‘Mapping’ is just one of many approaches, but of course when you look at mapping in detail it involves several quite complex moves.
I’m going to set out on a free association
ramble now, so bear with me. The point being that art isn’t necessarily
logical, it can be but it doesn’t have to be. My own interest in narrative
comes through here, stories are powerful ways to communicate ideas and some
stories are more rambling than others.
The first and most important thing to do when you are
mapping is that you need to translate the information coming from the ‘real’
world into something ‘readable’ or ‘useable’ within your communication vehicle;
in this case a drawing, therefore you need a selection process. A selection
process usually depends on your own particular focus. If you are interested in
botanical drawing, you will walk through the city picking out places where
particular plants or fungi grow, you might focus on places where plant-life has managed
to co-exist alongside motorway fumes or heavy foot traffic. A notebook might look like this one below.
On the other hand someone interested in religious doctrine may look for churches, mosques and temples, as well as associated religious burial grounds, and perhaps locate these within a framework that allows them to examine any particular North, South, East or West facing bias.
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: Notebook
On the other hand someone interested in religious doctrine may look for churches, mosques and temples, as well as associated religious burial grounds, and perhaps locate these within a framework that allows them to examine any particular North, South, East or West facing bias.
Nathan Coley for instance made models from technical drawings done of every religious building he found in Birmingham.
Nathan Coley: The Lamp of Sacrifice: 161 Places of Worship, Birmingham
Once the selection process begins a second
selection process comes in alongside the first; do you draw objects from observation,
do you make a series of rubbings to collect surface data, do you make signs to
stand for different things, (a cross for a Christian Church etc.), do you
collect things found at these sites, do you make models, do you develop a photographic record, produce technical drawings, undertake a series of archeological digs or make a video of the journey between
sites? This second selection process is the one that will give you some
physical material to work with. However you now need to process the information
gathered. This might involve ordering and selecting, perhaps locating and
linking or developing hierarches of information. Whatever system you develop it
will influence both the look and the form of the work, as well as locate your
practice within a wider context. For instance several artists using maps have
referred to Australian Aboriginal ‘Songlines’ as an ideal working methodology. Paths across the
land are as important as those taken in dreams below the ground and in the sky,
the ‘real’ world and its ‘dreaming’ become indistinguishable and therefore become poetically integrated
into the same space. As Glowczewski states, a territory in an aboriginal painting is also a story, it can be infinitely connected with other stories and they connect each territory with all the other stories of the dreamtime.
Aboriginal dreamtime map.
From: Glowczewski, B (1991) Yapa: Aboriginal Painters from Balgo and Lajamanu Paris: Galerie
Baudoin Le Bon
I have found this useful in the development of
my own working processes, as I needed a way of layering memories and dreams on
top of the reality of walking and drawing. However it might be that the
gridding and ordering of information that is central to archeological digs is a
process that allows you to develop your ways of recording and ordering
information. What might be right for myself might be wrong for you.
Another way to work is to decide on
your making process right at the beginning and then apply this to whatever
experience you want to use as a starting point. You can set out a way of making
signs and then decide what the signs stand for. When wanting to indicate
directional movement signs like these are usually quite clear; ←↑→↓, but what
about signs that represent how warm or cold it is? Is ῷ warmer or cooler than ¤
? Perhaps you need to develop new signs. Is drawing on paper the best way
forward? Perhaps you need to perform in order to communicate your thoughts. Necessity is the mother of invention, and in the case below it was important for sailors to be able to communicate between ships. They were used to conventions of flag flying, for instance half mast to signify a death, and the idea of semaphore is a wonderful example of a visual language being developed that could be read at a distance.
The artist has the advantage in that he or she
can develop their own sign system. I’ve mentioned Duchamp’s ‘Green Box’ before,
this is a wonderful example of an artist gathering his notational ideas about
process and signification together and preserving them as a piece of work in
its own right. The concepts developed by Duchamp laid the foundations for
conceptual art and now, 100 years later we are still working through the
consequences of his work.
Processes can be imported from other disciplines, rules of engagement can come from any rule governed activity, be it a board game or a discipline like science, (the rules of experimentation), the rules of OS mapping or the rules we develop in response to our everyday habits.
Sometimes the loss of one faculty can lead to the development of a new language format; this can be due to accident or design.
