While entering the final stretch of creating my map, I’m finding that curation is my biggest challenge. In the early stages of my project, I imagined my map to be a database. Even though I quickly narrowed down the number of public art projects I wanted to cover, I spent the semester gathering as many artifacts as possible for each project. As I’m working in URT I realize that not all of it is necessary because I’m creating a visual argument and all the pieces should add to the larger picture. While it’s interesting that Janet Cardiff wanted to get rights to use the song “Kung Fu Fighting” for her project “Her Long Black Hair,” it is not necessarily pertinent to my argument.
What’s going to be most time-consuming for the final days of this project is going to be deciding what stays and what goes. I gathered a lot of “goodies” at the Creative Time and Public Art Fund archives and it’s almost a shame not to share them all, but I think presenting only the essential artifacts will make my point clearer to my audience.
The act of mapping has also pointed out some of my missing pieces. I want the reader to see that these artists are waking up city-dwellers to their surroundings. I don’t think this is going to be very clear with out some scene-setting. I am scrambling to get some images that would create more complete pictures of the public art projects I’m representing. I don’t think seeing that a point “lives” at 7th Ave. and 43rd St. quite conveys the feeling of being in Times Square so I’m looking for some supporting imagery.
Despite the last-minute challenges, I’m looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.
2 Comments
1 shannon wrote:
Thanks, Mary. I think we commonly face similar last-minute challenges when we’re writing: I, for one, have to print out a full draft of any paper I’ve written and read it aloud in order to “hear” all the holes — all the assumptions and leaps in logic I’ve made, all the context I’ve omitted, etc. The same is true of the map — we have to see the “big picture” (the “full draft”) in order to identify the parts that are missing.
2 Tanya Toft wrote:
Hi Adrian
Thanks for your presentation last night! I really like the depth that has come to your project with the integration of the pieces these subway murals and decorations actually refer to. I think you are curating it all very nicely! – And for your consideration on ‘what goes in and what goes out’, I will let you know that you are not alone in feeling the pain of having to leave things out that took you hours to collect in the first place. It hurts! And, I am still negotiating if it is better to put everything up there and just include that which fits into your argument, or if it is part of the exercise to exclude those less relevant findings….