Mapping a lived experience in landscape: An artist’s analysis of GPS and GIS data

Abstract

This thesis involves a critical analysis of data types and digital interfaces used in a socially engaged arts practice aligned with the concerns of participatory mapping. The research identifies a problem which occurs when the development and use of technologies begins to conflate data with its visual representation or, conversely, reduces the experience of reality to what can be documented. The thesis aligns with a concern that this impacts the perception of, and sensitivity to, available qualities or indeed possibilities of experience. Responding to this concern questions are raised relating to how and why qualities of objectivity or subjectivity are associated with certain types of data and perceptions of landscape. Employing an autoethnographic research methodology, using Henri Bergson’s theories on perception as a lens, the research progresses through a series of mapping experiments informed by arts practice. It then undertakes a critical analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data, which extends to what effect interfaces have on the interpretation of the data and subjective experiences of landscape. The first experience is a participatory community mapping project that combined 3D game engines, geospatial data and audio-visual documentation of residents’ participation in arts practices into a 3D interactive model. The next intervention is a dérive in Lisbon documenting perceived relationships between matter and memory on a smartphone. This device, whose effect and potential use Guy Debord foresaw in his Society of the Spectacle, integrates the technologies of Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS), and audio-visual recording equipment used to participate in 2D mapping. A critical analysis of the subsequent psychogeographies revealed how qualities of empirical data, associated with objectivity, such as GPS, are distinctly different to the qualities of their representation in GIS. Conversely, the analysis of Audio-visual data identifies the absence of lived, subjective experience from the documentation. The final chapter proposes an alternative interface orientating lines between data points towards a diagram of a virtual experience. Virtual, in this context, is used in an applied sense to describe a reality that cannot in its fullness be represented.