Moving Towards a Collaborative Cartography

“As a consequence of the personal experience of places, we are witnessing the multiplication of our understanding of cities and landscapes – there are as many cities as city dwellers, each of them with his/her own view of the city, which in turn, generates his/her perceived city.”

– Teresa Iturrioz and Monica Wachowicz, “An Artistic Perspective for Collaborative and Affective Cartography” in Mapping Different Geographies

The main criticism that I had of Camilo Jose Vergara’s Invincible Cities Map when I reviewed it for my critique, was that it represented one man’s point of view within a neighborhood that he did not live in.  I sought a more diverse array of perspectives for my own map of the Young Filmmaker’s Foundation.  I thought of this organization as a neighborhood ripe for exploration and I did not want to just view it through my eyes, but rather open it up to a more collective cartography.  To do this, I have focused one of my layers on the young filmmakers themselves.

Throughout the course of the semester, I have been able to locate eight different people associated with the foundation – six alumni, two program leaders and one documentary filmmaker who produced a film at a conference for Young Filmmakers in the 1960s.  With each person I talk to, my own expertise on the Young Filmmakers Foundation seems to expand.  It is an expansion of knowledge that goes beyond dates, details and facts – all “plot points” that I thought I would value more throughout the course of the project.  Most of the people who I’ve interviewed for this project seem to disagree on the specifics, due to lack of recollection or interest.  The importance for them lies in the memory of the space that the organization evokes; the city itself and the heart of the Lower East Side.

The alumni, now in their 50s and 60s, reminisce about their experience making films as teenagers, talking about the streets of the Lower East Side and how they explored beyond them.  For Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler, the Film Club storefront on Rivington street was a stop along the way to their urban exploration in other parts of the city.  For their film Ellis Island, they picked up camera equipment and took it with them to the abandoned Ellis Island of the early 1970s.  They used a bike lock to keep their old wooden row boat on the shore and they took turns paddling to the island.  At that time, the island seemed untouched – some of the shots in their film depict paper with spilled ink, still on a table.  Steve and Phil left empty kodachrome boxes in the spaces they explored, a tag that showed people “[they] filmed it first.”

These scraps of nostalgia have turned my plot points into a more vivid space and transformed this map into a meeting of multiple memories; a collective cartography punctuated by subjective experience.  I am no longer the plot point perfectionist that I started out as.  My interview questions have shifted from “Where exactly was that?” to “Tell me what it felt like to be there.”

Photos courtesy of:  Phil Buehler

It is interesting to think of my mapping methodology as somewhere in between OpenStreetMap and Invincible Cities – I am both providing a structure for participation and curating its content, but many people are utilizing the structure to represent their different experiences.  I’m still in the process of pairing subjective experience with the more tangible (i.e. paper) documentation I am finding.  These pairings help anchor the stories.  For example, a story that Rodger Larson tells about working at a community center in the Bronx is anchored by the scan of a New York Times article about Rodger’s first experience teaching filmmaking at the center.

To further contribute to my method of collaborative cartography, and create a participatory approach that is appropriate to the ‘youth as maker’ theme, I am working with Jovon Gilliam, a student intern and media maker from Brooklyn Children’s Museum.  He is learning about the oral history interview while learning about Young Filmmaker’s Foundation.  Below is a short description that he wrote about himself and his interest in this project:

“I am currently 17 years-old and a student at New Exploration into Science, Technology and Math High School.  I have some experience in filmmaking, but I would like to learn go more in depth.  I would like to learn more about interviewing, so I can bring it into my life outside of making movies.  When I graduate, I either want to be a producer or go to school for engineering and design roller coasters.”