Darby, Montana

My goal while making this map was to illustrate my feelings towards my home town, Darby.  I tried to capture the simple and western atmosphere of the place I grew up.    Each of the images I chose to use in the center have personal meaning to me.  For example, the truck in the middle is the truck that our Town Mayor/ Head Custodian at school drives (odd combination, I know), the mountain on the left is one I climbed last summer (3,500 ft climb in 5 miles, not exactly a brisk walk), and the picture of the dog in front of the barn on the left is at my friends ranch.  It was a very personal project for me and I really like the feeling I get from it.

When making the map I wanted the focus to be on the center.  So the entire meat of the map is located in the center.  Also, I somewhat got rid of the edges by blacking them out using a pastel.  Originally the map did not have the different towns on it but without them I thought it felt unfinished.  The towns also gave the map a more personal touch and makes it so a larger audience can relate to it.  

For the map project I thought of different movies/plays that have a specific journey or plot line. Wizard of OZ came to mind. My map displays the travels of Dorothy. From black and white Kansas to the colorful Munchkinland and vibrant Emerald City. I used a grid to split up the paper and made sure to take advantage of the whole space. The yellowbrick road is the main focus to lead the viewer through the various points. I used mostly small images and small parts of scenes that give a sign of what each stop entails.

Map-Internship Boardgame

For my map project, I didn't want to do a typical map. At first, I considered doing some sort of maze or puzzle but decided that those didn't quite fit with what I wanted to do. So, instead, I looked up images of different board games. Board games have more 'direction' and allow for narratives to be told. For awhile, I had been looking for a way to bring a sense of closure to my summer. I felt as if loose ends were not tied away, and it was a confusing and awkward time of transition from my internship to school. I didn't want to forget what I had done and learned while I was in San Diego as a pastoral intern. I began to list all the different experiences I had there. Then, I thought of ways to translate that onto the gameboard. I included tasks that every pastoral intern (under this program) had to undergo. This was the bottom sheet-black & white. I also wanted to show what I made out of the internship. So, I used tracing paper and with different colored pens, I drew arrows and wrote my thoughts about each task as I went through them. I guess it's like watching a movie and then watching it again as you listen to the Directors'/Actors' commentaries.

Map of Sri Lanka

The division and conflict within the country is portrayed and there is a stark contrast between the north and the south. The irony is that the island itself is shaped like a tear drop which also reflects the conflict within it. The map is both historical and geographical, it has all the major roads and rivers which I highlighted by sticking little squares of paper along the routes. The bright color attributes to making the bottom half attractive and appealing but the top half is completely in black and white with war images implying how separate and out of bounds this area is, compared to the rest of the country. The different images are symbolic  and indicate what you would expect to see at each site. This map would also guide the viewer to locations that interest them historically, leisurely and culturally and also warn the viewer to keep away from certain locations. The background text is historical, it is fragments of information about the civil war, how it originated and the extent of damage it has caused in previous years. Its purpose is to give viewers background information and explains why the map is divided and what the civil war is about. I did not draw any neighboring land masses to enhance the feel of the island and to bring out the fact that despite its small size it is completely different in relation to the areas around it.

The Birthplace of Hip-Hop

I started off wanting to pursue a map that displayed how territorial the hip-hop genre is, showing how each region had its own distinct artists and sound. The inspiration came from Nike's "United Countries of Baseball" campaign seen here. This got more difficult when I realized each region was usually represented by a single city - making any boundaries I drew arbitrary without market research. I progressed to limiting myself to one city, the artists that emerged from it, and other places of relevance in the city that corresponded to rap.


Naturally, I decided on NY, NY - the 'birthplace' of hip-hop. I included different artists' places of birth and schooling, as well as the boundaries of the 5 boroughs. I did the entire project in Adobe Illustrator, first vectoring the borders of the boroughs, then pin pointing the exact locations on the map. Rap is a relatively new genre, but I wanted to depict the map in an older style because of its historic relevance.

A Map of Consciousness

[EXCERPT FROM 2008] "Whoa, what a voiiiiiiiiiiiiddddddd!! I'll go to an empty field; low winds, rustling brushes, big wide moon and an endless tapestry of stars -- but I wouldn't want to fill it with anything because I'm a black black black hole or something like that. But I EXIST and that's what matters. It matters, roight? Thanks descartes."

I took the theme of the project and twisted the definition of "map" to chronicle, through images, connections between philosophies of various psychologists in regard to the "mind and body relation". This is also a very personal work (that blockquote from above is from my journal; "I can't talk to my mother so I talk to my diary." Cheers, Office Space.)-- primarily due to the fact that I chose the philosophies on consciousness (that I find the most intriguing) to display on this map. My intent, with the creation of this map of conscious thought on conscious thought, is to confuse viewers and pose the question: Is there a correct viewpoint?

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The abstracted perspectives on this montage of buildings should imply the absence of definition and position. Due to the subject matter, I used a pastel palette to evoke a more dream-like quality.

My favorite part of the image is the Ego. This little character has squished her almost-androgynous looks into the center of the image (which, of course, implies the importance that one places on the self). The "Ego", as always, is the focal point of you, me, him, her, them. Earlier this year, I had worked on a series of digital sketches on Ego. The girl on the left is the prototype of the frumpy black-and-white Ego I have in my project. It's obvious the character lost a lot of its feminity when I stuck it into this project. 

Overall, I hope my project elicits a "Whoa, trippy" response from an audience. It certainly was a lot of fun to make. The washed-out blues, blushing pinks, beiges, and faded yellows are meant to catch the eye of the viewer as a source of solace from the blackness/nothingness/absence of color that is the background . The white (amateurish) cartographic lines and symbols imposed over the black poster ought to present the idea that it is futile to attempt to map the unknown -- the mystery that is human consciousness. I hope that I've, somewhat successfully, managed to convey (through this project) that particular sentiment.

Map of the Arts at Duke

My map shows the Duke campus with an emphasis on the space given to the arts (music, visual art, and performing art). The colored areas show the campus space devoted to science, residential life, the medical center, and other areas, while the red boxes show the relative sizes and locations of art buildings. The intention behind my map was to make visible the usually invisible practice of the arts on campus, and to show how the arts are physically as well as mentally relegated to the periphery at Duke.

To create this map I examined many different maps of campus, from the "official" map on the Duke website (map.duke.edu) to Google maps to promotional literature given out by the admissions office. I compiled all these maps to create the map shown here. The basic layout was taken from a Google map on which I superimposed a grid. The grey horizontal and vertical lines on my map are the remains of this grid. I also arranged the campus so it would fit within the page but as close to the edges as possible. The overall feel of the final product is like a treasure map, where the viewer has to hunt through the larger colored campus spaces to find the red art buildings that are the focal points of the piece.

In the course of creating my project I did research on the different arts venues at Duke, trying to find out how much space is allotted to them compared to the spaces given to other areas. I discovered that the measurements of spaces on campus are not public, and was unable to get access to them. I was also struck again by the lack of arts spaces on campus compared to the large amount of space given to other campus pursuits. Hopefully, viewers of my map will come to a better understanding of where the arts are located at Duke, as well as become aware of how the arts are marginalized and how space can be a powerful factor of control.

Map Project

I took an abstract approach when doing my map project.  I had originally envisioned silhouetting the images of a caravan over a map of caravan routes, but instead realize what interesting results I could get by only allowing the map to come through within the silhouette. There is movement from right to left in the piece, as I free-handed the images of camel shadows against a sand dune as opposed to actual camel figures, and the country lines within the map lend a blocky, thrown-off grid effect to the image.