My project is a careful, fine grain analysis of a series of places along Oakley Creek. My question is whether you can represent places through found objects, and in total contrast to the 'master plan' approach of the waterview-motorway-connection project. In Else/Where, Abrams and Hall talk about making the hidden visible through mapping, as a way to situate ourselves and add to a sense of community. Mapping a strategy for visualizing information that makes interpretation possible. Mapping is a 'creative enabling enterprise': a creative act that describes and constructs the space we live in, 'reveals and realises hidden potential.' My fine grain mapping through found objects will reveal ideas about those places not identifiable on a master-plan map.
The Agony of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, James Corner:
Corner goes on to talk about maps and reality, referencing Lewis Caroll: '...Carroll's tale in Sylvie and Bruno of a life-sized map... the map was useless, allowing Carroll's character Mein Herr to conclude 'so now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.' A discussion about the blurred line between real and representation due to technology, reality as constituted or formed through our participation with things: material objects, images, cultural codes, places, cognitive schemata, events and maps. This reinforces my investigation into representing place through found objects, as one of the factors which form reality. This discussion also reflects the more detail a map has, the less useful it is. There is a certain amount of abstraction necessary.
The text then goes on to say there are two main parts to mapping: 1. digging, finding and exposing (which I will quite literally be doing in my data collecting!). 2. relating, connecting and structuring (processing, analysis and presentation of data in visual form). And refutes arguments that a map is secondary or representational, saying it is a process and creation, re-invention of the place in its own right. Some maps, like the master plan (or represented new motorway connection) treat the site like a blank area, simple geometric figures to be manipulated from high above. Instead of asserting authority and control, my approach will be more one of searching, disclosing and engendering new sets of possibility. 'Like a nomadic grazer, the exploratory map detours around the obvious so as to engage what remains hidden.
Object-wise, I found it interesting to note Piaget's thoughts: '...to arrange objects mentally is not to merely imagine a series of images of them, or even to imagine the action of arranging them. It means arranging them just as positively and actively as i the action were physical.' My extraction, representation and display or arrangements of objects I find will actively involve viewers in this way. Also supporting my proposal, Corner concludes this section of the text by saying 'why not embrace the fact the potentially infintite capacity of mapping new conditions might enable more socially engaging modes of exchange,' and 'the notion that mapping should be restricted to empirical data sorting and array diminishes the profound social and orienting way of the cartographic enterprise.' My investigation will take me back to the roots of mapping, where it involved exploring.
The fact that I will be collecting data at only one point in time also seem important to note: recognition of mapping as an art form where temporal conditions are almost certain. Mapping needs to evolve with media to represent places more meaningfully today, will my mapping step to do this by recognition of static moments in places along Oakley Creek?
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