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There is always a separation between personal experiences of cooking and food processings shown on assorted media. The extent of elaboration and artistry presented through images and videos, at least to me, is just ironically equivalent to how awkward and tedious I prepare the foods in person. There seemingly exits a perceptual battleground to fight over the location of “food” — Whether food is the embodiment of high-quality life which is worthy of ample attention; or it is merely necessities to fulfill physic needs of basis, so that people could just deal with daily dishes as casual as possible, like full liquid diet as food we usually see in the sci-fi films; or whatever else. Anyway, when we talk about food, it is intricate to identify to what degree the “food” we mean is naturally formed, or is more likely shaped by disparate media, restaurants, professional societies, cooking schools, so-called as “knowledge infrastructure”. Food is thus bonded with far more meanings besides the basic taste: if expenses of food directly signify the economic capacity, dining etiquette and sense of taste yet implicitly suggest the social statues of diners; if delicate and mystified visualization of food processing somehow meets the bourgeois preferences, explicit and quantitative teaching videos yet appear more appealing to the underlying masses.

However, it is interesting to think about the uniqueness of food, of which those symbolic features of food seem no different from the other daily articles like clothes, vehicles, houses, especially when visualization, symbolization, contextual experience are not already a fresh fashion to look through. Food, in my view, is essentially antimedialized. It is admitted that all the senses should be engaged in the process of food tasting, nevertheless, the central elements are always the smell and taste, which function before and after we visually see the food. When the food is displayed in the common media, except some new media which is expected to be invented to deploy all senses, a large amount of information has been omitted, where we can only imagine through the reaction of diners and visual images. Interestingly, the imaginary experience on the other hand amplify the pleasure of taste, and even gives birth to a new occupation called “Mukbang”. Through watching the anchors eating, audiences gain more satisfaction compared with the previous static food display, where the missing sense of smell and taste are mobilized in an empathized manner.

My very early experience with mapping is to be trained to memorize assorted topographic and administrative maps, if they are accounted as the basic form, on the geography and history books. Then, mapping to me for a long time meant the factual information provided by national authorities in stable, map-like sheets of books. Not until the popularization of smartphones approximately 10 years ago, did I have the chance to use the map apps on the smartphones, like Baidu Map, where I could operate the digital maps to navigate and to record my traces. And later on, when I was studying as an undergraduate, the concept of Big Data prevailed among academia, so that even some humanity disciplines are active to harness the fancy methodology. I was majoring in Art History then, and conducted some research on historical geography, to find out the life courses of certain ancient artists, for example. One of the impressive researches, which is quite fresh then albeit customary today, is to visualize the spatial trajectories and social networks in a dynamic map through collecting all the information appeared in the artist’s works. Here you can view related researches.

 

 

The descriptions above are how mapping functioned before in my perception, which, of course, is far from reaching the climactic efficacy as is put forward in “The Agency of Mapping”:

“The capacity to reformulate what already exists is the important step. And what already exists is more than just the physical attributes of terrain (topography, rivers, roads, buildings) but includes also the various hidden forces that underlie the workings of a given place. These include natural processes, such as wind and sun; historical events and local stories; economic and legislative conditions; even political interests, regulatory mechanisms and programmatic structures … In visualising these interrelationships and interactions, mapping itself participates in any future unfoldings”.

In this sense, mapping is not merely the auxiliary tool, but a comprehensive, visual-based, and prophetic methodology. And the three steps of mapping referred to as “fields”, “extracts”, “plotting”  appear quite inspiring to me, where the inside idea of “de-territorialisation” and “re-territorialisation” reminds me of “deconstruction” and “reconstruction”, which are the key concepts of postmodernism. It thus gives the mapping as a methodology the rebellious streak and reinterpretative freedom, which is starkly different from the previous mapping as a tool or substance at rest.

However, what puzzles me is that since the definition of mapping has gone so far, to what extent it is connected with the original “mapping”, which is close to my narratives in the beginning, so that it is still entitled as mapping. Apparently, there are some prominent changes already. On the one hand, Mapping becomes more participatory and decentralized, since it is not only the medium to convey physical information by authorities anymore, and everyone is empowered to enter the mapping and interpret the accessible information on their own. But in the meantime, mapping remains enclosed and exclusive to the data collectors, since the core of mapping has transferred to provide a complete narrative, which means all information displayed should serve the subjective interpretation, as is mentioned “maps are essentially subjective, interpretative and fictional constructs of facts”. Mapping seems to form a new interpretative hegemony based on the data collection. Therefore, when we are encouraged to shift the attention from the physical information to the subsequent interpretation, there is also something we need to be cautious about.