Duchamp: The Green Box notes
Processes can be imported from other disciplines, rules of engagement can come from any rule governed activity, be it a board game or a discipline like science, (the rules of experimentation), the rules of OS mapping or the rules we develop in response to our everyday habits.
This plan of a board game comes from pre-Islamic Persia
Sometimes the loss of one faculty can lead to the development of a new language format; this can be due to accident or design.
In this case (above) a sign language was developed in order
to allow the deaf to speak to each other. This graphic representation is of course a further development, the original sign languages just used hand movements and these graphic representations are very crude and can't portray how when the hands move they can also signify quality or
So what was Duchamp’s process? The 'Large Glass' was begun in 1915, but from mid-1912 onwards Duchamp
was developing the processes, studies and research methods for its various
sections. (The 'Bride', the 'Chocolate
Grinder', the 'Glider' and the 'Nine Malic Moulds' ) In 1934 he published 94
documents relating to it in a flat case (The Green Box), including photographs, drawings and manuscript notes covering the
period 1911-15 and later. The Glass is divided horizontally into two parts,
with the female section (the Bride's Domain) at the top and the male section
(the Bachelor Apparatus) below, it is a
diagram of an ironic love-making machine in which the male and female parts
communicate by means of two circulatory systems, but without any point of physical contact. Amongst many other things it references alchemy, Tarot cards,
Christian symbolism, symbolic perspective and the fourth dimension. This is what the original looks like.
The image below is a diagram of the work, the labelling referring to the various meanings that have been suggested or implied by reading through Duchamp's notes. 
The key or
‘legend’ to Duchamp’s work in the drawing above is I think very interesting. An
illustrator has been employed to produce a diagram of Duchamp’s work and then
the researcher has linked this to the areas Duchamp set out in the Green Box. The
work now setting out on a new life, something Derrida would have approved of,
the work is being continually re-authored each time a new researcher or historian writes another interpretation. This blog is itself another re-authoring process, new storylines being added to old ones. When we are looking at maps or diagrams, the
legend is vital to their understanding. The diagram below is impossible to understand without its numbered key. But now as I write, my internal narrative logic is now linking this 'machine' drawing to Duchamp's machine thinking, above all his fascination for the 'coupling' of sex with machines. He had probably read Alfred Jarry's 'Supermale' or perhaps worked alongside a plumber, male and female joints being the bread and butter of their trade.
I'm sure sexual innuendo has always been central to metaphoric thinking
Once you introduce it, it is hard not to think of other readings when looking at machine diagrams, but you can of course simply think of them as thinking tools. (Ouch!)
The key or legend was what I was trying to think about, and most of us keep that key in our heads when we work, but it is still there. The ‘legend’ shapes our reading, but in the drawing above there is also a very particular space created by the conventions of technical drawing that the image floats within. The reading being a fusion between what we understand from the annotation and what we get from the image. Different types of technical drawings imply different types of space, see an introduction to technical drawing here:
The key or legend was what I was trying to think about, and most of us keep that key in our heads when we work, but it is still there. The ‘legend’ shapes our reading, but in the drawing above there is also a very particular space created by the conventions of technical drawing that the image floats within. The reading being a fusion between what we understand from the annotation and what we get from the image. Different types of technical drawings imply different types of space, see an introduction to technical drawing here:
Thinking of keys, (and this is why this is art
and not science, but allow me to ramble on), I can draw
with the keys of this computer and one of the most basic ways of doing this is
to make a line by pressing the hyphen key like so ----------------- or the dot
key …………………….. and dots and dashes can be used to create quite complex languages. The dots and dashes system of telegraph
transmission that became known as Morse Code came into being during the late
1830s and one of its earliest versions is seen in the image below in the bottom
line titled "2d For Letters."
International Morse Code (above) was devised a little later
and is now a fixed set of rules and like all languages it can be learnt. It can also be used in
various and ingenious ways, this artist’s book by Matthew Birchall, ‘Photograph Converted into Morse Code’, is a translation of the digital code of a photographic image file into morse.
