Wednesday, August 19, 2009

My Mapping Project: Routes, routines and what we hear...

I want to map the paths of individuals to see the dominant routes they take through Auckland. In doing so I hope to see how limited our mental maps are.

I want my mapping project to consider how our individual understanding of our city has become a routine. By doing so I want to provoke us to consider how we might like to break away from this routine and in turn discover new things and even better routes.

I do not want to just map the routes taken by individuals, I want to go beyond the visible to the invisible aspects of our contemporary city. In order to do so I would like to include sound as a sensory element.

Whilst making the journey home from university the other day, taking what is certainly my dominant route through the city, my mental map, I considered the importance of sound in placing and locating ourselves. Sound is an invisible, often forgotten and neglected aspect of our contemporary city. Yet sound can tell someone much about our personal geography, sound has the ability to give a sense of time, space and place.

Consider if the visual component of a person’s route is removed but the sound remains, what story does the sound tell us? Can we tell what time it is? Are we inside or outside? How many people surround us?

By mapping the paths of individuals using audio I hope to discover if certain routes of our contemporary city are able to be distinguished by sound. I wonder if rather than locating ourselves by using the tangible, that is the built world, we are able to find our way by using the intangible, in this case sound.

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