ChorAgraphy ChorOgraphy

View of Norwich
  Chorography is a mapping, practiced at      least since the time of Ptolemy, combining features of geographical data and mimetic representation. One of its practical applications was to aid ship captains to identify seaports; also for overviews of townscapes. Choragraphy (with an A) is a recent innovation based on the collaboration of Jacques Derrida with the Architect Peter Eisenman, adopted for my updating of cogntive mapping, the mental geographies people create for way-finding (more later).





Hundred Acre Woods
 Children's books often include chorographies of the place or Umwelt of the world of the story, such as the Hundred Acre Woods of Winnie the Pooh. The importance of literature for developing imagination is that the scenographies of the Other World created in stories inform human fantasy with instructions for how and what to desire. 






Uncle Remus, Song of the South
 I still have the book of the Disney (controversial) version  of the Uncle Remus stories of the trickster Br'er Rabbit and his ways of survival and thriving in the predatory environment that we recognize as a version of all the cat and mouse chase stories of popular and folk culture. The Other World is predatory, dramatizing a struggle between Master and Slave. In our mythology, the predator almost never wins (Mickey Mouse our hero). The allegory of electracy is a cat and mouse chase thriller. My favorite is Krazy Kat, about which more later.


Disneyland Tourist Map

  The most common application of chorography today is in tourist maps, guiding visitor through theme parks with visualizations at once geographically accurate and mimetically legible. Later we will review Disneyland as a relay for the cognitive map of Electracy (the "I Ching" of Entertainment enjoyment).








I Ching Trigrams

The full potential of place mapping, inspirational for chorAgraphy, is the I Ching, the cognitive map of the Asian oral apparatus, which charts the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm, collective and individual registers, in the form of a metaphysical landscape. The Chinese word for landscape is "Mountain Water," and many Chinese landscape paintings evoke the full range of environmental features selected to figure the fundamental forces interacting to shape experience, unfolded from the primal One, the interdependent Yin and Yang, whose combinatorial generates 64 situations. The situations embody archetypal scenes documenting in parable style the wisdom of right/wrong behavior developed in detail in the three wisdom religions: Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism.

Comments

  1. Leland UlmerMarch 7, 2026 at 9:50 AM

    I credit the drawings that Ty and I did of our house, from plan view with all the rooms and furnishings as an early nod to my future career in Architecture. I remember (correctly or perhaps not) we did this to map all the hiding spots for epic hide and seek or for kick the can games. A favorite pastime for Ty and I also was studying the map of Busche Gardens before a planned trip to strategize our best route to the roller coasters (the Python and the Scorpion). I found a website with a history of BG! bgthistory.com/galleries/maps/

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