Movement Maps
A unifying characteristic of being a passenger on all forms of public transport is that the control of the vehicle is the responsibility of an individual whose specific job it is to drive it. This relieves one of the need to continually think about, or concentrate on, driving and the best way to move through the traffic. It gives passengers the opportunity to think about and do other things. From my experience riding public transport, the most common ‘other’ activities that passengers engage in are sleeping and reading (done while listening to music).
The ‘Movement Maps’ project that is presented here is about being a passenger on a bus and specifically having the ability and time to do ‘other’ activities while riding public transport. In addition to contemplating what it means to be a passenger on a bus, this work is essentially about movement and how buses move individuals through various parts of a city. Through continual motion and the transportation of people, buses are continually forming relational networks that interconnect the different parts of the city. Buses take people to and from their homes, work and play. These spaces of the city can vary greatly in form, function and wealth, and the bus has the ability to transcend and enter all these spaces in a fairly nondescript way. A bus ride to these different city spaces is done at a primarily slow pace; it is punctuated by stops and starts, the moving in and out of traffic, and a slow swaying from side to side. A bus passenger is continually jostled about, an experience that is made worse by bumpy roads.
If one has ever tried to write while on a bus they will find that the result of their effort is often sloppy and illegible. It is a futile fight to control the pen in a usual manner. These ‘Movement Maps’ are an embrace of the jostling movement of a bus as it moves through a city, as the movement is used as a directional force to guide my pen across the page. Starting as the bus pulls away from one station (a fixed place), they ‘map’ the course of my journey to the next station using this natural force. The result is what you see here, a ‘movement map’. The final outcome may just look like some squiggly lines on a page, but the strength of this concept is that it will be different every time. A ‘movement map’ is determined by the traffic, time of day, weather and how many people are on the bus. The visual object that a viewer sees is a process of the environment, and how the environment passes through an individual. The artist becomes almost inconsequential, but remains essential to a completion of a tangible object. This occurrence mirrors the essence of the individual in the city; an individual in a city is almost a nonentity, but if the individual didn’t exist, then neither would the city.
Another important component of this project/work is how maps inform one of a sense of space and place and how they influence one’s ideas of how a place should be. Almost all of the US’s cities have grown using a grid system, something that is easily mapped and understood. These ‘Movement Maps’ upset the traditional notion of what a map ‘is’ by adding the element of time and space, so that the map is different each time.
Practically speaking these ‘Movement Maps’ were created on the (relatively) new Metrobuses that were recently introduced to one of Mexico City’s main avenues, Insurgentes. The Mexico City government has been congratulated on this transportation system and it continues to grow, with different routes planned to criss-cross the city.
