Unmapping

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1888

WHAT

Inspired by the conversations of the first D+arty Monkeys Darty_Monkeys#Virtual_roundtable_09.2F10.01.16 Global Virtual Hangouts on 9 January 2016, we found a common thread. UN-MAPPING.
While mapping immediately conjures associations (matrix operations, physical maps, cartography, GPS tracking, ...) we would like to turn mapping around to ask what it can be.

These are the beginnings of brainstorms. More soon...

WHO

• Vanessa - explore digital media to unfold information otherwise from nature and environment.
• Sachiko - my interest is to deconstruct the ideas of mapping around the BIODESIGN for the REAL WORLD project

HOW

This is a process to define what unmapping as a process could be
Some directional questions in our minds:

• how could mapping be if we removed the anthropocentric perspective?
• what if north is not north?
• what is a map if it comes from rememberance?

Inspirations

Unconference

• 24 hrs. The Unconference PARENTHESIS - An Unconference organized by SARN :: Swiss Artistic Research Network [1]

Remembrance

• Tega Brain Kilowatt-Hours [2]: "Over time, the work forgets"

• Breda on my Mind: a project by artist Tess Martin where people are invited to draw a map of their city from memory. (short clip on the making of)

• Sensory Maps: the site of Kate McLean, an artist and designer, creator of smellmaps. "alternative sensory modes for individual and shared interpretation of place" (her blog).

• Shape of Singapore River: artist/archivist/cartographer Debbie Ding's 20 illustrations based on collected sketches made by people and what they think the shape of the Singapore River looks like, without making reference to anything else.

• Converging ecologies [3]

• World Day of Water: In 2016, the theme is "Water and Jobs," [4]

Interactivity

• Waterwheel is an interactive, collaborative platform for sharing media, knowledge, ideas, performances and presentations about or inspired by water. [5]
• Interactive topography sand box [6]

Visualizations beyond 2D

• Adrien Siegal's Mollata Meander [7]: alluvial flows over 15 years of a section of the Molalla River in the Cascade Range of Clackamas County in NW Oregon

• Luke Jerram's Tōhoku Japanese Earthquake [8]: sculpture seismogram of the 2011 earthquake

• Crime Reports by information designer Sha [9]

• Trash collages - Your junk is beautiful [10]

• Hard Data by R. Luke DuBois string quartet and website, 2009 [11]: "open-source “information score” of the U.S.- led war in Iraq, taking economic, social (including casualty), political, and cultural statistics from both Iraq and the United States over the course of the war and placing them on a timeline."

• The Center for Genomic Gastronomy 2011 Smog Tasting - uses egg foams to harvest air pollution. Smog from different locations can be tasted and compared. and a subsequent sonification 2015: Smog Synthesizer

• "White clothing becomes grey after a few hours" Environmental science: Pollution patrol by Kat Austen, Nature 2015[12]