ISCO Project 1: Weather Map
This is a map of my experience going to, being on, and coming home from an 8-Bit Music themed boat cruise in early September. There are a few decisions I made which are key to one's experience of the finished map, which ultimately make it more a smattering of individual experiments smooshed together onto one page than a work with a clear, singular purpose.
The graphics look somewhat "8-bit" in their cartoonish simplicity and saturated colors, but are not quite the chunky square blocks we associate with 8-bit video games. I kind of wish I had been able to take the 8-bit theme to that point but when I shrunk, simplified, or obscured the symbols any further they became illegible as the entities they represent to the point that I might as well remove them and replace them with numbers or letters or some such symbols, which would likely be pretty dull graphically.
The symbols in the key relate only to experiences involving liquids. For some reason, this is interesting to me. Not liquids, although I obviously enjoy them and they were an important part of this evening, but I am interested in moving a representation of my own experience, or some... some sort of human experience towards something abstract and interesting in its strange meaninglessness. Hopefully my thoughts on this will coalesce at some point this semester. I feel in all of my work I'm trying to walk some line between normal, coherent reality and something schizophrenic or incoherent (though this map is not the best example of that as I rarely do things as subdued or static). I will write about this more in the future as it becomes more relevant to my pieces.
The way the symbols move in single-file lines (hopefully) hint that they represent the movement of a single protagonist, or possibly There is no way to know what direction the protagonist is going. Again, a simple experiment in abstraction.
As usual, the most interesting responses were ones that I did not anticipate and really did not even consider.
First, no one besides those who were there or knew of the night's events ahead of time recognized my simplified, bright pink depictions of lower Manhattan, or of its Brooklyn, Governor's Island, and New Jersey borders. I had figured people would see the resemblance, but it really wasn't crucial that they do.
Second, someone asked why i chose to symbolize land masses with said bright pink, to which I had no response besides that I really like the color. Looking back I still don't have much more of an answer, besides that maybe certain aesthetic choices I've gone back to over the years (like the gratuitous use of certain loud colors) are so deeply ingrained I don't even think about them. It was actually the first choice I made when I started drafting, it happened very naturally.
Ultimately, seeing peoples reaction to my map was a far more valuable experience than the actual act of creating it. It made me examine the significant disparities between how I predict a work of mine will be read by its audience and their actual response in a way I haven't in quite some time. For my next project I hope to apply this thought process to
