Hybrid languages: Diagrammatic thinking and subjective mapping for negotiating space & identity
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Arts, Design and Architecture |
Master's thesis
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Author
Date
2024
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Taiteen ja median maisteriohjelma
Language
en
Pages
79 +72
Series
Abstract
Diagrams and maps can fulfill functions other than strictly scientific or cartographic. In the face of environmental and spatial changes, our notions of connection to places are being put under strain. By addressing theoretical research on the use of diagramming and mapping as tools for introspection and personal sense-making, this thesis seeks to find strategies to express a negotiation of identity with a particular connection to place through visual communication design. These strategies are built up into what I will call a ‘hybrid language’. The aim of building such strategies is to foster a productive acceptance, based on Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘staying with the trouble’. By reconnecting to a place and becoming sensitive to its changes, unmapped dimensions become visible, fostering a deepened sense of embeddedness and consolation. Using myself and my own connections to a personally significant location, I explored a series of experimental visual exercises, both from a distance and on-site. These processes were largely led by memory and intuition, in an effort to approach the research from a grounded and decidedly subjective point of view. For this reason, the methodological approach is auto-ethnographic. Theoretical research and site-specific reflective studies converge into ‘Field Poetry’, a personal publication that documents the full research process, and is in itself a study in the expression of identity and spatial connection. The publication contains personal writings, reflective diagrams, and subjective mappings that revealed new layers about the chosen location that I had previously never considered, and in turn, prompted a newly found awareness of the importance of the place in the formation of my own identity. These insights are both a byproduct and an outcome of the artistic research, indicating a circular, rather than linear, process. The key outcome of this study is the development of a hybrid language of expression through various visual communication design techniques, creating a foundation for future similar studies. Because each person, space, and experience is different, a collection of such studies would produce a rich body of subjective mappings, so that a greater understanding of the self and space in the confrontation of environmental loss may begin to take hold.Description
Supervisor
Vyas, RupeshThesis advisor
Keywords
diagrammatic thinking, mapping, the un-mapped, identity, hybrid language, auto-ethnography, grounded mapping, subjective mapping
Other note
Media files notes:
FIELD POETRY – thesis artistic component
Description:
Artistic Production component for MA Thesis (Hybrid Languages: Diagrammatic Thinking and Subjective Mapping for Negotiating Space & Identity)
Also appended to the thesis document in full
