The team behind online magazine The New Wolf are the winners of our second Anthology brief, which offers £2,000 for a collective to make a zine. Their winning idea, New Cartography, is a unique take on mapping and psychogeography. Here, their editors Christo Hall and Theo Bones outline their aims – and how you can get involved...
Maps are tools that provide us with a systematic understanding of our environment, a navigational key, a reference point, and a visual representation of our world.
But they can also be a personal testimony, a narrative depiction of our own experiences. They can tell a story, and situate us among the events of our lives. They can offer us a broader and longer view of our own stories, allowing us to reconsider and reimagine our place within an environment, and to colour that environment with our own memories.
New Cartography will offer an alternative reading of maps, and an alternative approach to mapmaking, conveying new ways to understand and navigate urban environments. It will draw on work from architecture and urban planning, geography and psychogeography, literature and art. In its design, the zine will be a sort of map of maps, displaying a selection of modern interpretations of cartography, and exploring how these innovations operate and whether they affect or improve life for urban dwellers.
GPS, tracking devices and augmented reality apps that connect us to our cities and its people will be a theme explored in the zine. We’re interested in whether these or other forms of modern maps automate us or make us lose our personal connection with our lived environment, or if they open up, alter or distort our perception of city life.
Another area of interest for the zine is the use of cartography in creating and remodelling our cities through urban planning. Here, we want to look at how areas could have been very different if an alternative plan had been chosen, or how whole districts of cities are designated to ruin or places of desperation by poor architectural and infrastructural choices. As well as documentary features, the zine will see maps as personal memoirs and subjective illustrations. We will draw inspiration from “participation cartography” projects that have informed other artistic and mixed media works, and map areas, events and lives through personal cartographic realisations.
The New Wolf is a collective working to uncover all that is esoteric, overshadowed and overlooked, and to present them in an accessible and comprehensive manner. We set up our online magazine in 2010 while studying for variously broad and arguably useless degrees. Since then we have defined a mixed media approach to storytelling and a community of independent and genuine debate. Our topics are wide-ranging but thoroughly addressed, and our approach is serious but not dull.
We will be running a combined brief for contributors and IdeasTap users to get involved. We are still looking for writers, illustrators, photographers and filmmakers to add to the zine. It is been a passion of ours to work with young contributors and have always ran a thorough editorial policy, one that hopefully improves our collaborators’ work and our own editorial skills.
By its nature, the zine is a somewhat arbitrary selection of material on its theme – there is so much more content beyond the space of the pages, and our wish to convey individualistic memoirs as maps means that we are open to all sorts of interpretations of the subject. We want material that opens our eyes and informs us. We’re curious to know everything we know little or nothing about.
The New Cartographers are looking for ideas – from filmmakers, writers, photographers, illustrators and more – apply to their IdeasTap brief here.
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