Sotelo-Castro, Luis.

"Participation Cartography: The Presentation of Self in Spatio-Temporal

Terms." M/C Journal 12.5 (Dec. 2009). 19 Jan. 2010 <http://journal.media-
culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/192>.

Participation Cartography: The Presentation of

Self in Spatio-Temporal Terms

In this paper, I focus on disclosures by one participant as enabled by a

kind of artistic practice that I term “participation cartography.” By using
“participation cartography” as a framework for the analysis of Running
Stitch (2006), a piece by Jen Southern (U.K.) and Jen Hamilton (Canada),
I demonstrate that disclosures by participants in this practice are to be
seen as a form of self-mapping that positions the self in relation to a given
performance space. These self-positionings present the self in spatio-
temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define
the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an
unfolding live process.

It is my argument here that most of the participation performances to

which the term “participation cartography” may be applied don’t have a
mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation
experience embedded in the framework the artists provide. By discussing
Running Stitch from some participant’s perspectives—mine included—I
demonstrate that if such a sharing mechanism was provided, the
participant’s disclosures would enact a poetics of sharing that at once
reveals and conceals aspects of the self. “Participation cartography”
performances hold the power to generate autobiographical conversations
and exchanges. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges,
the disclosures made by participants in and through “participation
performances” such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they
reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these
practices.

Running Stitch (2006)

This piece is a performative installation that involves the use of Global
Positioning Technology and walking performances by participants in order
to produce collaboratively a new kind of “map” or visual-art object, more
concretely a tapestry. I experienced it in 2006 in Brighton (UK). It was
commissioned by Fabrica, “a gallery promoting the understanding of
contemporary art” (see: http://www.fabrica.org.uk/).

The following is the description made by the artists of the work on their
Website (see: http://www.satellitebureau.net/p8.php):

Running Stitch is a 5m x 5m tapestry map, created live during the

exhibition by charting the journeys of participants through the
city...Visitors to the exhibition took a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track
their journeys through the city centre. These walks resulted in individual
GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that were then projected live in
the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city. Each individual route
was sewn, as it happened, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving
tapestry that revealed a sense of place and interconnection (see also fig.
1).

Figure 1. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch

and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.

As the vocabulary used by the artists shows, the work was conceived at
that time (2006) as a kind of collaborative map-making process by which
previously “hidden aspects of the city” can be disclosed. My interrogation
of this practice starts by questioning the assumption that cartography, as
illustrated by cases such as this, refers to a physical or geographical space
—the city. Through the lens of “participation cartography” I mean to show
that that what is being mapped in and through practices such as Running
Stitch is not (physical) space but the being-who-moves in space. Rather
than the city, it is the multiple subjects-who-move in Brighton’s town
centre on a particular day in 2006 and within the frame of this event what
is the theme and content of the resulting tapestry and of the disclosures it
may contain. Accordingly, the resulting visualisation (the map) is to be
seen as a documentation of past performances by concrete individuals
rather than as a visual representation of urban space or as an
autonomous visual-art object. Practices such as this are a particular form
of “spatial auto-bio-graphical” performance art. In these practices, the
boundaries between notions of cartography and autobiography are blurred
and need to be critically addressed.

More established critical vocabularies such as locative media (Hemment),

psychogeography (Kanarinka), collaborative mapping (Sant), map-art
(Wood), or counter-cartographies (Holmes), with which similar works
have been discussed typically focus on studying the relationships between
the resulting visual-art objects and notions of space, as well as on issues
of representation. Similarly, the term site-specific performance, as
articulated for instance by Nick Kaye, draws attention primarily to the
physical location in which the meaning of a given artwork may be defined
(1), rather than on the participation experience by the subject who
engages with the artistic process. In my view, a participants-centred
approach is needed in order to adequately understand the power of
participation performances such as Running Stitch (2006) and its
connections with ‘auto-bio-graphical’ performance.

