User:Zpalomagar/PROJECT PROPOSAL

SECONF DRAFT

will be uploaded 30th September

What do you want to make?

Explore cartography's potential as a socio-activist tool understanding them as communication tools which are able to use global languages. Maps and diagrams can be powerful devices in society and can have a key role in creating visibility for hidden information, behaviours or processes.

I want to create a speculative collections of radical cartographies that allows me to experiment how to use social mapping and diagraming revealing hidden realities. Exploring cartographies in a non conventional way of visual language and trying to take advance of the possibilities that online publishing can complement this tool.

Analyse cartographies as tools between art and design, geography and activism. Using new techniques and technology. This is not about data visualisation but about emotional and affective cartographies.

Explore the relation between diagrams and urban design and architecture elements. The use of maps as a cross-disciplinary tool, as a hybrid design element.

These cartographies, sometimes define as counter-cartographies, radical cartographies or experimental mapping are defined in the book “This is not an atlas” as visual elements that exist beyond the traditional spheres of cartography, and in most cases their creators are primarily activists, critical educators, militant researchers, artist and/or part of social movements. I see mapping as a means to an end: I map for a cause.

Use communities in order to create maps, use collaborative processes and collective making —> wisdom of crowds.

How do you plan to make it?

Developing an atlas of small tools or experiments that allows me to produce radical speculative cartographies in Rotterdam that give visibility to hidden information about social practices, social behaviour, activism and use these maps as a key element to publish.

Creating my own collection of codes and visual languages to visualise information in our post-digital era.

Explore the public information that is available in the Netherlands and transform it with a collection of tools into something legible for people, into a communicative and expressive element - decoding information through design processes -

What is your timetable

Collection of small experiments in parallel to explore global language information visualisation and visual communication.

For cartographic experiments ( in parallel with writing) Collecting data Analysing Define how to translate into a graphic element Translation process ( exploring different tools or software elements to do it -dimanic visualisation) How to use this element as a communication tool for a community Make it public Repeat this process with several variations

Why do you want to make it?

As an architect I have spend my career translating thoughts and ideas into drawings. Furthermore I have always be fascinated about diagramming and graphic novels (Building stories - Chris Ware) that create an universal diagrammed- based tool to challenge the traditional storytelling path and create a new free world to process and perceived a story.

I also understand cartographies and mapping as a key element between some disciplines that I identify myself ( art, architecture, design, activism and technology) so this element is my way to communicate with the world.

As Johanna Drucker explains in her book “Grapheses” Images are produced and consumed in our current culture in quantities that would have been unthinkable in any previous period in human history so this is clearly a crucial area to communicate with people

Who can help you and how

Steve - Global language Michael - How to collect and process big amount of data André - Translation of data into graphic elements ? External people who are working with diagrams and mapping in the Netherlands TBD - maybe interviews ?

Relation to previous practice

Collaborative network processes - crowdsourcing  Workshops - Cartography & community / How to add value in collaborative sessions - wisdom of crowds The library is open - How to make visible hidden processes and information Entreprecariat - Power of capitalism - Structures of power - “Diagrams of power” exhibition was inspiring - How a drawing or a map can express power, specially with cartography and representation of territories Interpretation in annotations/codification of languages- visualisation are always interpretation (humanistic problems of interpretation) During my practice as an architect I have always understood diagrams and maps as a generative elements for architecture and urban design. Expressing at the same time a conceptual and supported idea

Relation to a larger context

Last year data became the most valuable asset on Earth surpassing oil. There is a vital process in how to understand this information, transform it and make emotional document with them. We are not machines, we are not excited with number but with emotions so we have to transform knowledge behind data into emotional elements. Links between knowledge and visuality not only have historic roots, they have historical and cultural dimensions.

Today we are surrounded by information, it is everywhere, there are much more information that we can process in our life. I believe in the collection selection and transformation of this information in a visual element that hide a storytelling. This is the result of a hard work between the artistic practice, the design and the technologic tools that we can use to achieve this goal. This is about turn complex phenomena into images

References

Grapheses - Johanna Drucker
This is not an Atlas - Kollektiv Organgotango
Diagrams of Power - Patricio Dávila
Visual complexity - Manuel Lima
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward R. Tufte
Cartographies of time - Grafton. A Rosenberg. D
The Datafied Society - Mirko Tobias, Karin van Es
Written Language and Picture Language after Otto Neurath - Popularising or Humanising Knowledge - Friedruch Stadler