13/06/24 - Duke Street, Norwich University of the Arts.
In June the Part Time Yr2 MA Fine Art Students were asked to present to all of the MA Cohort, full and part time who were joining together heading towards their Final Major Project. Below and to follow are images of my presentation and the script I delivered.
Questions raised post presentation.I had a few questions and comments from the floor, all from lecturers. Initially questioning maps and the accuracy and how they can define an area or does an area define a map? Then gave an example of a map that had a town inserted that didn’t exist (Agloe, New York) but people wanted to visit this mythical place and eventually it actually became a place.
An article in The Guardian (screenshot above) discusses these ‘Phantom Towns’ and how they are often put in by Cartographers to stop illegal copying of maps.
‘Agloe was the creation of two men: Otto Lindberg and Ernest Alpens from America’s General Drafting Company. Commissioned to make a map of New York state in the 1930s, they used the initials of their names to create a paper town – Agloe – which they dropped into a dirt road intersection in the Catskills.’
When it appeared years later on a map made by one of their competitors, Rand McNally, General Drafting threatened to sue. McNally pointed out that it would lose the case: Agloe’s general store could be found at the intersection. Its store manager, having spotted Agloe on a map, had taken it as a good place to set up shop. A lack of houses or indeed a town of any kind should have suggested otherwise; the unfortunate shopkeeper went out of business shortly after. It was, however, sufficient proof that Agloe existed. Contemporary maps still feature Agloe. This, its strange history and the popularity of the book Paper Towns ensures a steady stream of curious sightseers.’(https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/may/03/imaginary-american-town-tourist-attraction-agloe-new-york-state#:~:text=Agloe%20was%20the%20creation%20of,road%20intersection%20in%20the%20Catskills).
Another question was about disrupting the shapes, the walks. Could I make my own shapes? Would this be more in line with my ‘Not Knowing’ methodology, that have employed throughout the majority of the undergraduate and post graduate degrees. Although this obviously has merit it also goes completely against the reason I call these ‘Thinking Loops’ as they allow me that space to think. If I was to walk straight on a compass bearing, through hedge, field, garden, water... then I would be having to focus on every step and that would become the work, not the free thinking time. My loops are a record of my physical presence in a space that allowed me to think.
I could perhaps look to create my own shapes and reverse the process by defining a shape and then walking it to create a digital version of the shape I have created.
Beating the Bounds was also discussed. In an article by Amelia Soth (https://daily.jstor.org/beating-the-bounds/) the history of how boundaries were established and indeed remembered before being mapped.
‘Maps are only one way of knowing the shape of a place. Before the borders of England’s parishes were definitively mapped, people learned the boundaries of their community by foot. Every year, a few days before the feast of the Ascension, the members of each parish would come together to walk the edge of their common lands.
The practice was called “beating the bounds,” and the purpose was to create a shared mental map of the parish, to ensure that neighboring communities couldn’t encroach on their land. They carried flags, sang songs, read homilies, and used slender willow-branches to swat the landmarks that separated one parish from another.’
This practice also served to define the farming rights and was also used to bless the crops. ‘Pain was used as an aid to memory, and the form of attack was determined by the landscape. If they came to a stream, the children’s heads might be dunked in it; if the boundary ran against a wall, they might be encouraged to race along it, so that they would fall into the brambles on either side.’
The final comment was about the origins of Psychogeography, which is defined in an article in the Tate: ‘The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.’ (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/psychogeography).
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