With traveling on the brain (since it is Spring Break tomorrow and all), the fact that my GPS system got lost in a cross-country drive to Colorado over Winter Break, and my fascination with Heath Bunting and Kyle Brandon's piece of work I posted about earlier in the semester, I was immediately drawn to this piece from Torolab. The piece, which is entitled The Region of the Transborder Trousers was an installation piece that incorporated a large animated topographical map that recorded the travels of workers over a five day period along the Tijuana/San Diego border. Existing as one of the busiest borders in the world, the map visually represents the activity of people and cars that pass through these borders daily.
What I find interesting about this piece is how the artists looked at the information from this map as an aesthetic experience rather than just factual information. I have always been interested in map and as I have travelled to more new places using all different forms of maps, I have recently gotten more interested in maps and their aesthetic value as well as their informational purpose. Just last semester I did a project in my Drawing Studio class about place, involving maps of all the different places that have had an impact on my life. Combining all these different maps and layering them on top of each other created a visual experience I found captivating.
The way in which Torolab approached this visual experience of a map and how they relayed this experience to their audience I find really exciting. They really took the culture and events involved in the Tijuana/San Diego region and used color, shape, line, and technology to recreate this daily activity into a piece of work that demands the attention of it's viewer. I would love to know more about the decision process behind this piece because I think it would add an even more complex element to this already sensory-loaded image.
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