As previously mentioned, I was playing with the idea of turning the mental journeys taken during streams of consciousness, into physical ones. This proved harder than expected to crack. In the ideal world, I would have translated the SOC in Dharma Bums into the exact place chapter 33 was set. Obviously funding was a major issue. But if anyone reads this and wants to back it, by all means do. I'm only half joking by the way.
Location became my first focus as I couldn't vision how this physical journey could occur without first knowing the setting/what I was to be working with. It the hit me, I should take this project back to the place where I started using/noticing my own streams of consciousness. Thus not only giving the journey a location, but also bringing it back to the personal angle that Preretrospect stemmed from. But where was this? For those of you who know me, I'm sorry for stating the obvious, again. For those of you who don't, this is the farm and countryside that I grew up on. Whenever I needed to clear my head, think, or organise my thoughts back into their colour coded boxes, I would go off wondering around for hours. Even now I find that I need to get a fix of this every so often or I can't properly process anything. Ironically, it was while visiting this place again that I finally managed to sort out where I wanted this project to go.
Just to clarify - by farm I meaning working farm. Both my parents are farmers.
As this project has a heavy process and data based grounding, I started off my taking a google maps image of the fields on my farm, and directly overlaying the net of Dharma Bums onto it. I chose Kerouac as chapter 33 is when the protagonist removes himself from everyone, taking a job as a watchman in the mountains, and using the time to think. A more extreme version of what I do on the fields I'm using.
I lined the two up (photo and net) as if the original axis was over the entire farm section. The grid lines were added, so that each square represents 100m x 100m in real life. The reasoning for this will become clear later.
As preretrospect is a time based piece I wanted this to be a strong element of the work. The simplest way of showing this would be to use sunrise and sunset. So that therefore not only the time of day, but also shadows, sun position and available light contribute to illustrating time passing.
