Day 23: RESPONSE TO TODAY'S LECTURE

Today in lecture we focused on the theme of Mapping and Systems, and how they pertain to art and its daily implications. Rather than  looking at maps in a traditional sense, we focused on the idea of maps as "celebrations of knowledge and mastery", as well as how we map human behavior, beauty, hierarchy / power, demographics, fashion, as well as gentrification throughout history in a social context. Mapping, in this sense, can be as simple as tracing (or "mapping") themes throughout series of works, such as the "Ugly Duckling" motif throughout pop culture shows such American Idol, and outsider / Native interaction as seen in James Cameron's Avatar and its obvious predecessors. In each of the aforementioned categories, we discussed various art works (each mapping different societal "things"), as well of various pop cultural examples. I found the works of Nina Katchadourian that we examined at the beginning of lecture to be quite interesting, in particular, her "World Map", "Coastal Merger", and her "Map Dissection". I liked how in the first two of these works took very common images of world maps, and subtly changed the placement of countries, continents, sizes and orientations, making a completely new world view, potentially a statement about how we, the average viewers, really don't know anything about how the world is laid out, always faced with distortion...a different approach to displaying knowledge, or rather, lack thereof.