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Cajal, R. 1890-1933. no name. [Ink on Paper].

Chadwick, H. 1990. Eroticism. [2 transparencies on light boxes]

Fauchon, M 'Varoom! Lab Interpretation' (2014)

Gray, C. & Malins J. (2004) 'Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design'. Ashgate pp.22-24 'The Reflective Practitioner'

Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Jamie, K. 'Surfacing' (2019) UK: Sort of Books.

Lemm, D. 2015. Mapping Kings Cross. [Paper and Wood].

Marples, M (1981) 'White Horses and Other Hill Figures Paperback', England: Sutton Publishing Ltd.

Paolozzi, E. 1970. Secrets of Life - The Human Machine and How it Works: Inside the Brain. [Etching].

Paolozzi, E. 1970. Secrets of Life - The Human Machine and How it Works: The Moment of Conception. [Etching].

Prince, S (2018) 'A Lineage of Spectres Part 1 - From Hauntology to Hypnagogic Pop...' [Blog] 'A Year In The Country' (Accessed: 06/10/22)

Topham, I (2008) 'Uffington White Horse and Dragon Hill' [Blog] 'Mysterious Britain' (Accessed: 06/10/22)

Yang, W. 2021. Christmas Menu. [Digital].

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This is a scientific diagram depicting the flow of information through the hippocampus in the brain, drawn by scientist Ramón y Cajal. The visual language he uses is monochromatic, utilising fine lines and differing mark-making to variegate tone as shading. The inclusion of letters as labelling instantly communicates the scientific context, and the abstract yet limited composition is almost exclusive to informative diagrams and maps. Cajal would hunch over the microscope, drawing while observing, letting the pen map out the tiny world of the brain’s neurons. This is an example of investigative drawing.

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Chadwick, H. 1990. Eroticism. [2 transparencies on light boxes]

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Chadwick intention is to illustrate the contrast between our physical and metaphysical consciousness. The effect for the viewer is visceral – we become paranoid about our objective mortality, looking down on ourselves as a piece of dead meat. Chadwick’s piece is challenging the notion that this visual language accurately maps the brain’s physicality and is therefore a perfect example of reactionary image-making.

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Lemm, D. 2015. Mapping Kings Cross. [Paper and Wood].

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This piece of work created in a 6 month residency at House of Illustration maps the changing environment of King’s Cross, observing relationships between buildings, objects and people in the landscape. In order to translate these intangible relationships, Lemm creates symbols with close visual ties to traditional mapmakers symbols, placing them alongside fictitious, abstract shapes to merge the subjective experience with the concrete physicality of the place.

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Yang, W. 2021. Christmas Menu. [Digital].

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The compositional cropping and graphic labelling usually employed in X-ray scans or medical diagrams contrast didactically with the dynamic and exaggerated disease creatures within. Once again, utilising visual tropes and subverting the context allows Yang to communicate their topic of research subjectively yet concisely.

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Paolozzi, E. 1970. Secrets of Life - The Human Machine and How it Works: The Moment of Conception. [Etching].

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This is an etching exploring the artist’s mental health, depicting what his erratic emotions felt like in an abstract form. This is an example of investigating through image-making, testing out templates of visual communication as vessels for subjective expression.

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Paolozzi, E. 1970. Secrets of Life - The Human Machine and How it Works: Inside the Brain. [Etching].

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Paolozzi essentially applies the filter of scientific illustration to his personal artistic expression. In doing so, his subjective thought processes are translated into the language of science, creating the illusion of a system of categorisation, and concisely communicating notions that are otherwise too abstract to grasp from the drawing alone.

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Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp.

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The way that colour is used in these works is selective and limited, yet feels rich and full. There is a sense of nostalgia, especially in the map by John Held Jr on the right, which is created by choosing a limited palette of colours and using them in flat layers without blending. This is evocative of screen-printing used in traditional printed posters and children's books before digital printing was widely used.