Photograph Converted into Morse Code: Matthew Birchall
The Chauvet Cave dots and lines are
typical of some of the most commonly found symbols in cave painting. What they meant is hard to say, but I'm sure the makers of these dots had a meaning for them. See:
The Chauvet Cave dots
Recent neurophysiological studies have also shown that dots, dashes and zig-zags are typical of the first stage of hallucinations or visions of entoptic images, (if you get migraines, you will recognise the cut glass like circular zig-zag form that drifts in front of your vision). See:
Lines and zig-zags creating structures in the dark can be seen in the work of Nicolas Bernier. ‘Frequencies’, is an installation that links light and sound. In Bernier’s work the logic of quantum physics is extended into the audiovisual realm. Rapid bursts of white noise and sine waves trigger a zig-zag of luminous patterns in a dark space. See: Making patterns in dark spaces does appear to be something we are quite addicted to, perhaps this is why night clubs have always been so popular.
Lines and zig-zags creating structures in the dark can be seen in the work of Nicolas Bernier. ‘Frequencies’, is an installation that links light and sound. In Bernier’s work the logic of quantum physics is extended into the audiovisual realm. Rapid bursts of white noise and sine waves trigger a zig-zag of luminous patterns in a dark space. See: Making patterns in dark spaces does appear to be something we are quite addicted to, perhaps this is why night clubs have always been so popular.
Another translation system is Braille. Braille
translates visual information into a tactile language. It both looks and feels
convincing because it is based on a coherent and systematic logic.
Braille
Translation between different language
systems is one way of developing a process for generating new ideas. In the case
below a visual language is brought together with sound and touch. By chance I
discovered Braille
Byzantine Music Notation, it looks like this:
By applying these braille rules and re-translating a piece of music back into
English a Byzantine hymn now looks like this:
>HOS _9-!
_PA4
,LORD-:>\ ,I-\ HAVE-: CRIED-,:\ UN-\5'H9 TO-[H: ,THEE-@VR 9'
_P5 HEARK-@Q EN-*\# UN-*\>\1 TO-ME5\ ME-S _P5 HEARK-]<,:1 EN-MH'
UN-*[>\9 TO-\\ ME-:#::>9 ,OR/E5\ ,LORD-S _P5 ,LORD-9@]6[ ,I-\ HAVE-:
CREID-,:@<#\\ UN-8R1 TO-M# ,THEE-:>R 9' _G7 HEARK-,*[# EN-\\ UN-R
TO-\5'H9 ME-:2+O _Z0 AT-] TEND-^U TO-\ THE-\ VOICE-:,:/\9 OF-\H: MY-O SUP-:>\
PLI-:#9 CA-R/E5\ TION-S _P5 WHEN-] ,I-[ CRY-,W\ UN-R TO-\5'H9 ,THE-]3+\:> R
_G7 ,HEARK-[# EN-S UN-*\>\1 TO-M' ME-:#,UH9 ,O-S/E5\ ,LORD-!
If you then
try to shape this text as spoken aloud poetry it feels very similar to sound poetry by Kurt
Schwitters. Listen here:
I do realise
that I’m now rambling again but finding connections and looking for new paths
of thinking is what developing new concepts is all about. Remember this is
not science, it is to use Alfred Jarry’s term, ‘Pataphysics’. Jarry defined
'pataphysics as "the science of imaginary solutions”.
Touch text
The tactile diagram
Another translation system that links sound to touch is the one used by
player pianos. These paper rolls when
opened out are wonderful drawings. When looking at them, time extends along the horizontal axis. High
pitches are at the bottom, and low pitches are at the top. Short notes relate
to single holes, while sustained notes are achieved by punching a series of
holes. The reason they are like this is that sustained notes were punched on a
roll as a series of repeated notes, spaced so closely that air leaks around the
divisions enough to keep a piano key depressed.
The above is an early stage drawing: a composer begins to work out how their composition can be transcribed in holes.
Molly Rausch uses player piano rolls as supports for her drawings
Player piano rolls are also a bit like timelines and timelines are also very rich areas to mine for someone interested in drawing, but this is perhaps something to open out later. In the meantime see this interactive timeline for ideas.
Drawing is a process of thinking, a process that can
generate more thinking, which can itself generate more drawing that can be used
as diagrams or instructions for making things, playing games or singing songs. The process is as interesting as the final product, the two things being inextricably combined.
References:
Art by instruction and the prehistory of do it. See:
Lima, M (2011) Visual Complexity:
Mapping Patterns of Information New York: Princedon
Rosenberg, D (2012) Cartographies of Time New York: Princeton
O’Rourke,
K (2013) Walking as Mapping London:
MIT Press
See also:
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