Here’s a very early outline of what I have planned for my conference work. I have noticed that many people use public wall space as a canvas for expressing themselves around campus. People are compelled to speak their mind, and as a result there are a lot of messages, doodles and scribblings all over the place. I am planning on making a map that shows some of these messages and draws interesting relationships between message types. I’m definitely not set on these types being Band Name, Doodles, and Political Messages, but I used them to develop an early sign system and method of encoding information into my draft above. I am going to go out some evening this week and take pictures of everything I can, and then go to work sorting through and drawing some interesting connections to map out.
Thinking back, I have always found something amusing about the graffiti in bathroom stalls around campus (not that this project is limited to bathroom graffiti). However it wasn’t until checking out Everything Sings and seeing Dennis Wood’s graffiti map that I realized this could be interesting to do around SLC. I hope to take this map a few steps beyond his, and map some connections between the underlying themes that I discover in the messages, and use the project as an opportunity to connect with the thoughts of those who write on walls around these here parts.
