The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention 2

1. One especially important aspect for Arnheim's concept is that the concept is generative.  Corner often discusses mapping in generative terms.  For example, he claims that mapping is an "enabling enterprise that both reveals and realizes hidden potential."  What similarities do Arnheim's concept and Corner's mapping share?  What differentiates them?
2. More people in the world interact with Google Maps more regularly than any other map.  Corner argues that maps "possess great force in terms of how people see and act."  How do you think Google Maps has forced people to see and act?  Positively?  Negatively?  At all?
3. Corner looks to Harvey and agrees that "projecting new urban and regional futures must derive less from a utopia of form and more from a utopia of process - how things work, interact and inter-relate in space and time."  I believe that the map feature on Snapchat begins to achieve this in a fascinating way.  Am I right or am I crazy?
4. I think corner tries to place mapping somewhere between free-form subjectivity and and raw factual objectivity.  Is he successful?  Can there be a balance or does the presence of one begin to implicate or diminish the other?
5. Corner paints a grim picture of what I might call "red tape culture."  He claims there are plenty of answers to the question of what to do to address the issues of today and very few answers to the question of how to do it.  Do you think that Corner's mapping stands to be the operational factor that address the how? 

The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention

1) James Corner states; "mapping is particularly instrumental in the construing and constructing of lived space. In this active sense, the function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live", how do we see beyond the reality and whats factual to see the abstract? [213].  

2) If tracing is apart of mapping, what separates the two from one another? [214]. 

3) Mapping is suppose to lead you in the correct direction, but there are many options, points of view, and directions in which one can take. Does this make mapping abstract, if not what does? [217]. 

4) What steps need to be taken to distinguish reality and representation? [222]. 

5) How do you know when there's to much context into a map it becomes confusing?  

Exercise 01_Diagramming a Film

Rushmore

1. Felber
2. Winder
3. Dedrick
4. Noelck
5. Monty

The Royal Tenenbaums

1. Georgeson
2. Every
3. Lee

The Grand Budapest Hotel

1. Dickson
2. Lorenz
3. Liebenow
4. Laluzerne
5. Lin
6. Santos
7. Wosewick

What is not abstraction?

1. Susane K. Langer separates presentational abstraction from generalized abstraction, asserting “In scientific thinking, concepts are abstracted from concretely described facts by a sequence of widening generalization...”  Is Picasso's bull series not a sequence of widening generalizations, not merely “derived from some single instance under proper conditions of imaginative readiness.”? [161-162]

2.  “Samuel Johnson Defined the outcome of an abstraction as ‘a smaller quantity containing the virtue or power of a greater.’” At what point does that occur in Picasso’s bull, is that precisely why he drifted away from the ‘cow’ and brought back the shoulders?


3. If abstractions are often culturally based, is it an ideal window into another cultures perspectives? Is the art of previous societies a view into their abstractions or is it the stylistic means of representation [see geometric period].


4. If you choose to paint what you see without your glasses on, is the representation abstract or is it in fact “syncretistic perception.” [168]

"What Abstraction Is"

1) What does Arnheim mean when he writes, "...in order to produce a sensible abstraction, a concept should be generative"? (174)
2) How does "container concepts" work in abstraction?
3) How does "types" work in abstraction?
4) How does static and dynamic concepts help us recognize patterns and movement? Refer to figure 51 on page 180.
5) If, "in human thinking, every concept is tentative, subject to modification by growth" then how do we generalize/categorize?

Discussion Leaders

Week 02: Wosewick, Lee
Week 03: Lorenz, Noelck
Week 05:
Week 06: Dickson, Wosewick
Week 07: LaLuzerne, Lin
Week 09: LaLuzerne, Noelck
Week 10: Felber, Lorenz
Week 11: Lin
Week 13: Winder, Liebenow
Week 14: Every, Dedrick
Week 15: Liebenow