The International Transentient Cartographicacy Project

The International Transentient Cartographicacy Project exposes both the continuities and the distortions of contemporary urban experience through storytelling and a series of superimposed audiovisual environments. The project challenges traditional cartography by attempting to blur the boundaries between politically demarcated and subjectively experienced space by representing a hybrid, conceptual space through memories and personal experiences.

Fig. 1.

The International Transentient Cartographicacy Project (Public Space segment), 2003-2004. Single-channel video installation with sound and on-line interactive map. Public space is given a new dimension as the daily activities of Mexico City residents moving through the Jardín del Centenario in Coyoacán are superimposed onto the landscape of Diceman's Corner, Meeting House Square, Dublin, Ireland.

© Gilbert Guerrero and Kathleen Quillian

During the fall of 2003, we conducted interviews with family, friends and acquaintances who had traveled or lived in Mexico City. From the information we collected, we generated an interactive map of the city organized around these stories and personal experiences (Color Plate D No. 1). This map was placed on-line and made openly available for comments and additional stories. The map was specially created for this project by integrating the design for a simple, spatially oriented message board with a sophisticated PHP and MySQL database-driven open-source application called ActionApps [¹].

In March 2004 we traveled to Mexico City, where, during a 2-week period, we explored and documented the city with video, film and photographs, using the map as a navigational and spiritual guide. In June 2004 we traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to present our documentation as a series of public installations during the ReJoyce Dublin 2004 Festival, which marked the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday (the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses is set). The project was inspired by the "Wandering Rocks" episode (the 10th chapter of the novel), in which residents of Dublin are described moving about the city during the afternoon of 16 June 1904.

Over the course of a week, six installations were presented separately at six sites around Dublin. Each video was projected at near-human scale at sites chosen according to how well they connected with the presented footage. One video segment of Mexico City residents boating through the canals in the borough of Xochimilco was projected onto the banks of the Liffey River, making it appear as though the boats were floating through Dublin. On another night, in a corner of Meeting House Square, another video segment showed children feeding pigeons and couples strolling past what was once the hacienda of Hernan Cortés in the public plaza of Coyoacán (Fig. 1). The Mexican organ grinder in that video became a performer for Dubliners on their way to restaurants, pubs or the nearby Irish Film Centre. In another installation, the image of the Virgin de Guadalupe was displayed to visitors of St. Mary's Abbey. Tourgoers made their way through the exhibits set up in the last remaining structure of this ancient monastery while an image of Mexico City's virgen floated silently above them. In each of the installations, an audio soundtrack projected the stories that we had collected in our original interviews, plus sounds gathered in Mexico City. These sounds then mingled with and became part of the Dublin landscape, creating a third soundtrack of virtual resonance.

Through a layered combination of images, sounds and stories, barriers between time and territory collapsed into shared experiences, briefly turning differences into similarities.