I was immediately drawn to this idea: "It is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself". Now, I know I am taking this way off on a tangent that is probably not being referred to here, but I've always wanted to work with the visualization of the male and female body being an actual map, but have not found a way to use it. Reading Simulations and the above passage specifically, made me think that you could tell a visual story by focusing on different body parts that correlate to that part of the story either in a real, physiological sense or in a symbolic way.
In some ways, the idea is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man in that a character has a body full of tattoos and when you look at one, it transports you to a different time and space and characters and story. I don't think I would go to that extreme, though, as I would rather use the mapping system of a person's body and its parts to perhaps create an entire story for that person.
It could be done several different ways, but establishing the visual of the body as a map would be an important aspect and it seems like it could be done with some extreme make-up to render the body to look like an actual map or you could go to the other extreme and make it very campy with seemingly interactive special effects where the 'Host' of the video story could 'click' on the main character's body part and that body part would zoom to a close up and then the story of that particular part of the person's body and life would begin.
Here are a few ways to use the body as a map for visual storytelling purposes: When first showing the person as a map, it would be vital to explore the idea that the person's life events happen chronologically, but the telling of their life story as how that person lives and relives it (because we drift between the past, present, and future), may not be chronological, so just as the body doesn't haven't an apparent beginning or end (no butt jokes here, please), their life story could be shared or experienced like a road trip or 'where do you want to go next?' vacation trip ideal. Each body part would be labeled like a map, and each city or mountain or lake or forest could contain several experiences within the same locale of life events, such as romance (the nape of the neck, perhaps), family (the left hand), spirituality (the right knee), jobs (the mouth), etc.
No matter how you map it or choose what body parts represent what life events, I think it could create some wonderful visual opportunities. Simply focusing only on a person's mouth while they apologize to someone could be one way to use the body part mapping system and create an interesting visual dynamic, but to mix it up the mouth could also start another story, but be totally rendered silent while the character experiences his or her first passionate kiss, leaving the person to wonder what the lips and tongue dream about.
We talked about this in class, but I think using the question of mapping as a metaphor is an interesting idea, indeed. Fredric Jameson, for example, speaks of cognitive mapping, which is a process we use to get a hold of our world and its process (he further claims that the postmodern is characterized by a disturbance in our cognitive mapping).
ReplyDeleteIt's also interesting to consider what cartography does in B's context. It replaces the real version. Could we say that science performs a similar operation on the body?