‘Mapping Budapest’ Residency

Jessica Dolby is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and she creates intricately detailed drawings / maps as an investigation and exploration of walking, place and site. In Spring 2015, she plans to visit Hungary to further develop her ideas at the arts organisation MÜSZi, under the project heading ‘Mapping Budapest /ˈBuːdəpɛst\’. By using psychogeography as a tool, Jessica ‘drifts’ around urban environments, creating psychological maps in response to the city. Using her technique of mapping and ‘psychocartography’ to engage with the city and people of Budapest, she hopes to explore this new city, create a new body of work and engage others in talks and workshops.

To fund this research and development residency, and to contribute to the running costs of MÜSZi, Jessica has begun a Kickstarter campaign. This involves those backing her in various ways, and pledgers can receive dedicated drawings installed in the streets of Budapest, bespoke mailing lists and limited edition artworks. Those willing to contribute to the project can do so here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2002142130/mapping-budapest-budpst

Mapping Ephemeralities

MAPPING EPHEMERALITIES / EPHEMERAL CARTOGRAPHIES – Rio de Janeiro, Aug. 21-22, 2015

Workshop organized by the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commissions on Maps and Society & Art and Cartography

 Evanescent elements such as memories, stories, sensations and perceptions are just as much a part of places as more physical and tangible objects such as streets, buildings, landmarks, and topography. These evanescent elements contribute to our personal and collective relationships to places but as ephemeralities, they are difficult to identify, collect and map. Cartographers have begun to acknowledge the importance of such non-material elements in the mapping of places, though often it is through artistic practices that ephemeral mappings have been explored. Meanwhile, the idea of “locative” media serves to connect location with site-specific art or narrative that in turn helps one be more aware of the multiple dimensions of the immediate environment. With growing interest in ephemeral mapping and locative media comes the need for research and dialogue about some of the issues raised by both the collection of ephemeralities and their appropriate mapping. The goal of this workshop is to provide an intellectual and creative space to share different ideas and methodologies about mapping ephemeralities, as well as a practical environment to learn how some of these methodologies and technologies can be used and adapted for designing (online) maps of ephemeral phenomenon.

This workshop aims to bring together artists, scholars and students from cartography, geography, the humanities and the arts who are interested in exploring further the relationships between maps and ephemeral dimensions of places. We would like to invite participants interested in discussing and debating any type of relationship between maps and ephemeralities including:

• The theoretical underpinning of mapping ephemeralities;
• The methodologies developed in arts, sciences and the humanities for collecting ephemeral and non-material phenomenon associated with places (e.g. memories, perceptions, smells, sounds, emotions);
• The technological and practical aspects of mapping ephemeralities;
• The social and political implications of mapping ephemeral phenomenon and designing ephemeral maps;
• …

The workshop will be hosted by the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro located in Maracanã neighborhood. We also hope to involve the participants into some ephemeralities data collection activities and to use these data to design an online collectively-made evanescent map of the ephemeralities of the Maracana neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro.

Submission process and important dates

To participate to the workshop, each participant must submit a proposal describing her/his project by December 15^th, 2014 (max. 500 words) to Chris Perkins (chris.perkins@manchester.ac.uk), Laurene Vaughan (laurene.vaughan@rmit.edu.au) and Sébastien Caquard (sebastien.caquard@concordia.ca) who will share them with the other members of the scientific committee: Jörn Seemann and Taien Ng-Chan. The workshop will be free of charge, but the participants will have to pay for their food and lodging (a list will be provided on the 27^th International Cartographic Conference website: http://www.icc2015.org/).

Timeline

• November 10, 2014 – Call for Participants;
• December 15, 2014 – Deadline for submitting abstracts (max. 500 words);
• January 31, 2015 – Successful Applicants notified;
• March 31, 2015 – Final program released;
• 21-22 August 2015 – Workshop prior to the ICC 2015.

