Holiday break report

Dear all,

How is it going?

I just post to present you my work in progress, what I did so far, and where I am heading right now.
A quick reminder of the state of my subject when I last meet you: Mapping the unseen (following the project of Stephen Boyd Davis), an emotional cartography.
Biomapping is a neologism. It’s a humanized way of drawing maps. Although maps are already hundred per cent human: they are a representation (made of symbols) and they are a technical process (handrawing, printing…), the biomapping aims to reveal the human hidden behind the map. This human is a sensitive living being, and is going in opposition to the “dead” unsurprising rigorist geographical maps that we are used to, which will represent spaces, more than life within spaces.
They are rational, trustworthy and precise, and serve the community (by their capability of being impersonal, collective and common). In opposition, biomapping [from the Greek βιο / life] would be the translation of the irrational, the subjective and the personal. Though it might follows the same process of representation.
How did I come up wit this idea of live maps? Human beings are seeking for exoticism. In our quest of happiness, we tend to look toward what we can’t see, because it might hide a world of possibility. Reading a map is heading somewhere, mentally escaping to another reality. Where do you want to go, says the map?
In the other hand, the science of cartography is a systematic representation of either satellite views, either architectural drawings, and remains a very down to earth and expectable way of saying how a place looks like.
The exoticism tends to disappear, and that’s the point I will actually focus on along the year.
There are three medias I will work on, relatively associated to this travel outcome.
-Travel guides
-Travel diaries
-Maps
These are three distinct commercial products, but there shouldn’t be any reasons for them to be divided, as a support, as they tend to reach the same aim: travel is about experiencing, sharing, learning and challenging yourself. It’s a living experience and we could say that it overlays three realities: the past (travel guide), the present (maps) and the future (travel diary).

Tomorrow I’ll present you some ideas I had to develop the project.

On the photo you can see Aleksei, he is a vory v zakonye (legitimate thief) and I met him in the Transsiberian, one night. As you can see, he tattooed on his chest two stars, meaning that he belongs and is a high member of this cast of thieves.
Believe me, this guy was a bad guy!




Amaya
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