Maps & Dreams - Art & GIS

Subject is not scheduled Not scheduled

Code Completion Credits Range Language Instruction Semester
373GIS credit 2 2 seminar hours (45 min) of instruction per week, 29 to 39 hours of self-study English summer

Subject guarantor

Name of lecturer(s)

Contents

This class is designed to get you ‘thinking about’ how maps work, and then to make your own “deep map”, in the broadest sense of the words. What is important to you today and how can we create fresh narrative around this? With what facts? How can they be presented to an audience?

Through a combination of lecture and practice, each student or student collaborative team will develop a central map project in class. The class is designed to function as a dilna aid and for this work to be related to your central artistic outputs.

Cartographies are discourse functions, with the power to first and foremost foreground what is mapped, what is relevant, how it is described, and how it is circumscribed. Artist & activist countermapping strategies allow for our own needs, desires and spatial understandings to predominate.

Maps are networks and are defined by borders, but they can also be psychogeographies of place. Maps are visual compositions that can include sound, text, moving image and function as spatial narrative guides.

Cartesian space is a grid of reference, while place is associated with the existence of memories or events. Place mapping is a way to understand the spatial components of people's relationships with particular locations and each other.

GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems. It’s the science (and art) of organizing information spatially and symbolizing geographic datasets on maps. A conjunction of technologies (OSINT, GPS, ubiquitous computing, IOT) has led to the explosion in GIS related work in the past ten years.

A deep map is a map consisting of layers of place rather than solely designating space. The latitude and longitude are the space, but place is waiting to be filled based on your own dreams, your own uses.

We will designate a set of tools to learn and use together at the beginning of the semester depending on student skills.

Learning outcomes

-

Prerequisites and other requirements

-

Literature

Claire Reddleman - Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies 2018)

David J. Bodenhamer - Deep Maps & Spatial Narratives (Indiana University Press 2015)

Laura Kurgan - Close Up At A distance: mapping, technology, and politics (Zone Books 2013)

Dennis Woods - Rethinking The Power of Maps (Routledge 2010)

Ben Russell - Headmap Manifesto (self published 1999)

Guy Debord - Introduction To A Critique On Urban Geography (1955)

Evaluation methods and criteria

70% attendance

Completion of 2x small exercises

Completion of final project

Note

-

Further information

No schedule has been prepared for this course

The subject is a part of the following study plans