The world's a stage, and we are but poor stagehands

I’m having, as usual, a great time at NACIS here in Missoula (I'm writing this in the lobby of the Holiday Inn between sessions). We started with MapGiving, a new initiative to organize and collect efforts to create maps pro bono for good causes. Our kickoff event was a grueling 12-hour marathon, making what ended up as a first draft of a map for the Hank Aaron State Trail in Milwaukee.

Oddly, what I keep coming back to so far, which has very little to do with any of the conversations I'm actually having, has to do with performance and stage setting. Now, in the Western theatrical tradition, the stage setting ought to be a neutral space for a performance to take place in. A big fancy setting requires a big fancy performance. In other cultures (I'm thinking here for example of the ras lila plays my mom spent some time among in Vrindaban in India), the setting is itself a sort of performance.

My view of how maps work increasingly works with this metaphor. The performance is the specific narrative information, the "story" that is being told. In the case of what we call "reference" maps, that performance is expected to be played out by map users identifying relationships, routes and patterns upon the stage setting of the map. For propaganda and other persuasive maps, the map itself makes a performance, enacting arguments as part of the product.

What Denil, Krygier and Wood and much of the rest of modern cartocriticism all have in common, is the realization that the western idea of separating stage setting from performance is an artificial one. The way we draw the setting for our argument is itself an argument for what background will be used in the discussion.

I still think there is a useful distinction to be made in looking at the stage and the performer as distinct, simply because they are experienced differently. When we look at even a Wagnerian stage setting, a ras lila with flowers pouring from the ceiling for an hour continuously, an evening at Red Rocks, we are in an environment. The performers, on the other hand, we perceive as persons. So perhaps this is a useful distinction: where is the thing we are taking in a "person", and where is it a "non-person."

More food for thought.

Home and Away

One of the defining moments in my pre-cartographic life was my first time in London (England) in 1983. I did a lot of wandering about, and had an old-fashioned Bartholomew’s map of the city (hand lettering and cross-hatching, spot colors, etc.). I took some longish walks exploring the city, and then would get out the map to see where I’d been. Because London is such an un-gridded city, I’d find myself approaching places I’d been before from new directions, and later, tracing my route on the map, I’d realize I’d sometimes been only a block or two from a previous day’s walk.

In this case, the map provided an obvious framework on which I “draped” my own experiences. I’ve found that for large-scale maps in general, this process of using the map as a common base for explorations makes places make sense—especially urban spaces (I’m not much of a wilderness walker).

To me this is central to what a map is good for, but it is of course only a small part of what maps do in the world: it only really happens using large-scale maps: maps of states and countries don’t have the sort of visual information that ties direct experiences together.

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Every so often these days, I’ll find myself approaching a familiar place from an unfamiliar direction, and I find the jump from one to the other to be a sudden change in attitude. When i drive through unfamiliar places, I pay attention to the generic: interstate highway signage, billboards, franchise stores. It makes me a little sad to see this generic quality, when I am interested in seeing something new and different; it makes me think a little of John Steinbeck’s rants against growing uniformity and generic-ness 50 years ago in Travels With Charley.

On the other hand, I see the same signage, billboards and franchise stores in my own back yard, and they seem simultaneously normal (they’re always there) and locally rooted (they’re landmarks, and they employ or otherwise have to do with my neighbors). A Burger King on the corner near my office closed earlier this year, and while I won’t miss it as a place to get food or as a neighborhood social hub, it was a little disturbing to see the marker of the corner of 18th and Central change.

My point is, depending on whether I’m home or away, my responses to these generic landmarks change. When I’m in unfamiliar territory, they are the only things familiar to me. And in fact when I’m on the road, I tend to seek out specific generic national brands for the sake of being reasonably sure of what I’m getting. When I’m on familiar turf, these generic brands are just part of a familiar landscape more shaped by my past experience and those of friends.

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Where am I going with this?

When I cross under an anonymous freeway bridge (and is there any other kind, really?), it makes a huge difference in my attitude if I can see in my mind’s eye that it’s a bridge I’ve crossed myself. It becomes a “home” experience. When it’s an unfamiliar road, all I see is the bridge; when it’s a familiar road, it becomes part of a mental map of the familiar.

I think of the experience of driving a new bypass on a formerly familiar route. The landmarks all look right, and then suddenly I’m seeing familiar places from the wrong angle, and then familiar places from elsewhere on my map, or features I’d never seen before.

This to me is where large-scale maps can be very useful. They let me make sense of new experiences like this, and ground them amongst my existing experience. I find it a kind of exciting thing to edit a map to show a new road alignment (call me weird) in part because it’s about a new experience of a familiar space.

But interestingly, those maps are themselves built of entirely generic graphic materials. So they can’t and don’t actually transmit local sense of place. They are all grammar and syntax, all the graphic equivalent of journalistic speech, without any sense of direct experience or personal lives lived. When I project my experience on them (as JB Harley did in his famous essay on an Ordnance Survey map of his former home town), I am essentially draping experience over a framework. This process is similar to the way I approach a new place via landmark, directional orientation, and street grid, and then build experience on top of that.

So what I think I am approaching here is a way of looking at maps that needs to incorporate more than the map itself. Studying cartography separate from experience, especially studying meaning and implicit content of maps, is like studying syntax and grammar and sentence structure without ever acknowledging one can be moved by literature.

Windows

Imagine three frames, each on a wall, with essentially the same view of a landscape through them. The first is a window in a house, the second is a painting, and the third is a window on a theatrical stage.

In the case of the real window, the world seen through the window is in fact three-dimensional, and one can assume that clues in this window to what lies beyond the line of sight of the person inside will be largely confirmed in fact: a view of downtown New York will not be replaced by a view of rural Vermont if you stick your head out and look off to the left.

In the case of the painting, one can assume there was a model for the painting: what one sees is a fiction based on visual documentation. But even as a work of fiction, the conventions of landscape painting imply that if one could stick one's head through the picture-plane as if it were a window, one would have the same effect as above: the fictional landscape seen in the picture continues past the "window," while the painting itself probably doesn't continue much past the edge of the frame.

In the third case, a scene seen through a window in a stage-set, the set designer is portraying something similar to the first instance, but the portrayal is only as good as it needs to be to fool the audience. Beyond the sightlines of the audience, the backdrop with landscape painted on it is left unpainted, such that an actor looking through the window could clearly see the edge of the artwork, even the edge of the surface the painting was made on. The character that actor plays, however, has fictionally the same experience as the first viewer.

This framing effect, implying a world past what we can see, is basic to "realistic" arts in all their forms. Characters arriving into a scene in a movie or play in mid-conversation imply there actually was a conversation before we heard it. An apartment in a novel or an interior decorator's plan is assumed to be part of a larger building. A person whose mug-shot we see is assumed to actually have a torso.

And territory mapped is assumed to continue past the edge of the map.

The set designer, the landscape painter, and the cartographer are very much aware that their work is creating an illusion of continuity past the picture-frame, while the user does not need to be aware of the falsity of this illusion and in fact needs to ignore it in order to use the picture/set/map as it is intended. I'm thinking this is a major (the major?) divide between creator and user. More on that divide next time.