Clearly the readings this week were about migration, space and ‘home’. Reading the first article, about ‘the way home’ made me think about what we were talking about in class last week, mainly a lot of map based locative media projects.
I realized that I had been farily dismissive in class, specifically something that you had told me that you didn’t like. I thought I would try to furthur explore my problems with the apparent domination of mapping in locative media. A map is a very utilitarian tool. Even when the artist chooses to map some data in a way that is somewhat revolutionary or interesting, the very nature of the map, as a tool for wayfinding and exploration, is limiting. In my mind, there are two uses for a map. To provide a guide for somebody who comes after you to follow the same path as you, and to draw a multidimensional space into a two dimensional representation.
In the first artwork we read about, the maps being created fall into the first category, although it is true that the participants played a role in the map creation, and they learned something about the way they mapped out their space. It just seems so constrictive, however, this reliance on cartesian representation. It is almost, I feel, a surrender against the difficulty of representing the complex, multi-demensional realities uncovered in exploring locative media to represent them on a map. It feels as though the next few steps are missing, the extrusion of the artists observation and critique back into the real, complex world.
When we explore these massively important concepts of space, location and mobility as artists, it seems too simple to just map out our results and say, “here i am”, even if the map is representing an emotional response, or an unknown longing for home. Perhaps these maps were neccesary to have us think about these things on a fundamental level, perhaps we need these maps as early guides into these complex worlds, but to me, it seems as though these issues are crying out for intervention, for real, concrete representations and critiques.
