A Plan for the Final
1. Essay
The story I want to tell with my essay is about the proof of existence we leave throughout the city. In one of our first classes, we watched a video for Australian tourism that showed a woman dragging a string throughout the city, winding through the streets and alleys. The idea has stuck in my head, that we know the journey we have gone on, but we don’t carry strings around with us. To everyone else, your path is invisible. When you think about it, it’s easy to travel in the city without any physical proof of your journey. You get on the train and get off, and the train keeps moving. Or maybe you walk, and even with walking, you don’t leave any trace. But there is still proof of life in the city. Yes, there are moving cars and trains and people walking on the streets, but even if we stripped the city of all those things, it would still be clear that people were here. So, what are those intentional marks that we leave on the city?
Throughout my walks, I kept finding myself fascinated by the graffiti across the city. Most of these were cartoonish spray paints or tags of the same name I came across again and again. But there were also footprints in the concrete I kept seeing. Were those intentional? Or a permanent mistake? I want to explore the marks we leave on the city, and what paths are left unseen.
2. Field guide
I want my field guide to accompany my essay and to show off some of the different graffiti and stickers I have come across during my walks. I plan to include pictures of graffiti that I have taken, with maps that show where the graffiti can be found. The field guide will mainly be a photo collage, combining all the pictures into one book. I also want to highlight the things that I saw multiple times on my walk, like the same tag names, or the same sticker designs. I think by showing a pattern throughout the city, this can provide an easy entry to the city. It gives people something to look for, and when they find it, it makes them feel connected to the city. I also think it is important to highlight the public art of Chicago outside of just murals. I find the graffiti to make the city a lot more interesting, and I want others to see it in this way rather than as something connected to gangs or illegal activity.
3. Reading Response
Is it possible to make an accurate map? How?
Making is accurate map is not as simple as it may seem. While today we have satellites to give us a pretty accurate representation of the world, it is still difficult to accurately represent the globe on paper. It has been mathematically proven that it is impossible to represent the globe on paper without morphing it in some way. In Krygier and Woods’s article ‘Ce n’est pas le monde’, they suggest another route to map making. They say that every map is a proposition, rather than a representation, of a place. So while it may be impossible for humans to create a scientifically accurate map, we are able to make a map that is accurate to our perception of the world. When we make a map, we are proposing our individual reality of a place based on our experiences and viewpoints.
