Alternative Map of St. Mary's

My map of St. Mary's is related to a research proposal that I wrote for one of my Anthropology classes. The proposal is about the cigarette smoking behaviors of St. Mary's College students. I want to find out why students begin to smoke and what influences their smoking behaviors.

For the map, I decided to do some research about my own smoking behavior and identify places on campus where I take smoke breaks. I made bars with pictures of smoke around them in Google Sketch. They represent the amount of stress I feel before I smoke a cigarette. At each place, I wrote about what I see, if I am with anyone else, and what I am doing when I decide to take a smoke break. The place markers are color coded according to how often I smoke at each place: red means everyday, purple means four to six days and blue means one to three days. The paths are color coded the same way, but with different shades of each color to distinguish the paths from each other. I also included some nonsmoking areas with reasons for me to quit smoking. One is at the cross country meeting place and one is at my house in Baltimore. I would have liked to includ pictures at each place to show when I am alone and when I am with friends and what I see when I am smoking a cigarette.

By looking at the map and reading about each place, you can draw some conclusions about my smoking behaviors. I am more stresses out when I smoke alone and when I am doing schoolwork. I smoke more often at places that I smoke alone rather than when I am with friends.

Google Sketch Monuments

For the monuments, I chose three of my favorite places on campus, the cross country meeting place by the track, the Monty porch and a spot in Historic St. Mary's that is a nice place to watch the sunset. I tried to make the design of the monuments reflect the reasons I like to go to these places.

The cross country club meets at the end of the south crescents next to the track. We meet here to start our warm up run to Historic. The monument is in the shape of the mile markers along the paths in the woods of Historic. The writing symbolizes the new varsity cross country team that will start in the fall.

The Monty porch monument looks like a mini version of the porch with the same textures and colors. It also has a chimney because I like to take smoke breaks on the porch when I am working in Monty.

In Historic there is a bench under a tree next to the graveyard that I like to sit in and watch the sunset. The monument has the colors of the sunset and they are transparent so when you move around it the colors change. The bench reflects the setting of the spot.

Artist 10: Douglas Gast

30 Days of New Life Project

This project is a series of performances, which has a team of cartographers go to a new city for 30 days. The first one was in 2008 in Berlin, Germany with the New Life Berlin Festival, hosted by Wooloo Productions. The cartographers do not control what goes on the map but they work with residents of the city to map out places and people that are "personally, artistically, historically or culturally significant." An online interactive map is created using Google Maps and the project's website. Each place identified has a description, information gathered from the residents, reflections, images, and/or video.

source: http://transition.turbulence.org/spotlight/30DaysofNewLife/index.html

This is an example of psychogeography because the map is based on the memories and experiences of local residents. The map is not just a map of interesting places in Berlin for tourists to visit but it is a map of the places that are important to the people of Berlin. The places do not have to be popular or well-known, but they can be important for personal reasons.

Carrara Rendering

I think Carrara was the most difficult program to use that we have learned in this class, but I had fun making the map of my home neighborhood. I added some things to mark where we used to go and to symbolize what we would do. The map is based on the parks around my house that we would go to. I added a sleigh to one of them because we used to sled down the big hill at the park and at another park, I added a swing set because there is a swing set at that park that we used to play on. At the end of my street, I added a bike because we were allowed to ride our bikes to the stop sign there and then we had to turn around and go home. I put a 3-D house overtop my house to make it stand out more.

Psychogeography

The concept of psychogeography is very interesting to me. As an anthropology major, I see psychogeography as a good way of making connections between the things people do and why they do them. It is also a good way of visually showing data and making it easy for the general public to understand. It can really help us learn about how we view the places around us and how these places have an effect on us and our lives. By mapping people's emotions and behaviors, we can discover how they relate to certain landscapes and architecture. We can also learn how certain places and areas influence the views of the people living there in the same way that political maps show the views of certain states, cities or neighborhoods.

Artist 9: Martha Gabriel

Sensitive Rose

Sensitive Rose is an interactive compass rose that maps people's desires. It is formed by mobile tags and people interact with it through cell phones or mobile devices. The rose compass navigates the desires in a secret way through the tags which cannot be deciphered with the naked eye. The person must choose what he or she wants from life and the desire is mapped as a colored dot next to the tag related to it. The desires can only be read through a mobile tag reader installed in a cell phone or mobile device.

Source: http://www.sensitiverose.com/

This is kind of like the psychogeography mapping, but it does not map an actual place. It makes a map by navigating throught the desires of people. The desires are placed in the form of a colored dot next to the tag related to the desire. This map cannot be read like a normal geographic map, but it must be deciphered using a mobile device. When you look at it online, you just see the picture above, squares in the form of a flower with colored dots around it. This secret way of navigating the desires is symbolic for how we keep our desires secret and how we try to figure out what other people want from life.

Placing Color Panel Discussion

For the panel discussion of the Placing Color exhibit, the speakers were professors of different majors - Art History, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Physics and Philosophy. The psychology professor raised the question, "Why do we create color?" The sociology and anthropology professor talked about the space in the paintings and how we experience the world. The physics teacher talked about unseen colors and wavelengths and how a rainbow is sorted in space by color and how this is related to how we sort color. The philosophy professor talked about our movement within the world and how we experience color.