Both methods of mapping zoom out and look at the landscape from above, and utilise a stylised perspective to capture the most significant elements of the landscape. It is useful to note the differences in aesthetic despite a similar approach. Held Jr focuses more on the man-made buildings in the landscape, winding the paths and canals around these features. Whereas Ricketts seems to do the opposite - drawing the imposing river and piecing the land together like a jigsaw around its' curves, which can be seen from the rough draft at the bottom of the page.

Not only does this reveal the artists' personal geography within the space, but it also poses an interesting question of how nature and humans interact when mapping a place; what takes precedence, why is this, and can the two forces exist with equal importance within a map?

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Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp.

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All three of these examples of mapping focus on pictoral symbols. Translation of symbols is often universal, such as the heart shape being widely recognised as suggesting love. Some symbols however have become lost between creation and discovery, such as the lines and numbers found on stones, such as the example on the left.

However, regardless of whether the original meaning is translated through these marks, the illustrative intention is clear; the marks indicate a human life with a desire to be remembered, their movements to be tracked, and their life to be mapped.

The missionary map uses symbols to illustrate follklore, myths and beliefs in the world, not only marking out the mapmaker's space in the world, but indicating a fear and mysticism about the unknown.

The link to the white horses is obvious here - etching symbolic marks into the landscape. Again, the original meaning has been lost, but a desire to be known, remembered and eternal through the earth is clear.

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Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp.

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What surfaced for me through these examples of mapping is how imagination is the driving force of mapping. Often we think of a map as a concrete definitive diagram of a place, but even if this is the intention, no map can escape an element of imaginative manipulation. Symbols are created from a need to communicate a memory of the place, and often a place's relation to its surroundings also shapes how it is mapped, and places cannot exist outside of their context.

In my own work, I need to define how I can map through memory, rather than mapping a memory in itself. I think this will assist in my illustrative boundaries, as right now I am finding it difficult to structure my pieces and create a sense of purpose.

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Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp.

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These pages brought the question of who maps a place to my mind. Who we allow to document a place can define how a place is culturally placed within its' surroundings. Would we view Africa differently if the world map was upside down, and it pointed upwards, dominating everyone? The answer of course, is yes. The reason for its' position in a standard world map currently is political; the mapmakers of early colonial Britain wanted England to appear large, central and dominating, to reinforce its' global power.

In these examples, what is central and dominating can tell us about the political and personal circumstances of the mapmaker. If somewhere appears edging off the page, added on later, or only half connected, this often indicates a lack of importance for the map-maker. Even in modern maps, you would never find central London on a crumpled corner of an A-Z or on the middle crease. Its' importance is indicated through its' position.

Looking at my own work through this lense will help me to reconfigure notions of composition, and become more aware of how I map my illustrations.

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Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp.

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Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp.

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Harmon, K 'You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination' (2003), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp.

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Fauchon, M 'Varoom! Lab Interpretation' (2014). pp.82 - P.86

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Fauchon, M 'Varoom! Lab Interpretation' (2014) pp. 87-91

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Gray, C. & Malins J. (2004) 'Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design'. Ashgate pp.22-24 'The Reflective Practitioner'

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Marples, M (1981) 'White Horses and Other Hill Figures Paperback', England: Sutton Publishing Ltd. pp 73-74

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Marples, M (1981) 'White Horses and Other Hill Figures Paperback', England: Sutton Publishing Ltd. pp 38-39

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Jamie, K. 'Surfacing' (2019) UK: Sort of Books. pp. 86-87

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Marples, M (1981) 'White Horses and Other Hill Figures Paperback', England: Sutton Publishing Ltd. pp 14-15

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Topham, I (2008) 'Uffington White Horse and Dragon Hill' [Blog] 'Mysterious Britain' (Accessed: 06/10/22)

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Prince, S (2018) 'A Lineage of Spectres Part 1 - From Hauntology to Hypnagogic Pop...' [Blog] 'A Year In The Country' (Accessed: 06/10/22)

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Although not exclusively so, hauntological orientated work tends to use and refer to British culture from approximately around the late 1960s to the late 1970s, to be a re-imagining and misremembering of reference points and that era's music and other culture to create work that seem familiar, comforting and also often unsettling and not a little eerie.

