map making

a couple of days focus on the reality of the website : this is a new area of work for me : i have never designed a website before, or made it the 'outcome' of the work : usually i make live performance : so i'm dealing with all sorts of new questions : file sizes and types : loading time : the relationship between my artistic desires and the practical and structural needs of the web : accessibility : the file size of the 'background map' : it all feels quite sculptural in my mind.

this is what i've imagined : a 'map' which works something like google earth / google maps which has all the waterways, brooks, streams and rivers, with around 20 portals / buttons into pop up windows for specific materials - images, text, sound file or video - on migration and transience through the neroche.

i spend the day tracing OS 128 1:25 000 scale which has the detail i want : using carefully selected coloured crayons and experimenting with washing over some lines and areas. quite quickly i'm bored by tracing the rivers : and i'm also thinking what is the difference between 'my' map and the os map : what have i processed? : i begin to trace complex road junctions in the centre of the villages : churchinford has six equal spokes : quite beautiful, and then move onto just following some of the lines of field boundaries, roads and streets with the pencil : i like using the stationary i've collected : and then the names stand out to me, so i start extracting words out of the names of farms, parts of words, looking for words that include animals, moving or changing forms, weather. something starts to take shape : i realise i've only just begun.

i fold the map within the os map to get the creases and marks : i want this map to have a handdrawn and paper feel on the web, to retain the traces of its origins : scan parts of the map and look at them in photoshop : at 66% there is some of the texture and feel that i'm looking for : this is where i have to start.

these images hold some of the elements i think will work :