The experience of creating a psychogeographic map was definitely a new one, and very interesting. I feel as though my experience may have differed from the majority of my classmates, because here in Virginia, the high was 44 degrees and we had winds reaching 30 MPH. Perfect weather to walk around and draw a map, right? Weather aside, I think that this exercise forced me to look at things a bit outside of the box – to use markers I would not normally notice. This map is done from exiting my condo, and the local high school actually has their football field right behind our condo, so that ended up impacting my map a good bit, and some of my observations and “markers” are actually noises from the games. This is different from what I would normally expect to see on a map and made me expand my understanding of what a map could be or show.
Another part of this exercise was that it made me look at other things besides normal signs and use those as delineations for the map. For instance, instead of using the signs that mark our condo community and show which numbered houses are where, I had to use things like children playing in the street and a giant pile of leaves as my guide posts. I think this exercise has further cemented what I have been learning in this program – that the way you think of and look at things is never the only way. This exercise really pushed me out of my comfort zone to use non-conventional markers for my map.