The resulting work often conjures a sense of parallel worlds that are haunted by spectres of our cultural past (to loosely paraphrase philosopher Jacques Derrida).

One of the possible reasons for the hauntological work focusing on/drawing from the above time period often quite specifically is that from the late 1970s onwards there could be seen to have been a swing towards the right politically, socially and economically within Britain. The starting point for that movement is often considered to be the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher's right-leaning government in Britain.

Within hauntological work there is often a mourning for lost progressive futures, sometimes overtly and sometimes as an underlying cultural trope or atmosphere, which essentially demarks the above time as a tipping point for an ending of the prevalence of related hopes and dreams - hence the cutoff of the late 1970s in terms of points of reference and inspiration within much of hauntological work.

Although, as I have mentioned before, author David Peace has commented that:
"...people often talk about 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher as a sea-change. But these things rarely take place overnight. And I still think her re-election in 1983 represents the clearest marker of how far things had changed. And of what was to come..."
The 1980s could be seen as a transitional, liminal period which involved ongoing conflict and rearguard actions from older, progressive/social consensus ways of thinking.

This could allow for a less era delineated sense to hauntological work, less of a quite well defined cut-off point than the late 1970s. Hauntological-esque spectres and parallel world refracted reimaginings could well draw from a later period.

Which leads me to...

Work such as hypnagogic pop shares a number of similiarities with hauntology - it also utilises misremembered, re-imagined cultural memories/reference points and creates a parallel cultural world the draws from past eras and often creates work which David Keenan called "pop music as refracted through the memory of a memory".

However, it is American rather than British culture orientated and it draws from the 1980s and early 1990s and in this sense it illustrates that hauntology could be seen as being part of a continuum or broader lineage of such work.

(A brief definition of hypnagogic pop from Wikipedia: "Hypnagogic pop - sometimes used interchangeably with "chillwave" or "glo-fi" - is a 21st-century style of pop music or general musical approach which explores elements of cultural memory and nostalgia by drawing on the music, popular entertainment, and recording technology of the past, particularly the 1980s. The genre developed in the mid to late 2000s as American underground artists began reaching back to retro aesthetics remembered from childhood, such as 1980s radio rock, new age, MTV one-hit wonders, and Hollywood synthesizer soundtracks, as well as analog technology and outdated pop culture.")

One of the signifiers of hauntology is an interest in and utilisation of the signifiers of previous era's recording media and its related audio artifacts - such as vinyl hiss and crackle, tape wobble etc - with such aesthetics being used in order to create or conjure a spectral, edge of memory sense of the past.

The use of such signifiers is also present within hypnagogic pop but in its case these are more likely to be the likes of video cassette, 1980s-esque computer graphics and early internet aesthetics.

In contrast to hypnagogic pop, hauntology does not tend to be all that pop orientated - it may draw from areas of pop culture such as 1970s childrens' television dramas but it is more likely to be presented in for example the form of Radiophonic-esque/inspired electronica.

However, "traditional" hauntology does not have one overarching musical style - rather it is defined by a shared music and cultural approach than a shared musical style, something which critic Adam Trainer has also identified in connection to hypnagogic pop.

Which brings me to synthwave...
Hypnagogic pop at Wikipedia Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Day #183/365: Steam engine time and remnants of transmissions before the flood 2) Day #162/365: Hauntology, places where society goes to dream, the deletion of spectres and the making of an ungenre
3) Day #125/365: Journeying through The Seasons with David Cain (or maybe just July and October)4) Chapter 3 Book Images: Hauntology - Places Where Society Goes to Dream, the Defining and Deletion of Spectres and the Making of an Ungenre
5) Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 17/52: David Peace, Texte und Töne, The Stink Still Here and Spectres from Transitional Times - Part 2
To be continued in Part 2 of this post... coming soon...

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A Lineage of Spectres Part 1 - From Hauntology to Hypnagogic Pop: Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 19/52

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Although not exclusively so, hauntological orientated work tends to use and refer to British culture from approximately around the late 1960s to the late 1970s, to be a re-imagining and misremembering of reference points and that era's music and other culture to create work that seem familiar, comforting and also often unsettling and not a little eerie.