Map Translations

Last semester I started to work with the senses and how we use them to react to the world around us. I thought about the senses connecting to our language and how there is some forms of disconnect there. By the end of the semester, I was creating three-dimensional cubes that were based off maps of walks I took in different places/cities. Maps are a form of communication we use to show and understand our surroundings. They take our physical three- dimensional world and translate it to a two-dimensional form. Through my project I was to show the translations back and forth between the two and the abstraction that occurs.

Proposal:

Map Translations

The physical world around us has been taken from three-dimensional and transformed to two-dimensional forms for people to better understand our surroundings. Maps help us get from one place to another by creating negative and positive space that shows the ins and outs of the environment. I am interested in translating these maps back and forth between three-dimensional and two-dimensional. Through this I hope to gain an understanding of our relationship to our world by pulling away from the original context of the maps and moving towards abstractions. The visual experiments I go through in the process will work with positive and negative relationships to relate back to the maps.

This piece that I have started creating shown above was moving from the last pieces I had created last semester that were two-dimensional forms of the cubes. This piece is bringing it back to three-dimensional and playing with the positive and negative space of the shadows created by the strings. Some issues that have occurred with is that it is coming off looking too visually heavy. Some solutions that have come up are: removing the canvas, using smaller eye screws, using thicker string to balance the heaviness, just screwing the eye screws into the wall and stringing it on there. I will continue playing with this to see where it can go. The following step after would be finding the shapes the shadows create and translating it back to two-dimensional.