INTRODUCTION: For six weeks in 2010, the world’s attention will be focused on Vancouver. Athletes, their families and friends, global media, officials and sports fans will congregate in the city to enjoy the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. The media focus will be on the stadium events, but the Olympic Games themselves will constitute only a part of visitors’ experience of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics; much of people’s time will be spent engaging in more peripheral activities and encounters beyond the official Big ‘O’ Olympic venues: eating in restaurants, inhabiting temporary accommodations, shopping, sight seeing, exploring Vancouver’s unique landscape and meeting people from all over the world. Beyond the media spectacle there is a vast multitude of diverse personal experiences‚ a constellation of little ‘o’ events. For visitors and residents alike, it is these personal moments that will ultimately define what the Olympics means to people. The proliferation of electronic media communications tools such as blogs, microblogs, SMS and MMS has given people the means to share these moments. And millions of people are now making avid, and often poetic, use of these tools. For the first time in history, we can collectively explore this landscape of personal experiences and emotions and map its geography.
CONCEPT: Collaborative Memory
The Vancouver 2010 Relational Map project proposes to create a real-time, immersive, interactive map of this constellation of personal little “o” experiences of the 2010 Olympics. The map will be presented to the public in the form of an animated urban video projection. (The mockup below illustrates how the completed installation may look.) By projecting people’s sentiments directly onto the urban landscape, this project realizes the goals of Mapping and Marking quite literally. An ephemeral geography of personal experiences becomes marked onto a physical site that visitors can collectively inhabit. The project is envisioned as a temporary installation but it can be maintained after the Olympics (either in situ or on a website) to preserve a record of this fleeting social geography arising during what promises to be a highly significant turning point in Vancouver’s history.
Read the whole proposal here: **VDN_MappingMarking**