Dice Map

This contribution to the exhibition 'O Avesso de Cidade' (the Reverse of the City) curated by Carlos Julio, is a development of my earlier project Almost a Map: Coimbra, from the previsous year. The project was named Dice Map, a play on the title of the cult book 'Dice Man' by Luke Rhinehart, that told the story of an individual who decided to make all their decisions by rolling dice.  Dice Map consisted of an A3 fold out with a map of the city on a numbered grid and a set of six instructions for creating a route. These instructions ranged from the reasonably practical, such as drawing a picture on the map without looking and then taking this as the route to walk along; to much more challenging proposals such as tearing a hole in the map and never visiting that part of the city ever again. Along with the map itself, a display unit was created to display the maps based on the figure of human making a pointing gesture towards the door of the gallery space with one hand, while holding a pair of dice in the other. A shelf built into the body supported a stack of folded maps, while unfolded copies where suspended from the extended arm, each of which had been adapted according to the instructions (with burnt holes, scribbles, drawings etc.). The printed maps were hand stamped and numbered. Instead of facial features, the head had 5 circular holes in the form of a quincunx, in reference to the '5' face of a dice. I have published a conference paper discussing this and several other related mapping projects.