Where You Are - 16 Artists, Writers, Thinkers and 16 Personal Maps. Each one exploring the idea of what a map can be. The result is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost

Visual Editions, Where You Are, 2013.

16 Artists, Writers, Thinkers and 16 Personal Maps. Each one exploring the idea of what a map can be. The result is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost.

“We really like the idea of starting an adventure through maps. The ability to find yourself in the unknown and discover new places – that’s what exploring is all about.” —Google Maps Team

“Where You Are is beautiful. Its contents delight the mind, its composition the senses.” —Will Gompertz

“These imaginative and irreverent personal cartographies expand the conception of a map as a flat reflection of geography and reclaim it, instead, as a living, breathing, dimensional expression of the human spirit.”—Maria Popova

Where You Are is a book of maps. And it’s also a website www.where-you-are.com.
It’s a collection of writing (non-fiction and fiction) and visuals (drawings, photographs, paintings) that explodes what a map is. A wide range of writers, thinkers, artists responded to what their map would be, bringing together human stories about modern, everyday personal lives and mapping.
Those stories range from Chloe Aridjis’ short story mapping out the daily journeys of a homeless woman in Mexico City, to John Simpson essay that looks at the perils of following GPS systems in South Africa, to James Bridle mapping the technology and looking at how GPS was developed in the first place, to Geoff Dyer mapping out his childhood in Cheltenham according to sex, death and drugs, to Leanne Shapton documenting her everyday desk objects at the end of each working day.
Where You Are plants the flag at an amazing map-shifting point: from one kind of map — the geographical kind that gets you get from a to b — to another kind of map altogether — a life map that tells human stories about our everyday.
Where You Are begs the question: What would your personal map be? Here is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost.

Contributors

Introduced by Will Gompertz, BBC Arts Editor
Chloe Aridjis
Lila Azam Zanganeh
Alain de Botton
James Bridle
Joe Dunthorne
Geoff Dyer
Olafur Eliasson
Sheila Heti + Ted Mineo
Tao Lin
Valeria Luiselli
Leanne Shapton
John Simpson
Adam Thirlwell
Peter Turchi
Will Wiles
Denis Wood

 

 

 

Did You Draw That Yourself?

29 November 2013

The last couple weeks have been fantastically Where You Are-ful. We hung out with Tao Lin and his burrowing lunar hamsters with Sheila Heti and her re-imagined every day decision maker I Ching, and Joe Dunthorne and his literary landscape map with Geoff Dyer and his Cheltenham childhood map before black screens sent Geoff into a technological ether.

www.where-you-are.com

14 November 2013

Today is our official tadada day for Where You Are. We’ve talked about the maps in their treasure box, all those lovingly produced paper maps. The book in all it’s epic Chinese production is a few days away from physically landing on shelves in shops and hands at home. And there’s another epic something. Live. Today. www.where-you-are.com.

Where You Are Live Events: With Geoff + Joe; Sheila + Tao

8 November 2013

Our Where You Are live events gives you the chance to hear Geoff Dyer and Joe Dunthorne, and Sheila Heti and Tao Lin tell you all about growing up in Cheltenham, mapping literary landscapes, modernising the I Ching to help find your way when you’re lost, and mapping crazy sci-fi hamsters in 2027.

First Look Inside Where You Are

24 October 2013

For those of you who loved our new look Tristram Shandy, our tactile experience Tree Of Codes, our delightfully disorientating Composition No. 1, our turnable Kapow!, here is a first peek inside our latest and very nearly on our shores Great Looking Story, with 16 very different maps to make sure we all get fantastically lost.

Where You Are IS ON

17 October 2013

The suspense. Oh the suspense. And now, Where You Are is here. And it’s real. It’s really real.
It looks big. It feels lush. It’s full of texture: outside the box and inside, oozing with 16 different maps.

16 Writers x 16 Maps

6 August 2013

We’re digitally proofing, very nearly on press.
Oh what a spread. What. A. Spread.

