Idea 2- Presentation Idea

http://www.planbperformance.net/dan/index.htm

Don Belasco Rogers who is also one half of Berlin-based performance artists plan b explained his interest in mapping and the personal geography of cities. To him, they are rather accumulations of events than their hard, concrete surfaces. One of the events which proved that to him was a fire in Clerkenwell, London in which several people were trapped in an illegal porn cinema and killed by the flames. A short while later, every trace of this incident was gone and he realized that this events like these rather live on "in the head and in the body" of the city's inhabitants than anywhere else. The same goes for personal accidents that happened to him throughout London during the time that he had lived there.

As Dan puts it, "we're quite soft to mark, whereas the city is rather hard". When he moved to Berlin in 2001, he wondered where those personal stories about London would go, so in order to approach this new city (and to record his London history), he drew a map of such incidents and then matched it with a map of Berlin of the same scale while Picadilly circus and Brandenburg gate served as center points. Like this, he could approximately tell where an incident would have been if it had happened in Berlin instead of London and subsequently documented the sites. For instance the place where he tripped and head-butted a lamp post near Picadilly circus would have been that patch of open space just in front of the Reichstag.

Becoming increasingly interested the city being a "mnemonic place which lives through its story", he developed several pieces and performances which almost all revolve around similar ideas, like Our House or A description of this place as if you were someone else. The latter uses GPS-technology to place stories around Bristol's Queen Square while the user can walk through them and literally "peel back the layers of a city" and a similar way of tracking oneself through satellite is also applied in the project which Dan is exhibiting at Ginza Art Lab, Mapping.

For this ongoing practice of "daily mapmaking" (which borrows from Gerhard Richter's practice of daily painting), he basically takes his GPS receiver/recorder whereever he goes to trace his ways and watch himself making new connections. The outcome of this project is really beautiful, intricate maps which look a lot like precisely-drawn, slightly technical maps, unless you zoom in and see the inaccuracies of the GPS which suddenly give them something very handmade. Yet, obviously they haven't been "drawn" in a traditional sense but rather been created by his body's movement through the real space they resemble, so there's a whole host of connotations to be found. So now for every day he is in the city, Dan will update the Tokyo-map with last day's data and it will become more ever more complex as he discovers it.

source

When I have collected my everyday routine for about a week, I want to draw my routes out on a map of Dublin. I'll probably mount an A2 or A1 map on board, and put pins in the locations i frequent and could use thread to connect them according to the journey I travel.

I could also use tracing paper to trace my routes from the map, then using that traced image transfer my journey onto soft material and embroid my journey onto a piece of cloth.

I also had an idea of photographing a string that i'll drag behind me on one of my daily journeys, similar to the Hansel and Gretel story, or the Theseus and the Minotaur myth.

I could also look at Richard Long's land art: