This task simultaneously intrigued and confounded me when first I saw it. I thought, "What is Burn Unit smoking?" So of course I had to do it because it made my brain do contortions to figure out a completion with which I would be satisfied.

I guess what threw me was that the links in the task (and comments thereto) brought up things that I would not have otherwise recognized as maps. I thought it would be easy - too easy - to just make a Google map with markers for each point in time that I recorded, and that wasn't nearly as creative as the I believed Senator Unit intended for us to get when he hallucinated this task.

So, even though I've been going BartPA-heavy recently, I decided to chew on some of my UofA roots and re-think the idea of "map".

The important element of this task is time. Each point in time recorded is just that - a point in physical space. Certainly some of these points would overlap. As I was meditating on the idea of physically manifesting points in time in physical space, I thought about stars. Stars are points of light that represent a time long, long ago - millions of years ago, even. And from where we are, the stars are relatively fixed and can be read... like a map! So I thought about celestial maps I had seen:

"Create a map that contains only these data." With that in mind, I decided to dis-associate the surroundings of the temporal locations I recorded and map them like stars in the heavens, with nothing but space between them. And when multiple times overlapped in physical space, those would be larger stars. I love looking up at the night sky and trying to fathom the depth of the universe. It's neat to know that two stars which appear to be right next to each other to my eye may actually be many light years apart - I just can't see the depth that separates them. Similarly, my map contains points that are very close together, but separated by time. In this instance, time is the invisible third dimension.

Then I had to figure out what kind of key or legend my map would use to indicate the time associated with each point. Here I decided to be inspired by the pattern of a circular clock, as well as the circular old-timey maps of the celestial sphere. I liked the idea of visually noting the sequential order of my whereabouts and thought it would be easier to note these by being able to access the points from all sides.

I chose a 36 hour period during which I knew I would be active. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much data to work with. And I decided to mark every 50 minutes into the hour, because 10 'til is a popular time to be going somewhere.

This is the map I ended up with, drawn on black construction paper with silver pen:



It's all within an approximately four mile stretch of San Francisco. Each point represents my physical location at a specific time. The dotted lines connect each point to it's corresponding time. For points at which I was present for stretches of time, of which there are three, I assigned astrological symbols. For my home, I used a symbol for Earth, for work, the symbol for Saturn, and for our friend's house where we drank late into Sunday night, the symbol for Jupiter.

After uploading the scan of this map, I added the exact latitude and longitude of these three locations in the bottom right, so that one may triangulate on a mundane map the locations to which each of the points corresponds.

I was displeased by how jumbled much of the information is in the lower left section of the map (where the box is). But since it was such a pain in the ass to draw the thing by hand with silver markers, I didn't want to re-do the whole thing. So I made an insert for the section of time to which most of those points correspond (Sunday morning), and drew that on the back:



I think the map looks better without all of the lines, it just doesn't correlate the time info:


With this view, I'm very tempted to draw new lines between the points and create constellations, but I'll leave that to your imaginations...