Locating Territories
Due: Monday, February 29th.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda, Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
- Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 1946
Sourced from Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
1
This week, we begin to identify and locate territories within the broader spectrum of your interests and practice. Because it may be difficult to define or know how your work will continue to evolve over the next three semesters, our focus instead will be delimiting the field—identifying more of the where than the what. The exercise is also a starting point; from here you begin to articulate your interests and concerns clearly, with care, reason, reflection, through writing, in order to establish a stronger foundation for your work.
This foundation marks the boundaries of your personal landscape of investigation: where you’ll go, where you’d like to go, and what you’d like to do in those places.
2
Please take time to take note of three (3) to five (5) areas that are of deep and abiding interest to you. These can include abstract concepts and broad fields, as well as more specific items.
Within each of these fields, list three qualities that further define your attraction to the subject or topic. For example, if film is one of your interests, you can locate within any number of people, schools, movements, theories, events, debates, & so on, which are of more specific interest to you.
3
Next, survey these sets and discern any patterns or associations—be they formal, historical, conceptual, or intuitive. Edit and format the sets; create a 3-4 sentence statement about the subject terrain you’ve surveyed for Monday’s class. If you wish to share relevant studio work on that day, you may do so, but it is not required.
Please be prepared to present these findings to the group in any format that you deem appropriate. Perhaps Keynote or Powerpoint makes sense, but you are encouraged to be free here, and to make assemble work in a form that makes sense for you. In the past, folks have made a short video, recorded themselves talking over a screen recording, printed, created a PDF walkthrough; you are encouraged to use these short assignments as ways to play with form. Most importantly, pay attention to what is appropriate for you, given the territories and interests that you lay out.
Please upload the final ‘form’ you choose to your folder in Google Drive.
(You will have about 5 minutes each to present, so this method and form should be very concise.)
4
A contextual note on the purpose of this assignment. You may know the dictum, “The map is not the territory” (from Alfred Korzybski, scholar of semantics). As we make maps, and locate territories, we might be equally conscious of how we map, why we map, and from what position. We need to map a territory to set out upon any significant journey; in doing so, we might also recognize the artifice of this entire project. In acknowledging the boundaries of the maps we make, we can throw out, expand, or revise the map.
That’s to say, none of these assignments are meant to lock in your Compendium, but instead provide a scaffolding for inquiry, a way to expand the expression and limits of your interests as we proceed through the semester.
A quote to take with you on the road:
There are things that we like that we like (i.e., we like the fact that we like them).
There are things that we like that we don’t like.
There are things that we don’t like that we like.
And then there are things that we don’t like that we don’t like.
Those are the ones that stay poignant and relevant. Those are the ones that we don’t understand.
-Anthony Huberman, “Naïve Set Theory,” Dot Dot Dot 15 (2008)