Marco Roth writes about “The Rise of the Neuronovel” in n+1: “Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder.” He thinks it shows “shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are.” I think it’s because we don’t publish enough fuck ups. If modern writers won’t be mentally unstable themselves, then they must, at the very least, try to empathize with those of that condition.
Tomorrow afternoon at the New Museum: “Experimental Geography Panel Discussion: An Aesthetic Investigation of Space.” Check out the amazing list of recommended books for anyone interested in the subject. (via.) Probably should add Iain Sinclair to that list. Here he is in the Independent, writing about living in the same house for 40 years.
The web is full of dazzling architectural renderings (many unlikely to ever get made) but I cannot stop thinking about Herzog & de Meuron’s Le Project Triangle. The triangular building will not cast a shadow on adjacent buildings once construction is completed in Paris in 2014. Citylife is defined by its noise and perpetual darkness. I can’t help but dream of a future where every building is like this. A utopian cure to seasonal affective disorder.
I’m in New York tomorrow and there are a million things to catch. Paul Chan is speaking at the New Museum about his production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. And I’ve been waiting all month for the Conflux, the “art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space.” Email me if you’d like to meet up, GMAIL:joanne.mcneil
Mapping Memories
South African artists Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter interviewed a number of Senegalese immigrants for their 2006 project UrbaNET: Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow. Hillbrow, a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg is home to a number of Dakar expats. The artists asked the Senegalese immigrants to draw maps for them to use during their two-week residency in Dakar. From Rhizome:
Over the course of the residency, the artists documented their journey in photographs and video and even visited friends and relatives of the mapmakers. For the 2007 exhibition of their project at University of Johannesburg, Neustetter and Hobbs conducted a twenty-person walk from the campus, in Auckland Park, to a Congolese nightclub in Hillbrow, where the project was discussed by art-goers, neighborhood residents and the mapmakers. Neustetter and Hobbs’ project thus does not profess to establish any authoritative study of the respective cities it maps, but rather overlays remembrance, map-making, navigation and the documentary image to tell the specific tales of a group of immigrants and a broader story about home, migration and place.
If you Google around, you’ll see memory maps are often assigned in grade schools. I wish my teachers were that creative. There is a Memory Map Flickr pool and last year, Kottke made a list of a projects. Al
Fraken can draw the United States from memory, which makes one wish there 
were a quiz show/pictionary component to political debates.
Veering in a different direction, City of Memory compiles stories and anecdotes marked by contributors on a map of New York City. Next Great Thing suggests with a “mobile component, people could lifecast their past, in a way, letting place serve as a trigger for recollection.”
A great book about recollecting memory is Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. It’s a story about a man awarded millions in compensation after an accident. He constructs buildings and hires actors to act out the parts of a memory he remembers only slight details about, but keeps coming back to mind.
Nothing is more frustrating then realizing a memory isn’t coming back. And there’s not much you can do it about it. The more you revisit a memory the more you damage it. It gets tainted by present events and reanalysis.
Art by Kunie Sugiura.
Iain Sinclair at the 2012 London Olympics site. (via.)
What is the life of models /proposals /plans for projects that never get built /realized? Do these become art? Documentation of fictions? Narratives of the future? Yes, they become art. Art is, in general, nothing but failed or dysfunctional design – Art Lies interviews Boris Groys, author of Art Power (via.)
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