Reading Response 1

1. Identify the article you have selected and why you chose it.
I chose the "This American Life" article because the title seemed interesting . The article talks about artists who've made maps using the five senses, sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. Each summer these people pick a sense and only using that sense they map out a piece of their world. These people pay very close attention to detail in order to bring a sense of reality to their maps. This article considers maps to be very important because they focus on a particular street or region. According to the article this is "the age of maps" just about all of the maps in the world today have been created within the last 100 years.

2. What are the main points of the essay?
One of the main points of this article is to show how important maps are to our world, and how the world we live in can be completely remapped based on our senses. Some of these people like Dennis Wood, would create maps out of addresses of a certain neighborhood. He also made maps out of graffiti in the neighborhood and he believes these maps represent these neighborhoods and show the potential of the whole world. Toby Lester, another map creator would make maps based strictly on sound he focuses on the harmonies of everyday sound which was inspired by a distraction between his heater’s hum and computer’s fan. There’s also an electronic nose which will be able to track smells like “decaying bacteria”, and Channel Perfume which are the only smells it can really identify until more research will be done. The electronic nose is expected to be used first for mainly, scientific purposes because it can detect certain gas sensors. There’s also a women who made a map using touch by listing possible diseases and her obsessive hypochondria behavior. She talks about her life within the last ten years by explaining her lumps, cramps, and rashes which she believed would be a symptom to some severe condition. For example the year 2005 for her would be mapped out as the year of the brain tumor and for weeks she would be convinced that she had bad headaches and that she feels a knot by her ear which is the “tumor”.

3. How are the ideas or arguments in this article relevant to your own practice as a media artist?
Media and the five senses kind of work hand in hand because most mediums include visual and audio examples. This article sort of put a an emphasis on our senses and it sort of opened up a creative window for me because I got the idea that I can use other senses besides sight and hearing to make media projects. The idea of making maps focused on nothing else but sound or smells is intriguing because most people only visualize maps as a visual source and don’t realize that the visual is so much more because of the things you smell or hear or taste in that particular area.