As we gear up for the first event of our Save the City project, Listen to the City, we’re also planning ahead for the February event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. Another Friday night at HQ trying our best to get as much work done as we could before heading out to the opening at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
Andrew Hunter up at RENDER recently lead participants at the Oakridges Moraine For Life Community Well-being Symposium in a creative mapping project designed to identify the links and barriers to progressive change. The map, pictured above, highlights barriers and connectors by using different coloured post-its alongside more illustrative mapping techniques.
I thought this could be a particularly interesting way to think through larger scale projects.
Pardon me for being a little behind the times, but John Baldessari‘s “California Map Project” from 1969 strikes a chord of creativity in me. Maybe we could find a way to blend the scale of this project with the plausibility of our Google Earth rooftop idea. Basically, John Baldessari took a map of California (bottom right) and went to the places where the map letters “California” would be located, and spelled out the letters in rocks or other ways.
From the artist – “Photographs of letters that spell California and of the map used for locating the site of each letter. The letters vary in scale from one foot to approximatly one hundred feet, and in materials used. The letters are located as near as possible within the area occupied by the letters on the map. The idea was to see the landscape as a map and to actually execute each letter and symbol of the map employed on the corresponding part of the earth. It was an attempt to make the real world match a map, to impose a language on nature and vice-versa.”
With the help of Panoramio, a site that allows users to upload images and plot them using Google Maps, I created a project where I mapped the routes that I walk on a weekly basis. I did this by photographing the tags I see on my walks, then plotting the images on the map. There are three main taggers in my neighbourhood; Beast, THC and Jerk. I tagged the appropriate photos on Panoramio with the names of these taggers. I plan on extending this project to include more images of tags in other neighbourhoods around Windsor and opening it up to others to contribute their images as well.
Check out the photos here.
With our interest in mapping (and using the fancy technology of Google Maps to try to do so), I thought it might be interesting to post on this project, which is very much not about fancy technology. Katy Asher, a student in Portland’s MFA in Art and Social Practice program, along with Ariana Jacob and Amber Bell, have initiated a project that “aims to make a vending cart of maps made by people from Portland.”
This feels like an intersection of a number of projects we’ve discussed and are also ongoing in the community, and makes me wonder what subjective maps would look like for other Windsorites. Asking for people to map their routes to work, their favourite restaurants, their neighbourhoods would certainly provide an interesting look at the way distances and geography are collapsed or exaggerated and might help to discover some other broken parts of our city and the way it functions (or doesn’t).
We spent a couple hours last night highlighting areas in Windsor that are of interest to us, either as potential research sites, potential exploration sites, or places in need of further examination. If you have anything that should be added to the map, please do so, but in order to edit it, I think you need a Google account. In particular, it would be good to build a better directory of places for rent in the downtown core. I also tried to make a screencast of the discussion and mapping, but having some difficulty getting it to export—I’ll post it when/if I can get it to work.
Photo by Darren.
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