Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world

Identifying with the field of cultural geography this studio based research project questions how the consequence and affect of global mobility has changed the way we see and encounter the world, and how this has necessitated alternative ways of visualising our position within it. This creative project explores mobility specifically associated with leisure travel, examining the phenomenon of mobility and what it means to be part of a world on the move. Through practice led research this project questions how both physical and virtual mobilities inform our ability to know and understand the world and how the experience of mobility could be visualised.<br><br>Through scrutinising the visual language of traditional mapping, this research project turns to contemporary cartographic practices as a way to find out how the world may be encountered, how it can be represented visually, and how it may be experienced ontologically. At a time when every surface of the world has been discovered, surveyed or mapped in some way, and the globe is encased in the tracks of satellites, global travel and movement, this project looks at ways of making use of this information: of the spaces, journeys and experiences that this era presents. As a corollary to both mobility and mapping, the relationship between knowing and being are central in this research project. Throughout this project maps and mapping offer an enduring structural and conceptual methodology to create works that evoke some of the unknown in a world of the known.<br><br>Examined through Nicolas Bourriaud’s aptly geographical metaphor of a conceptual archipelago (Bourriaud, 2009) this research project unites a series of separate yet interrelated ideas akin to metaphorical islands, and draws them together to form an archipelago of creative projects. Arising from a curiosity about how the world is encountered and represented, this research project connects cultural geography and cartographic thinking with contemporary art theory and practice, in order to seek new ways of understanding the world. Through this research project I suggest that being in our contemporary world is inextricably linked to wanderlust, mobility and mapping.<br>