Participation Cartography: A New Vocabulary

“Participation cartography” introduces an ontological shift in what is
typically considered performance art. From live gestures, or more
precisely, “live art by artists,” as art historian Rose Lee Goldberg (9) has
defined it, performance is re-defined by these practices into live art by
participants in response to a spatio-temporal interaction framework
provided by artists.

Running Stitch illustrates a kind of practice in which the artists’s creation

is not a finished artwork or arrangement of actions and conditions (a
conventional performance). Rather, the artists’s creation is a kind of “open
work” in the sense that the active role of the participant is envisaged by
the artist at the very moment of conceiving the work (Eco 3). The
participant is, moreover, conceived of by the artist as an individual who
collaborates with the artist or group of artists in the very production of the
artwork.

From an ontological point of view, I conceptualise more specifically

practices such as Running Stitch as what Allan Kaprow termed
“participation performances,” that is, performances in which those who
take part are literally, the ingredients of the performances (Kaprow 184).
These were lifelike pieces in which normal routines by non-actors became
the performance of a routine. In participation performances or activities
every day life “performances” or “presentations of self” (Goffman) are
framed as art, and more concretely, as a happening or a new form of
theatre or performance art. For instance, by means of instructions to be
enacted by non professional performers, in Kaprow’s participation
performance Maneuvers the daily routine of the courtesy shown another
person when passing through a doorway becomes the artistic performance
of that routine (191).

I conceptualise practices such as Running Stitch as a particular form of

“participation performance,” namely as “participation cartography.” The
cartographic power of such practices needs to be studied from the
participant’s perspective. Let me illustrate this idea by discussing Running
Stitch more in detail.

Over a four weeks period, more than hundred participants collaborated in

the production of the object called by the artists “the tapestry map”. Each
walk was represented by a line of stitches on the canvas, and each walk
was stitched with a different colour. At the end of the process, the
tapestry was a colourful and intertwined collection of threads stitched onto
the same surface (see fig. 2).

Figure 2. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch

and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.

But, what did each thread disclose about each participant? Who are they?
What exactly is disclosed to whom?

On Disclosure
In Running Stitch it is possible to speak of two moments of disclosure,
each moment illustrating a different scope of the verb “to disclose.” First,
there is the disclosure in real time of the physical location of each walker.
Second, there is the disclosure of the sense of purpose of the journey and
of all what happened to the participant during the walk and after when
confronted with the visualisation of her personal walk. It is this second
disclosure what can infuse the “map” with personal meaning.

In the first case, disclosure is associated with surveillance. Positioning, as

used within the framework of Global Positioning Systems, refers to the
computational process whereby the geographical location of the carrier of
the GPS device can be pinpointed, usually on a conventional digital map.
“To disclose” means here to make visible and, more precisely, to “draw”
by means of technology the whereabouts of someone—an anonymous
other—who is outside of the gallery walking about Brighton’s city centre.
This first moment of disclosure happens for all to be seen in the gallery. It
is framed by the artists as the core of what constitutes Running Stitch as
an artwork.
However, the technology-aided map-making that takes place here
conceals the mental processes and the autobiographical stories that go
with the actual walk—where did the participants go and why, what made
them be there in the first place? This can only be known if the participant
is given a voice for him or her to “map” herself by presenting the Self in
spatio-temporal terms within the public arena of the ongoing artistic
event. This would require an additional sharing mechanism to be
embedded within the framework provided by the artists.

As organised by the artists, two participants at a time were walking during

one hour outside in Brighton’s town centre in the area surrounding the
Fabrica Gallery. While this was happening, other members of the public
could witness the unfolding journeys live on the canvas inside the gallery.
While one was watching, there were of course random and casual
opportunities to engage in conversations with other onlookers. However,
the artists did not devise more formal opportunities for the public to
engage in conversations with previous participants or with other
onlookers. After the two walkers in turn had returned to the gallery and
finished their walks, the next set of walkers would depart. Typically, the
previous walkers would stay for some minutes watching at the resulting
visualisation of their walk—the running stitches—on the canvas. The
framework provided by the artists placed these previous walkers as
onlookers rather than as ‘official’ commentators of their own walks. Their
comments and their thoughts on the running stitches representing their
walk remained secret—concealed, unless spontaneous conversations
would randomly communicate (reveal) them.

