Interactive map/ epic poem
A while ago, I sketched out an idea to create a fantastical map of Switzerland that would be accompanied by an epic poem, an Ode to Switzerland. I traced over a found map with paint pens and wrote text in the margins.
I want to expand on this idea so the finalized text will be an epic poem that is slightly based on Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chatwin’s In Patagonia. The setting will be the country roads and mountain passes of Switzerland and my guide will be Albert Hoffman, the swiss scientist who discovered LSD. The poem will stay true to geography and uncover the historical oddities and place-specifities of each village it walks though. I want to sift through the layers of time and create a historical yet fantastical oral/physical map/songline of Switzerland. The poem will function as a sort of hypertext so it will need a reference guide and this where I’m not sure about how to go about it. The map could be physical or digital, it could be both.
Expanding on the piece On the way to the Sublime
This installation was all about mountaintops as shrouded places of mystery. The home of the gods, the earthly paradise, the staircase to the stairs, the point where like in the Sistine chapel man can touch god. I used cairns, stacked rocks, as altars and markers of the path. A series of cairns led to a locked door. Behind the door was a strong light and if the viewer got on their knees and placed their heads as low as they can go, in complete supplication, they could see a glimpse of the Shangri-La. However, the piece was not successful do to space and time constraints.
There were not enough cairns and the path was to straightforward. The piece is as much about the act of walking as it is attempting to reveal what our true destination is. The way that the cairns were laid out did not force the viewer to walk for the amount of time that creates an awareness of the act of walking an in turn an awareness of life itself. (I am not explaining this very well but I am sure you know what I mean. Walking allows your mind to do things that sitting still will never achieve). The cairns should be placed further apart and form a path that is more convoluted, backtracking, circling, and climbing. I’m thinking of acres and acres of land with huge cairns that must be climbed in order to see where the next one is, tiny cairns that are nestled in trees, a wide variety of way-finding marks. This is in a forest but this could also be in a desert where the cairns would stand out from the atmosphere as man-made monoliths. Overall, I would like to create a path (or space-intervention) in an urban park that is navigated from cairn to cairn using sound, treasure-hunting, logic and riddles.
Expanding on the form I discovered in You Win
I would like to make a huge landscape out of found video. I want to collage the video like I did in You Win but hundreds of more times. Rather then focusing on narrative I would focus on the visual and aural experience. Imagine a landscape like this:
or this:
but each brushstroke is a piece of video.
