This American Life: Mapping

This American Life: Mapping was an audio program presented on thislife.org and presented five ways of mapping the world. One story was about individuals who make maps the traditional way (cartography)—by diagramming locations for our reference. And the other stories were about people who perform some non-traditional cartography: they map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste.

Denis Wood’s account of creating visual representions or maps of phenomena in his neighborhood is fascinating. Even though the concept of mapping such unusual things such as the pools of light from the streetlamps is a simple idea, the resulting map is wonderful to look at. The piece that I think is brilliant is the one where he lay down on the ground in an intersection in his neighborhood and then mapped in silhouette the ‘hole’ in the tree foliage above him and what images he saw through the opening. In some ways, the way he talked about recording data in everyday life reminded me of Edward Tufte’s experiments with photography and motion or his map of Napolean’s march.

I had to laugh out loud for the story of Toby Lester and his sound mapping; as a kid, I did that all the time — by suspending the noise as if the tape stuck, one could easily determine the pitch and then say that the object or the machine was singing its own song! As a musician, I still do it to this day: the pitch of the dog clippers, the annoying whine of my next door neighbor’s massive air conditioning unit through the walls, the comforting hum of the computer tower in my bedroom. I was fascinated the day I learned that the arpeggiated c major chord of the slot machines in Las Vegas were purposely designed that way: the Western ear has been conditioned from a very young age to know that this is a positive, happy and gleeful sound! I just lost all my money in that machine, oh well! It’s all good! I feel great!

For the sense of smell and the sense of touch profiles, they seemed more like scientific databasing (for the electronic nose) and just plain psycho obsessive compulsive disorder than experiments in mapping. I think it might have been much more fun to think about mapping the body for tickle spots or areas that are considered attractive to your lover.

Pico Blvd in Los Angeles is definitely an amazing exercise in mapping the sense of taste. I like how Jonathan Gold took his project so seriously that he made up a series of rules for patronizing his targeted establishments. And the significance each had as his sense of taste was also connected to memories, history and personal knowledge.