Performing Cartographies: Getting inside and beyond the map

Myers, Misha and Frears, Lucy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3654-7246 (2021) Performing Cartographies: Getting inside and beyond the map. In: New Directions in Radical Cartography. Why the Map is Never the Territory. Rowman & Littlefield, Landham, Maryland, US, pp. 209-232. ISBN 9781538147191

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Abstract / Summary

‘All set, then let’s begin…by imagining this. By imagining yourself jumping, jumping and falling, free falling in the 15,000 feet of empty airspace above you now adjusting pitch and roll and yawl with outstretched arms and legs, for sixty seconds, face down an aerial view of this place, birdseye…’

This is how the Hibaldstow track of Mike Pearson’s mp3 audio walk ‘Carrlands’ begins. In the first sixty seconds of the walk he describes the landscape seen from this birdseye view, the patchwork fields, hedges, roads and man-made waterways, the carrs, then immerses the walker in a close up, intricate and intimate experience within it as they hit the ground and walk the ‘bottom lands.’

The aerial view of the landscape’s three dimensions represented in the two-dimensional perspective of the topographic map is disrupted or augmented by work such as Pearson’s Carrlands. Performance cartographies offer an experiential movement through the textured embodied and storied depth of place, whereas traditional forms of map making (McLucas 2001) neglect the presence of people and their embodied experiences of place. Using performance cartographies, one is inside the map both physically in the landscape and sometimes simultaneously, virtually, if technologies are used, for example through hearing and seeing a multi-media and multi-layered ‘narrative archaeology’ of places that can be located and experienced within the map.

This chapter focuses on embodied geographies of landscape, deep mapping and embodied forms of mapping, wayfinding, performance and art, including locative media art or ‘remote performance’, performances involving live or recorded performers mediated by or present through technology. Two case studies of cartographic performance works are presented, each created by one of the co-authors and each from a different period of time in the development of locative media art technologies.

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	Reproduced by permission of Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint.
ISBN:	9781538147191
Subjects:	Technology > Digital Works > Digital Artefact Arts > Drawing Arts > Geographic Geography & Environment Arts > Miscellaneous
Courses by Department:	The School of Film & Television > Film
Related URLs:	Author
Depositing User:	Lucy Frears
Date Deposited:	23 Aug 2022 08:54
Last Modified:	27 Jul 2023 10:53
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/4663

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