Maps and Journeys- 2/10 lecture.

Yesterday we attended a lecture provided by Dr Yuwei Lin and Rosie on Cultural Geography and Mapping, and GPS, Telepresence and internet art.

During the first half of the lecture, Yuwei demonstrated how maps can be used as a form of narrative, such as the map of The Shire from Lord of the Rings, and how maps from the past and the present can be used to make political and religious statements, as a motion of power over a people. As can be seen in the Psalter Map, where North, East, South and West have been rearranged for the purpose of making a religious statement, claiming that God comes from the East:

Also, in modern maps there are some statements of political power, such as in this map of China, which includes Taiwan as part of China, despite being a different country:

Yuwei also spoke about how maps can be used to play games, such as in Geocaching, which is an international treasure hunt, started and maintained by others. This is something I was very familiar with as I partake in it regularly and have already incorporated it into elements of this project. Also, she described how maps can be a conceptual representation of a place from a perspective of someone, rather than a literal one. It became apparent to me after this part of the lecture that maps aren't always for simply plotting data and can be used to show a variety of things such as: personal experience, knowledge, memories, identities, belongings, emotions.

The second half of the lecture, presented by Rosie, was more of a presentation of works that were relevant to the subject matter that she wants us to explore for our projects. 

The first artist was Iain Mott, who did sound-mapping in the 80's, using early GPS methods in suitcases to produce sounds with movement. Although now there are many smartphone apps like this and most phones have the technology that he was putting into suitcases, I still realise how important those early experiments were to the technology we have today.

We then looked at artists which had use sound and places together, such as Rebeca.org which is a map of all the places in the world they play an instrument called the Rebeca. Also an artist called Masaki Fujihata who started a project called voicesofaliveness.net. This is a website which exhibits different people following a path on a bicycle and screaming at the same time. 

However the artist I found most interesting was Aram Bartholl, a Dutch artist who does a lot of internet related work, which tackles issues with internet surveillance and the safety of personal information, for example, his installation work called Forgot Your Password? Which is a book with passwords leaked from the networking site LinkedIn.

I really liked this piece of work as it was a very plain and artistic way of showing how vulnerable our personal information is when we look at it in a seemingly 'published' book out for public view. He has also done similar work with postcards, where he took photographs of wifi passwords he had come across and displayed then on a postcard rack, as if to be sold.