Note: The deadline to submit a paper to the main International Cartographic Conference is Nov. 15, 2014 (http://www.icc2015.org/call-for-papers.html)

The edited collection “Piani sul mondo” (“Plans on the World”), reviewed by Tania Rossetto

Very interesting review (in English) of “Piani sul mondo” (“Plans on the World”) an edited collection in Italian that looks more specifically at maps emerging from literature rather than at maps of literature as emphasized by Tania Rossetto the author of the review. This collection contributes to the extensive academic literature published recently on literary geography and mapping (http://literarygeographies.wordpress.com/litgeog-mapping/). A taxonomy of the multiple relationships between maps and literature has also been developed by Ryan (2003) and discussed by Rossetto in another paper (2014) and a new open-access academic journal entitled “Literary Geographies” has been recently launched (http://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs). Definitely a very active area of research…

Guglielmi, Marina and Giulio Iacoli (eds) 2013 Piani sul mondo. Le mappe nell’immaginazione letteraria, reviewed by Tania Rossetto.

Ryan, M.-L. (2003) Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space, In Herman, D. (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford, CA, Publications of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, pp. 214–242.

Rossetto T, 2014, “Theorizing maps with literature” Progress in Human Geography 38 513-30

Travel by Approximation

Jenny Odell is an artist from the Bay Area (USA) that travels via satellites and Google Street View. In her work “Travel by Approximation” she proposes a

“virtual road trip across the United States via Google Street View, Yelp, TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon, InsiderPages, CitySearch, YouTube, Virtual Tourist, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and countless other forums, blogs, user maps and 360-degree tours. For one year–almost two virtual months—I transported myself into one place after another, both by writing a travel narrative and by using Photoshop to integrate myself into photos I found online.”

The result was turned into an installation and a book that tells the story of her virtual journey illustrated by many photos and screen captures of Google Street View in which she appearances extensively. This virtual journey seems even more interesting than the real one. As she points out:

“Pages 97-98, in which I brave the tourist-masses of the Grand Canyon. In the first page, I’m encountering a guy who claims (on TripAdvisor) that “the thing with the Grand Canyon is… once you’ve seen it, well, you’ve seen it.” (Those are his bored kids in the photos.) On the next page are user photos all geotagged at the same exact spot on Google Maps, a lookout point just off the main road.”

Colloquy “Cartographier les récits”

Some of the participants of the Colloquy on “Cartographier les récits”

Last May, the Art & Cartography commission organized a colloquy in Montreal within the context of the 82^nd acfas conference (Association francophone pour le savoir). During this two days event (May 12-13, 2014), 25 students, professors and researchers from geography, cartography, literature, sociology and anthropology got together to discuss (in French) issues around mapping different kinds of stories such as historical stories, everyday life stories, stories of refugees, stories from films and from novels. The title of the colloquy was “Cartographier les récits : enjeux méthodologiques et technologiques” (full program available here). The presentations and discussions were very stimulating and will be continued…

 

Special issue of CAJ on Cartography and Narrative

The special issue of The Cartographic journal on “Cartography and Narratives” is now available online. This Special Issue provides a cartographic point of view on the relationships between cartography and narratives. As stated in the introduction (Caquard and Cartwright 2014, 102):

“This cartographic point of view is envisioned from two perspectives. The first is where maps are used to represent the spatial structures of stories. Cartographic projects associated with this approach use maps to locate elements from all types of stories (i.e. fictional or factual). In this special issue, this category is illustrated by papers that address the mapping of oral indigenous stories (Wickens Pearce), the cartographic representation of fictional places that appear in novels (Weber-Reuschel, Piatti and Hurni) and the mapping of a tragic event with deep emotional dimensions (Roberts). The second perspective refers to the narrative power of the map. In this special issue the narrative emerges from the mining of geolocated photographs (Straumann, Çöltekin and Andrienko), as well as from the critical analysis of alternative atlases (Cattoor and Perkins).”

Finally this special issue also include a linking essay by Denis Wood in which the author

“…was not only able to handle the impossible task of stitching together the various stimulating ideas developed in all of these papers, but he turned them into a great academic story about childhood, ideas, concepts, memory and nostalgia.” (Caquard and Cartwright 2014, 105)

Motorville: Animated maps at their best

Motorville is short animated movie (directed by Patrick Jean) in which the main character is an online map (that looks very much like a Google map, although according to the credits it is based on OpenStreetMaps) that turns into a giant in search for its oil fix… This is an extremely well designed animated film in which the intimate (and frightening) relationships between online mapping services and our car/oil addiction is brought to the fore in a clever, poetic and penetrating manner. Thanks to Florence Troin for pointing me to this great movie.