, but I wanted to see if it would be possible to represent the sensory truths of that engagement in my video. Is it possible to document the four-dimensional in a way that reflects how living in four dimensions feels? What can be done to attempt this effect? I went down a research rabbit hole, looking across genres and mediums for inspiration in search of qualities that I could pinpoint and apply to my own work. By putting my video collage in conversation with other multimedia artist’s four-dimensional works, I learned more about the limitations and parameters of cartography. I attempted to subvert traditional materials and approaches to cartography, in order to make maps that accurately represent the experience of navigating the unfamiliar.

I began my rabbit hole with WindowSwap, an interactive online site that allows its users to peer through other people’s windows, which led me to think about voyeurism, tunnels, and portals. From this idea, I visited a pivotal scene from Henry Selick’s 2009 film adaptation of Coraline, in which the protagonist crawls through a tunnel to reach an alternate version of her world. A video game I’ve fallen in love with, Kentucky Route Zero, depicts this kind of tunnel travel masterfully. Players traverse highways and side roads alike as they meander through rural Kentucky, but they occasionally need to navigate “The Zero”, a shadow road that condenses time and space. The way navigation and the laws of physics work in this game reminded me of Cristopher Nolan's 2014 Interstellar. It may not be completely scientifically accurate, but it is a triumph for its production design, special effects, and sound editing. It represents warped space-time visually and aurally in ways I had never encountered before my first viewing. Interstellar sparked an interest in other forms of spatial audio, namely Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson’s work. I listened through song after song, trying to isolate patterns and instruments for my own purposes. From all these works, a pattern emerged. The audio-visual components of three-dimensional works that successfully and creatively tried to represent four-dimensional life are designed to break laws of physics and nature. Impossible repetition, intrusion, and recursion abound. I tried to weave this throughline into my video as best I could.

While my project worked conceptually, I encountered many (technical) difficulties in physically executing my idea. Most significantly, the microphone I used ran out of battery just after I had finished filming, and did not save the 25 minute-long recording of the ride. I was able to salvage the GoPro’s less than optimal audio, and decided to supplement it with snippets of Laurie Anderson’s song, “Lighting Out For The Territories”. I am pleased with the effect this pairing created, but it strayed from the whistling, windy aural landscape I had planned to make. My computer crashed several times while I edited and exported my film, causing the loss of quite a few finished drafts, which I then had to recreate from scratch. Ideally, I would have left the video footage at its original speed. However, my professor intended for every student’s work to be presented to the class, so I had to condense the footage to make the final product shorter in order to fit my video within my limited presentation window. I was initially disappointed with my video, mainly because it wasn’t on par with my technical abilities in different mediums. Conversely, I was very pleased with my choice to make something I didn’t find beautiful — value judgments mattered much less to me after finishing the project. It was an excellent opportunity for me to learn about the technicalities of portable video production, and a fantastic excuse to dive headfirst into the work of artists I already know and love, as well as that of artists I’d just discovered. In this piece, the work was located in my research, the throughlines I traced across mediums, and in the act of making the map itself — not in the presentable document. Making a piece of art I found unappealing brought me closer to myself, and let me navigate my artistic process with greater ease and understanding. To the point made in Mapping Emotional Cartography, I felt much more personally engaged with Morgan Street and the surrounding neighborhood as a product of the time I spent filming, walking, and biking around the area.