Rude Health

A few maps from my Rude Health project.

Creative Mapping - Newtown, Wellington

Even though there were only 5 of us at the workshop, due probably to a combination of bad weather and people being unsure what creative mapping is and what to expect, we did get some great images from the workshop.
As it was wet we stayed in the Newtown Community Centre and though at first glance the room did not look very promising for textures to take rubbings from but it in a way it makes you work harder to seek out interesting textures, the images below show some of the  textures we found.
The next stage will be to use the rubbings to form a map of the room and I will work on this over the next week or so, but also I hope to plan a day long creative community mapping workshop. This would be open to all and focus on producing a texture map of Newtown produced in a day and covering the whole area, what makes rubbings so good as a starting point is that they something most of us have done at some point and they provide a rich source of material and help in looking at a place in a different way.

Texture Maps Chalkle Class

These are the first part of the Wellington Atlas, starting with the Chalkle Class held in Enspiral's boardroom, where these rubbings of various textures were taken by participants in the class. Further classes will explore different aspects of creative map making and I will add more images and information as the project develops.

Wordle, Word Maps and Barmaids

There are many of examples of word maps to be found and I mentioned Paula Scher after a tip off and Merrill Shatzman to name just two and there are many ways to construct a word map. Wordle is one way to generate a word map or maybe better described as a word cloud, but you can enter text or link to a website to generate your map based on the words and how often they appear, so the more often they appear the big they are. I wanted to make on using a list of Wellington street names, but have not found a good source yet. But I did find a list of registered barmaids in Wellington from 1913, I did not no that barmaids needed to register and secondly how many there were. The image below is just the a - g surnames, I plan to look at how to combine it with a map of Wellington later.

Mrs L Lahman, barmaid at the Grand Hotel, Wellington. Dominion post (Newspaper) :Photographic negatives and prints of the Evening Post and Dominion newspapers. Ref: EP/1963/0163-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22696157

Merrill Shatzman

Playing Around

Playing around with Google Maps and finding places in Wellington and overlaying maps from places named the same. I lived in Wilton in Wellington last year so made a map combining Wilton in Wellington with Wilton in Alabama and Wilton in Wiltshire as well as a map of Wellington overlaid with a map of Wellington in Somerset, UK. I could be playing around for years doing this, but it does show up how settlers chose to name places and ignoring the indigenous peoples names of places, which often provide a more descriptive view or connected with a person or event.

3 x Wilton

Wellington NZ Wellington UK

Wellington over Wellington

Aerial Mapping

Link to BBC article on aerial mapping and more information here, might be a good follow on project to work with some of the other Chalkle groups to build our own aerial mapping balloon or we could use one of those flash quadcopters or octocopters.

Dargaville High School

These 'maps' where made by students at Dargaville High School as a way to get them to explore their school environment and to think about different ways to look at something they see everyday. The tasks included searching for a range of colours, single colours, their own alphabet and sounds, it started off fairly slowly but once they started to think about the creative ways they could use it really took off and I ended up having to work with them and thousands of images, but it really helped in looking at their environment afresh.

The soundmap idea was particularly hard as trying to get a group of teenagers quiet for any length of time can be a challenge, but once they got it we produced some good starting points for further development. We were also had a blind student in the class and he was able to help in how listening can help us all relate to the world and gave us an insight in to listening in general.

I am still using sounds as a way to develop soundmaps or soundscapes and a useful resource is freesounds, you can search for freely able sounds and use their maps to explore the world through sound recordings people have uploaded. I am also developing a project using sounds from Wellington and there is more information here.

Psychogeography

Psychogeography is, for me anyway, a means to explore a place, area, city by getting lost or wandering around click here for more information.
I have used some of the ideas of psychogeography when working with school students and communities as a way to explore their local area by setting them some tasks and then combining the resulting information into a map.
Another way psychogeographers have used to discover new places is to use a map of one city to navigate around another, for example using a map of New York to get around Wellington.