(Re)tracing : Explorations in Counter Cartography

"With my upbringing in post-war Iran, and also being an immigrant to Canada, I have been taught to embrace nostalgia and melancholia. I have flirted with feelings of regret and fomo all my life and always will. This research project is an attempt to map memories and places that I am not able to walk on anymore or even if I can, trying to map its relevance with the passage of time. Maps are made and used for a reason. Reasons like situating someone, navigating in a space, etc.

The user of the maps, activates the maps by passing through/over the places that those maps show. But what is a map good for if you can’t use it? What does a map do if it is not accurate at all, and it is incomplete? What do a series of incomplete and inaccurate maps do when they are overlaid on top of one another? For the next step of this project I will be working with Artificial Intelligence and making maps using Neural Networks."

– Kasra Goodarznezhad