Self-Assessment -- Final Project

Saint Mary's is a tightly-sealed, if not claustrophobic, campus; the lives its residents entertain while there begin to feel like the entirety of the person's repertoire and then the majority of their identity. As I approached the end of my sophomore year, it struck me that my very recently ended relationship-- the longest relationship I'd ever had, clocking in at 15 months-- had become the epicenter of my life at SMCM, and in following, not far from the epicenter of my life. Before I sound too gushy, I assure you that my case was far from unique. Long-lasting, all-consuming, almost stiflingly-close relationships haunt the campus like our egret haunts our pond--- still, unceasing, and occasionally looking physically stuck in the mud. Long-lovers flock here, and somehow, St. Mary's tends to just keep couples plastered together. And indeed, the repercussions of that stifling closeness made itself clear enough after the breakup: as David and I did the unthinkable as a "set in stone" couple and pulled our egret-legs out of the muck, I realized this entire campus is steeped in memory, both tender and angry. Maybe it always will be. What else is to be expected when such a great chunk of time, one might even say a critical impression period for one's memory of a place, was thoroughly consumed by a first love? When I broke up, I lost a boyfriend, a lover, a confidant, and above all, a best friend. Memories of each of these facets just loom and loom.

In my final project, the GoogleEarth assignment, I focused on these persistent memories; I wanted to make a way to convey the feeling of this permanence after this great loss, this unignorable surrounding of memory to emphasize the importance of the real relationship preceding them. Mainly using SketchUp, I began to create what I titled in my project an "acropolis," an array of monuments mostly in a Greco-Roman style of architecture to place in the literal place a memorable event occurred. (I chose this architecture since I felt it seemed sufficiently out of place, sufficiently stately to give great dignity to the event, great size to stress its magnanimity, and old age since it is, well, out of commission.) I wanted to contrast the flat surface of the photographed map, the unavoidable objective life anyone can be told about and see for himself, with the 3-dimensional, absurdly large, clearly nonexistent monuments to nonverbally describe the feeling of the event. I focused upon making these monuments instead of making too many paths and too many unique placemarkers or overlays (I did these for the sake of experiment and what they could plausibly be worth) since I felt I could convey enough through the creation of the buildings. The designs of the buildings were intended to convey something specific about the feeling of the event and memory; for instance, a place of religious discussion is demarcated by a basilica, one with many many pillars and levels for its complexity and grandiosity. The site of our silly dinner date is marked by an equally-silly looking gazebo (or so I hope). The site marking the traversal between our residents halls has a steep set of stairs only leading from my dorm to his, intending to convey nonverbally that I felt burdened and overactive in the relationship.

I think I achieved clarity in these constructions; they loom satisfactorily over the otherwise flat environment. Each tells only a small amount on its "plaque" about what happened, when, and what it's made of in an objective tone: I did this to stress the metaphor to the site of an ancient city and to stress the inability to tell a very personal story with anything but nonverbal means, so the monument itself may be looked to. There are more things I would have developed giving the time with my project, such as more specific monuments with more readable shape and form, more paths, a better overlay. For the rather simple aim of the memorial project, I satisfied my anticipated plan. The monuments, to me and for my personal memory, reflect what happened, what I felt and what I feel now. For the sake of subjectivity in psychogeography, the map was quite a success.