Abstract:
This narrative immerses the map-reader in a collection of curiously futile mappings and re-mappings of the City of Auckland. The map-maker [author, collector, possessor] reproduces the “Pulman’s Register Map of the City of Auckland” [1863] in a multitude of architectural makings and re-makings. These translate across analogue and digital realms; translations between original and copy, world and map [and then back again]. The futile nature of the map is discovered through this work as through the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein mapping a projection of the world is seen to be an impossible venture. A map is a two-dimensional copy of a moment in space and time, and can never be a true and accurate recording of the world. Despite this, it is both a chronophobic tool of claim and collection, and an ‘original’ artefact to be preserved and displayed. The making, writing, and research of this thesis seeks to disrupt such colonial measures of claim and collection, by enfolding the map-reader in an abstract architecture of varying exactness, scale and timeliness. The map-maker embraces the rather pleasing vagueness of ambiguous terrains; mappings which are translated, projected and reflected, and where experiential duration is separated from the mapped artefact. Finally the mapreader inhabits this disconnected map [this immaterial map] and the map re-inhabits the world. Throughout these infinite projections of originals and copies, the map-maker and map-reader pursue impossible notions of authenticity as one.
