Reading “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” helped build and explore different themes and visual variations of mapping whilst sardonically presenting the failure of modern society to produce works that correlates the great masterpieces of the past. Smithson’s work helped us understand how within the suburbs and cities the buildings that represent our daily lives fail to say anything profound about us as a city & culture within our habitats.
The theme of Our Habitat was explored by the group, looking at the South of Glasgow, deciding as a group for this to be our focus. With 2 people in our group not being in Glasgow and 3 people in Glasgow it gave us the opportunity to carry out both primary and secondary research. Along with this, as a group we looked at the south of Glasgow over a 200-year span, the past, present and future (1920’s, now, 2121’s). Narrowing down our work we focused on dividing our research into the Social, Political, Economic and Environmental aspects of Glasgow. To map Glasgow Southside, we created a digital collage, bringing everything together. This idea of mapping came from the artist C.J. Lim, looking at his mapping of apartment buildings. Each of us made individual collages to map our research and brought them together in one big collage.