As you can see, my final map differs quite dramatically from the one I initially presented for crit. This is due, in large part, to technical difficulties that arose unexpectedly. When I realized that my first idea was not going to work, I was sitting at a computer in the library mac lab feeling frustrated and anxious, because I had no idea what to do next and the rough draft was due in a few days. I opened up a new Photoshop page and started randomly scribbling with the paint tool, and an idea came to me that seemed pretty simple: to create abstract areas as an artistic representation of different moods. The first mood I started with was Anxiety.
What I ended up with was a square with different triangular sections of emotion. I drew over it it, in sharpie, symbols that represented objects or locations where I felt the emotions and used arrows to demonstrate how I get from one emotion to another. I wanted, however, to create a surface that better resembled a traditional map, so I decided to create an imaginary land mass and divide it into sections for the different emotions that were not all the same shape as each other (like they were in my draft). I combined the outlines of real physical locations that are important to me, and then divided the area into the emotions.
Then, I sketched out different symbols to represent places, times, or concepts that corresponded with the emotions. I drew lines, based on highway lines on maps, that showed the paths and directions between the different emotions.
In my final version, I did not use all of the ideas I came up with while sketching because I wanted to be able to make a small number detailed symbols rather than a larger number of simple ones. I was initially planning on labeling the black pathways in sharpie, but after I printed my map out, I realized that it would look too cluttered, so as a result the map remains intentionally a little vague. When I presented an earlier version of this map, Una and Angela suggested I add more to the surface to make it look less flat. I resolved the flatness issue by drawing swiggly lines around the symbols, loosely based on topographical lines and tree rings. The number of lines represents the number of years that that place/idea/belief/person has impacted my life. Finally, I drew dashed lines around the perimeter of the mass to illustrate the future potential of each emotional and my life as a whole, thus suggesting that the map is transient and changeable.
The word “State” served as a large influence on my map making process. I find it curious and interesting that in the English language, the word can mean both a physical area (ie the state of Illinois or in reference to the State as a country) and an emotional territory. The TV show “United States of Tara”, which I do not watch, depicts the life of a woman with Multiple Personality Disorder, and the title is a pun that plays off of the double meaning of State. The duality of State is perfect for a creative mapmaking project, because it enables the map maker, in this case me, to translate an invisible concept into a physical region or location. My map proposes that one can look at my emotions as physical territory: connected, navigable, and segmented somewhat arbitrarily. While creating the map, I did not reference any artist’s work directly, but the ideas behind it resemble the brain phrenology that we looked at on the first day of class and Wolfli, who mapped his emotional turmoil albeit in a less straight-forward manner.
