Project 1 - Myriad of Conversations · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Sep 23, 2007

Myriad of Conversations is derived from personal memory of a few events from approximately 20 years of my life. These events are represented briefly as conversations I’ve had with the people involved on a plain (the map) that has no specific chronological order of the events represented. It grew out of an interest in involving the archetypal roles we play of the brother/sister, friend, companion, child etc into a map as a way to organize and represent interactions with different characters in our lives.

These events and relationships are contained within a boundary- which in this case is drawn as a tree. The tree(perimeter) is porous to indicate things that you choose to learn and ignore. The tree is a container of things.

The table is a specific instance or a cumulation of events usually involving one other person (sometimes more). The opposite sides of the table usually represent the kind of relationship. And a conversation in the middle. Sometimes this is a shared understanding and at times it is an interpretation of one of the involved characters.

This is the final memory map

Prior to arriving at this map I tried other approaches in terms of how I wanted to organize these events. One of them was a much more structured, chronological and labeled map. I dropped this because I didn’t feel it was all that important to indicate time in such a clear manner using numbers. Also doing so would make it a string of events that had nothing to do with the meandering experience of relationships and conversations. It also looked too much like a taxonomy of interactions which I wanted to avoid.

I thought it would be interesting to further explore the table as symbol. What if its shape could change depending of what was being said at the table? But this would again turn into a much more detailed typographical work such as the one by Tibor Kalman (from the book You are Here).

This is the first sketch of what I initially intended to do. It was meant to be a comparison of the city grids of New York and the suburb I grew up in India.

I believe the symbols and metaphors such as the tree and the table are powerful in what they can contain and convey. Returning to such iconography is refreshing for me. I also made the map before I did the readings and in a way I was glad I did that. Primarily because I did not feel the need to think of elements of the map as discursive or event based- though there are some uses of tropes of storytelling and cartography. I still feel that I did more of an illustration than a map, primarily because the drawing fails to establish a well defined territory of interrelated events. The relationships and conversations to a large extent are loose, unique and dispersed. They don’t form a firm set of entities. Though this also due to the fact that I attempted to control exactly what I wanted to the map to tell/reveal.

If I were to iterate over I would start by building a detailed set of relationships between different characters I have played and come across in the years. And how each conversation has had a cause and effect on all my relationships with people. I would also further investigate the archetypal roles we play- its fascinating to see how we are different people in different circumstances.

And I would certainly use colour, texture and type!!

Inspiration:
Warli Paintings
You are Here – Katharine Harmon

tags: isco, mapping