To follow up yesterday’s post, regarding leaving London and having
to return to my home town, an incredibly less busy and noisy place, I
have posted two maps I drew of routes I have walked, in order to show my
thoughts and experience of that area whilst walking through it. One map
is of a walk from Shoreditch to New Cross in London, and one is from
the Mapplewell to Darton, in my home town, Barnsley.My intention was to
show that the thoughts in ones mind whilst walking through an area and
experiencing it, can make interesting documentation wherever one happens
to be; that whether one is in the heart of a metropolis or in scattered
former mining villages, the internal running commentary that
accompanies that walk can be just as revealing and conscious-awaking of
our real material conditions.
This all related to the Mapping Capitalism course I began, but couldn’t complete, in London, and in particular theorist Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, as a modern means to class conciousness and awareness of our real material conditions, in the disorientating world under late capitalism. Informed by both the philosopher Althusser and the urbanist/town planner who used psychogeographical ideas to create better living environments, Kevin Lynch, Jameson argued that the “mental map of a city explored by Lynch can be extrapolated to that of the social and global totality we carry around in our heads in various garbled forms”
These maps are just the beginning of many I wish to make. I do lots of walking, but not so much leisurely walking (in the sense of a country side stroll), more like walking to town to town, village to village. I have attempted to draw these maps right afterwards, visually the area as I draw the route I walked, in order to remember my emotions and things I saw whilst walking.
If not to anyone else, I find this deeply informative to myself. It’s like when I look back on what I have written the landscape reveals its true identity to me; something an A-Z or Google map could never do. It also made me realise that there is something to be gained conceptually from any walk. Not just a walk through the most tourist-friendly spots on earth.
Map 1. Sunday 7th October 2012
Map 2. Thursday 7th February, 2013
This all related to the Mapping Capitalism course I began, but couldn’t complete, in London, and in particular theorist Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, as a modern means to class conciousness and awareness of our real material conditions, in the disorientating world under late capitalism. Informed by both the philosopher Althusser and the urbanist/town planner who used psychogeographical ideas to create better living environments, Kevin Lynch, Jameson argued that the “mental map of a city explored by Lynch can be extrapolated to that of the social and global totality we carry around in our heads in various garbled forms”
These maps are just the beginning of many I wish to make. I do lots of walking, but not so much leisurely walking (in the sense of a country side stroll), more like walking to town to town, village to village. I have attempted to draw these maps right afterwards, visually the area as I draw the route I walked, in order to remember my emotions and things I saw whilst walking.
If not to anyone else, I find this deeply informative to myself. It’s like when I look back on what I have written the landscape reveals its true identity to me; something an A-Z or Google map could never do. It also made me realise that there is something to be gained conceptually from any walk. Not just a walk through the most tourist-friendly spots on earth.
Map 1. Sunday 7th October 2012
Map 2. Thursday 7th February, 2013
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