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Deep maps are finely detailed, multimedia depictions of a place and the people, buildings, objects, flora, and fauna that exist within it and which are inseparable from the activities of everyday life. These depictions may encompass the beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears of residents and help show what ties one place to another. A deep map is a way to engage evidence within its spatio-temporal context and to provide a platform for a spatially-embedded argument. The essays in this book investigate deep mapping and the spatial narratives that stem from it. The authors come from a variety of disciplines: history, religious studies, geography and geographic information science, and computer science. Each applies the concepts of space, time, and place to problems central to an understanding of society and culture, employing deep maps to reveal the confluence of actions and evidence and to trace paths of intellectual exploration by making use of a new creative space that is visual, structurally open, multi-media, and multi-layered.

Carte De Tendre

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‘The Carte de Tendre or the ‘Map of Tender Love’ appeared in the 17th Century novel Clélie by
Madeleine de Scudéry. It is an allegorical love map, ‘a set of instructions in love. The lover who
reads such a map is, at it were, travelling on the body of his or her love.’[1] ‘The country is
bisected by the Inclination a river that runs south to north, joined by two smaller rivers, Respect
and Gratitude before plunging into La mer dangereuse, the Dangerous Sea (unbridled emotions)
which is separated from a reef-ridden narrows, the Terres inconnues, Unknown Land.’[2] The
eroticised body is fleshed out so to speak in the form of a landscape, a libidinal topography of
het-erogenous zones. In The Book of Disquiet Pessoa mentions the Tender Map in relation to a
‘geography of our consciousness’ suggesting reality is a complex equivalent to ‘complicated
coastlines, lakes and rugged mountains.’ [3]

1] Gandelman, Claude, Reading Pictures Viewing Texts, Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, USA 1991 p.81/89

2] Image reproduced and text from https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/245-loves-topography-la-carte-de-tendre/ (accessed 25/07/12)

3] Pessoa Fernando, The Book of Disquiet, Ed. Lancastre Maria José de, Trans. Costa Margaret Jull, Serpent’s Tail: London 1991, p.147

Robert Smithson – Strata

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Robert Smithson – Strata 1970

“Robert Smithson’s photo-essay “Strata” was published in 1970, the same year Anderson’s recycling symbol was released. 1970 also witnessed the inaugural Earth Day, which consecrated an ecological movement that had been building over the decade. Smithson’s own Earth Art during the 60s and into the 70s was similarly concerned with pollution, land reclamation and ecology, though his interests led him always to contemplate the Earth’s matter on an extremely wide time-scale.

“A book is a paper strata,” Smithson says, stringing snippet-like descriptions of distant times together with mentions of x-rays, stereoscopes and dioramas in museum displays, emphasizing the latter’s near-obsolescence so as to project the reader into the museum’s (and the text’s) entropic future. The canny paratactic construction of “Strata,” telegraphic in style and lacking conjunctions and transitions, links past, present and future through verbal abutments and layerings that connect as much as they disjoin. The point bears repeating, as Smithson’s ecological consciousness emphasizes the mind’s distance from the matter it contemplates, a distance given dynamic form in his dialectic of site and non-site, a conjoining disjunction that both bridges the gap between museum and natural site yet defies synthesis in opening the dialectic onto entropic processes in both space and time.

Sea butterflies fall into a nameless ocean. Plaster restorations collecting dust in the Museum of Natural History. The tracks of trilobites harden into fossils. Accumulations of waste on the sea bottoms. Jelly-fish baking under the sun. Digestive systems shown in diagrams. … A tendency to amorphousness….”

Image and text reproduced from https://johnculbert.wordpress.com/tag/strata-a-photogeographic-fiction/ (accessed 11/11/23)