Gene's map of Asheville:
Gene, 32, lives in Morningside Park, West Asheville, and moved here from Lexington, KentuckyWhat gets on a map?At some basic level, maps are information. Gregory Bateson once asked, “What gets on a map?” And then he answered himself: “Difference gets on a map.” He meant that a landscape with virtually no variation would be represented by a blank map. Think of it: no roads, no change of elevation, no river, no property lines, no demarcation between field and forest or city and county. The things that get on maps are differences.
Bateson was making a larger point about the nature of information: that information really amounts to a lot of differences. As any computer geek knows, information is a series of of 0’s and 1’s.
Notice also how
different maps of the same place convey different differences, different information, because mapmakers have different
interests. You could say that’s another thing that gets on maps: interests. Most of us look at maps because we’re interested in roads and paths. But a water department employee is interested in a map of water lines. The power company guy wants a map of power lines.
Given that I’m interested in what interests people (their culture), I’ve begun to ask them to draw maps of Asheville. As I go, I’ll probably narrow things down a bit. But I’m interested in “where people go” with the open-ended request: Draw me a map of Asheville. Here’s what I got. First try!
The maps above and below were drawn, with one exception, by professional GIS mapmakers who more customarily use computers to model places. They were generous enough to humor my request that they sketch these maps by hand. They had all, with one exception, been drinking a little beer when they drew these maps.
Pete's map of Asheville:
Pete, 37, lives in West Asheville, moved here two years ago, but has lived on and off in Asheville a long time Greg's map of Asheville:
Greg, 30, now lives in Avery's Creek, was born in Alabama, and grew up in upstate South CarolinaEmily's map of her Dad's apartment:
Emily, 12, spends summers with her Dad in Haw Creek and the rest of the year in Ohio Emily's Dad's map of Asheville:
Emily's Dad, Frank, 38, lives in Haw Creek, has been in the Asheville area five years, and is originally from Barnesville, Ohio
We leave maps behind in our wake. An unmade bed is a sort of map, a map of the night, where we spend about a third of our day. I'm not sure what it says, whether the bed is more territory than map, but a photograph of the bed is more map than territory: it is flat and rectilinear and it suggests topography, geography, movement. For all the stillness of sleep, sleep shakes up the landscape. A bed is a place, one of the more important (if judged by time spent in it) of our lives. We start our days here. We end them here. We call the luminous interval between "life," but events in life are far more fleeting and beyond our control. In bed is where we dream.
