I think that Ceara makes a good point in relating the permeability of meaning that both Cosgrove and Corner attribute to mapping in their essays to the stickiness that we return to often in our conceptualizing of Venice. This stickiness also extends, I think, beyond the vacillating boundaries between sea and land, and into the intersection of the cultural/historical/built environmental forces at work in shaping the perception of Venice as a city that exists as an imagined space (perhaps something of what Calvino gets at in his retellings). I think that mapping Venice rhizomatically in both its imagined cultural context and very real environmental milieu might be quite fruitful in this light.
Further what I found most compelling in both Cosgrove and Corners work is their suggesting that the efficacy of mapping lies in its referencing of the power inherent in the perceived objective status granted to the mapping logos. The idea, as I read it, that this fetishization could be used to overturn the very power structures that gave rise to the illusion of objectivity is one that has vast potential. Most of us sat through “An Inconvenient Truth” this morning and can attest to the seductive power that a well-illustrated map can have in conveying an argument/dogma. At the same time we are seeing potential globally disastrous scenarios mapped out, we are told that the powers that be are not currently interested in changing the situation. This stands a particularly relevant (if not immediate) example of using the tools that once reproduced power into tools that subvert it.
Certainly mapping as it is given in these readings is presented as an open-ended enterprise, but what occurred to me as lacking the discussion is how mapping might be conveyed in a more universally sensory realm. A possible example, and one that I am not wholly familiar with, is what Herzog and de Meuron did with their creation of scents that evoked various materials. I can see an argument being created using a sequence of scents mapped in such a way as to convey a possible set of ideas, and one that was necessarily open/permeable in that the associations made by those who experienced the scents would be different.
3 comments:
Corner and Cosgrove’s arguments for the imaginative and projective value of mapping is a nice framework to begin discussing process, a topic which was proposed as a goal for introspection this semester. Both authors agree that technique and decision making of a map has enormous potential in its capacity to reveal previously unseen meanings of a space. Trials and decisions in the process of making something are therefore a conceptual task inherently separate from the gained understandings revealed by the product. The act of mapping, as Corner argues, has the capability of altering our constructed understandings of the reality of a place, thereby challenging normative assumptions of conditions and functions in our world – essential to our task as architects. Commonly, “[…]maps are taken to be ‘true’ and ‘objective’ measures of the world, and are accorded a kind of benign neutrality” (Corner, 215). Corner demonstrates that by critically identifying what is thought of as neutral, true or objective, we can understand the social/political/economic motivations behind maps, and realize that in our representations can never be “true reality,” but can produce new “realities.”
Cosgrove’s discussion of tidal zone mapping is very relevant to my lagoon group’s task of representing the barene’s gradual boundaries.
“Not only are all coasts in fact zones rather than lines – the unstable space between high and low water in tidal zones, for example – which the cartographer has to “fix” according to criteria which are inevitable arbitrary, but their linearity is mapped by determining a finite set of points which are then joined by a sweep of the cartographer’s hand to create a coast-line” (7).
In light of our efforts to produce useful mappings of Venice with laser cut lines, the readings provide at least two considerations that relate to boundaries, or edges, and their meanings. The first is the questionable representational ability of particular lines, and particularly with the edge of coasts, which, according to Cosgove, are “….in fact zones rather than lines…”. While this implies that mapping can introduce abstraction that obscures details as with the nature of the coast, the reading also provided hope that mapping can preserve complexities, such as the “alternative ways of inhabiting the city” revealed by derive. Or, as in colonial mapping, Cosgove implies that a single map created so that colonists could claim land can also reveals a claim by use of its aboriginal peoples in the form of “…rock markings and memory lines.”
It seems that these points may be relevant to Venice’s history of claiming land from the lagoon floor, imposing lines on a landscape of murky zones. On the one hand, Venice defined the edges of its isole atop arbitrary edges of barene which would have naturally kept moving. On the other hand, Venice depended on the existence of a dynamic murky zone to the point where it deflected rivers to preserve it. It seems that mapping has the potential to further reveal these complexities.
Hyun-young's reference to the tidal zones reminds me that I had intended to post the James quotation:
"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."
As you see, I didn't quite have it memorized as accurately as I claimed.
Post a Comment