Walking the map & tracing the territory

"Walking the Map & Tracing the Territory" is a locative media project created to investigate the relationship between the visual representation and aural/physical experience of space through the roles of mapper and walker. Both forms of knowing a space have biases that privilege certain aspects of space. While visual representation on a map totalizes space and emphasizes the spatial relationship between objects, aural/physical experience emphasizes the evanescent quality of walking and narrative. This exploration has led to the idea that space is physical but also represented, experienced and recreated constantly through its use. The project has drawn on the work of various locative artists such as Janet Cardiff and Rimini Protokoll to understand the way that story, listening and walking can inform one's perception of space. The work of Michel de Certeau has also been used to understand how one creates space through the subjective negotiation of place. Finally, the creation process ofthe installation, using consumer electronics, open-source software and programming languages has also been used as a way of looking at how space is articulated through this technology and how it mediates the mapper's and walker's perception of map and territory.