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Experience, Place, Immersion (and Color)

If I try to summarize today in one word it would be: experiential. Today focused on deep mapping, but in particular the kind of deep mapping that is immersive and tied to experience. We really got at a range of different sensory aspects of deep mapping today, particularly with our experience in the Cave. This has all led me to think more about subjectivity and aggregation. If one of the goals of deep mapping is to provide a multiplicity of perspectives, experiences, sources, and interpretations, how does aggregation work in this format? Aggregation is always a process that causes a loss of some kind of detail or specificity. The necessary process of, say, “mapping” in the cartographic sense of the word would seem to limit the multiplicity of interpretations one could draw. Or perhaps it widens it by leaving more to the imagination…I haven’t quite thought this through…

In order to play around with subjectivity and aggregation I decided to take one dimension of a place that we all could share: the IUPUI campus. To do so I did a quick image search for “IUPUI campus,” downloaded the first eight pictures that appeared, then used Colorhunter (www.colorhunter.com) to create eight different color palettes for each of the images. By taking oftentimes quite complicated photographs and simply reducing them to a five-color palette, I’m aggregating them quite dramatically. Can we still recover a sense of place from the IUPUI campus from these palettes? Can we come out with a shared or recognizable sense of place from simply color alone? Better yet, can we emerge with a multiplicity of recognizable experiences from color alone?

I’d be interested to hear your reactions:https://picasaweb.google.com/118230833681778056180/IUPUICampusColorSwatches?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNmax4bShoKaJw&feat=directlink

- Cameron Blevins