Our Printer Says: "I Have Good News and Bad News"

11 July 2013

“I have good news and bad news”. We’ve been there before with Tree of Codes for different reasons. But still, when a printer says that, we’re back to balancing on the knife edge of the bloody carcass of crying and the happy summer fields of laughing hysterically.

Mason Wells Mapping Geoff Dyer

7 June 2013

We are so close to being ready to share more about our book of maps Where We Are.
With a Ryder dummy archive box already made and the contributions each making up their own individual maps as designed by Bibliotheque – one for each of our 16 contributors – we’re at the stage of getting the last bit of input from our amazing group of writers before the final press-green-button-to-go.

Mapping Out

8 February 2013

We’ve been wonderfully submerged, lost even, in the shaping of our book of maps. It’s our very first collection, with a super exciting line-up of talented contributors, and made with help from Tom Uglow at Google’s Creative Lab.

Where We Are

7 December 2012

In the week where the run-up to the holiday season feels in full gear and the year end shut down is within reach, we thought it would be nice to raise our glogg filled heads and do a bit of lift-lidding on our new book in a bid to kick into fresh beginnings.
The new book is called Where We Are. It’s a book of maps. Put another way: it’s a book that celebrates getting completely lost.

Peter Turchi’s brilliant “Roads Not Taken”—one of sixteen booklets that make up Visual Editions’ Where You Are (2013)—is a meditation on all the hypothetical parallel versions of Turchi’s life that never materialized. On paper the piece reads like a smart personal essay, with some funky, overwrought formatting punctuated by chromatic street sign icons. At one point Turchi writes, “Ideally, The Map of Roads Not Taken would be four-dimensional, moving through time and space, with still pictures as well as audio and videos of what have happened alongside clips of what did.” Upon reading this description I began salivating at the narrative potential of such a map, but of course the power of the image relied upon the fact that such a map could never exist.

Except that the online version of “Roads Not Taken” is a formalistic nod to the infinite allure of this impossible map. The story is laid out on a limitless, scrolling window. The semi-contrived street sign icons suddenly take on an essential role in this context, for as we begin to scroll and scroll, we also begin to search for direction. I found myself wondering: Did Turchi actually write an infinite story? I couldn’t find the seams. The form of this story so perfectly matched the content, it brought the piece to an entirely new, metaphysical level. It is perhaps the most successful moment in all of Where You Are, on screen or in print.

Indeed, what makes Where You Are so fascinating is its dual existence as a box containing sixteen physical booklets and a website, where-you-are.com, to which this content has been ported. While many print books have attempted a similar multi-platform extrapolation, Where You Are seems particularly suited for a dual paper/digital edition given some of the central themes of the project, which seeks to explore how we locate ourselves in a swiftly changing world and how these methods of location have evolved since the rich mnemonic stomping grounds of our childhood.

London-based Visual Editions—which previously brought us an intricate new edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman as well as Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer’s palimpsestic die-cut reworking of The Street of Crocodiles—are clearly interested in exploring the boundaries of print technology, incorporating old book-making techniques with new visual aesthetics, and Where You Are’s twin existence feels a natural extension of this trajectory. The project features sixteen different writers, artists, and thinkers offering a range of interpretations on the ways in which we map our experience, both literally and metaphorically. We get contemporary art, musings about adolescent snogging spots and paper routes, diagrammatic explanations of GPS technology, cartograms of playgrounds or a homeless person’s urban trajectory, fictional maps depicting writer’s block and imagined planets. As with most collections, the work is a bit uneven—some of the pieces feel as if they were created for another purpose and then hastily retrofitted for Where You Are. Despite this, a number of the booklets—particularly those by Turchi, Geoff Dyer, and Will Wiles—feel essential as they cleverly scrutinize the borderlands of map, identity, and narrative.

But even more than the content of Where You Are, the cross-media transposition of this content seems ripe for analysis, particularly because a) this is increasingly the direction that print publishing is heading, and b) this transposition is rarely done well. - Reif Larsen