Fortunately, the artists did ask participants-walkers to fill anonymously a

feedback sheet before leaving the gallery. In that sheet, participants had
an opportunity to share their comments and thoughts about their
participation experience with the artists in writing. These responses
provide the evidence that, in practices such as this, a second disclosure
moment can take place and, indeed, needs to be seen as integral to the
cartographic process. Disclosure, in this second moment, is not associated
with surveillance but with the ideas of sharing, self-reflexion, subjective
positioning, and self-mapping.

“My walk was an act of love…”

One Running Stitch participant wrote anonymously in the above
mentioned feedback sheet:

My walk was for a friend of mine –Sandra- who’s very ill. I wanted to go
past various landmarks that had meaning for us both and end up in
Prestor Park where I could make a large S shape. There was another park
where we used to meet where I wanted to make an ‘X’ shape. Sandra
signed her e-mails SX. (“My walk was an act of love”).

This testimony, which was not shared with others during the cartographic
process called Running Stitch but framed by the artists as private
participants’s feedback, not only comments about the walk but constitutes
it. This story explains what makes the participant ‘be there’, go to Prestor
Park, and walk/draw an “X” shape on the canvas. Rather than a statement
about place in itself, it is a “spatial auto-bio-graphical” presentation of Self
as a friend of Sandra.

Within the framework of “participation cartography,” a “spatial auto-bio-

graphical presentation” is a presentation of Self in spatio-temporal terms
that involves an act of self-reading.

By means of reflexive language, the participant gives an account of his

walk as represented by his running stitches on the canvas. Literarily, by
drawing his walk on the canvas via the Running Stitch framework, the
participant made his Self legible. However, nobody but the walker himself
is in the position to make an authoritative reading of his walk. The terms
“reading” and “legibility” refer in this context to the ability to both
remember and make sense of one’s own steps. In this sense, the drawing
—the trace of the walk—must be seen as a mnemonic device enabling the
subject who walked to perform self-reading, hermeneutic acts. Disclosure,
as illustrated by this case, is then linked with a self-reading process in
terms of a walk—a spatio-temporal live process—as documented on the
canvas.

Certainly, the Self of the participant emerges as the theme of his map as
drawn on the canvas: “I wanted to go past various landmarks…” Rather
than space, it is the being-who-moves in space what is being read and
mapped through self-reflexive language.

According to Ervin Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to social interaction,

the notion of presentation of Self takes relevance whenever an individual
“enters the presence of others” (14). To be in the presence of others,
whether wittingly or unwittingly, involves a presentation of Self.

Goffman’s influential The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) is

primarily concerned with arguing that the ways in which one presents the
Self may direct the interlocutors’s attention towards those aspects of the
Self one chooses to highlight (14). A premise underlying Goffman’s work
is that a presentation of Self generates impressions and that one can
manage the impressions one makes of oneself. A crucial concept in his
theory is the notion of control: one can control and guide the other’s
impressions of oneself, and a number of techniques can be employed to
do so.

It is crucial to understand that in practices such as Running Stitch,

participants are enabled to occupy a dual position as “writers” and
“readers” of the Self, as positioners and as the ones positioned. As
“writers,” participants position themselves physically, graphically and
literally both in the city and “on the map.” This takes place by means of a
walking-drawing performance via GPS technology. As “readers”,
participants position themselves linguistically (by means of
autobiographical stories) and in their mind in relation with the performed
space in question.
By presenting his walk with words as ‘a walk for a friend of mine—Sandra
—who’s very ill’, this participant positions himself subjectively in relation
to his performed walk. His auto-biographical narrative infuses his walk
with meaning. There is a relatively new approach in social psychology
called “positioning theory” (Harre and Slocum). Drawing on Goffman’s
work on social interaction, the issue that this theory investigates is the
dynamics of creation of patterns of meaning. How can these dynamics be
brought to light?

