Admittedly, I had a bit of a late start to methods of cataloguing.

I was running into a bit of a mental block with the idea of re-cataloguing or re contextualising an already tightly defined set—it felt like trying to dismantle a brutalist housing development with a spoon.

I ended up restarting my initial project before it even got off the ground. I had initially selected 10 books off of the CSM shelf from the Occult and Freud section but felt like I was unable to do anything with them.

I restarted using the Harvard Collection’s collection of city maps.

Seen here is a small selection of the final images I chose to use. Initially was very inspired by the phenomenon of urban sprawl, particularly in America.

I began to combine the images to illustrate how lifeless and impersonal a place becomes when it gets absorbed as part of urban sprawl.

After looking at the maps more in depth, I realised that the elements of the maps were actually quite beautiful themselves, and were something that was totally overlooked by the server/computer system that organised them. There was no way to “sort by beauty” or “select elements based on quality” — just place, time, author.

I began to collect and categorise images by their elements rather than their displayed purpose (a map).

After collecting these, I made a very crude catalog of them to present. In my head, I viewed each different category as a different method, but as soon as I started presenting I realised that I had *accidentally!* only produced two methods of initial cataloging.

The following is a further developed version of the second method.

After producing this though, I wasn’t really happy with the outcome as it didn’t feel like I was challenging myself to create something new or exciting. I didn’t really like what I had made.

So instead of just calling it quits there, I decided to further develop this concept to be a little bit more playful; I made a map of maps

The idea was to really create a meta map. A meaningless map that wouldn’t be able to guide you anywhere—it’s simply just a collection of elements that are nice to look at.

Based on the feedback I received, I think an interesting next step (that I am planning on taking) is to riso print all of the elements to be cut out, and layer them physically. Ideally I can create several copies of these elements and have the viewer create their own map using elements as they see fit.