Positioning theory analyses the emergence of meaning in terms of story

lines. It is concerned exclusively with analysis at the level of acts; that is,
of the meaning of actions as expressed through story lines that infuse
those actions with meaning.

A positioning is not a theoretical knowledge about one’s relationship with

a given space. Rather, it is a practised knowledge. Moreover, it is an act
of freedom. It is a choice. And it is an ethical choice in the sense that the
one who positions himself claims responsibility for his own acts and
decisions. The “I” of the one who positions himself emerges as the actor,
author, and theme of the narratives that go with that decision. Such an
act writes subjectivity (biography). Paraphrasing philosopher Emmanuel
Lévinas, a reflexive positioning is a disclosure and opening of being that
takes place for others and with others and where being manifests, loses,
and finds itself again “so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing
itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth” (99). A reflexive positioning is a
moment of truth. However, and still with Lévinas, truth, “before
characterizing a statement or a judgment, consists in the exhibition of
being” (23). In other words, by presenting the self in public and in spatio-
temporal terms, the subject who presents herself produces truth about
herself as a relational and spatial being.

Positioning, or the Enactment of a Poetics of Sharing

I use the term sharing as the act of presenting private, subjective,
everyday life, and autobiographical material in public contexts. My notion
of the term sharing is inspired by Deirdre Heddon’s (21) account of how
consciousness-raising events in which women shared personal concerns
with each other was tied with the emergence of feminist, autobiographical
live performances. In the context of such feminist events, according to
Heddon, sharing and consciousness-raising processes were linked.

My argument is that, in a similar fashion to feminist’s consciousness-

raising events, the “knowledge” that the representations (maps) claim to
represent in practices such as Running Stitch cannot be achieved if the
voices behind the trajectories are not activated. The transformation of the
represented trajectory into self-mapping knowledge cannot be achieved if
the individual who took part does not “read” herself by sharing her spatial
autobiographical narrative with others. For such a self-mapping to take
place, artists need to devise a mechanism for participants to share
reflections about their participation experience and embed it in the
framework they provide.
I use the word poetics as synonymous with the notion of “technology” as
articulated by Martin Heidegger in his 1955 lecture on the question of
technology. A poetics is “a way of revealing truth” (qtd. in McKenzie 156).
In this sense, “participation cartography” is a technology that enables
participants to bring forth “truth” (rather than simply disclose truth) about
their self as a being-in-motion. However, it is a way of revealing that also
conceals. This is precisely what makes this way of revealing a poiesis: it
reveals and conceals at once.

For instance, the uniqueness of my Running Stitch walk was concealed to

me. I walked with my wife, our son, and a couple of friends who lived in
Brighton at that time. Our walk was a means for us to spend some time
together. In a way, it was a means for building our relationship. The
meaning of our walk became conscious to me after I had read the story of
Sandra’s friend and the other ninety or so stories. Without these
(collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by
participants in and through ‘participation performances’ such as Running
Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the
cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices.

The act of validating the sequence of stitches as his is a crucial

performative element of this process. It completes the disclosure process:
it is the moment in which the voiceless walker on the canvas becomes a
speaking subject who authors himself by recognising himself in the
uniqueness of his auto-bio-graphical stitch. His spatial autobiographical
narrative is a crucial self-positioning performance.

By not framing moments of sharing such as this as integral to the

cartographic process, I suggest that the artist may scatter the self-
mapping and self-positioning agency of this practice. In consequence, the
representation loses sight of what it claims to seek and represent.

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