Sam (Schillace) has put me onto yellowarrow.org – a fascinating new project in mobile phone deep mapping.

“yellowarrow” [noun] – a collective symbol for personal communication | [verb] – to leave and discover messages pointing out what counts

choose – find a place that speaks to you, something you want to point out, a detail in the cityscape that counts

tag – mark your place with the yellowarrow sticker

message – join the conversation – send a text message or email to point@yellowarrow.org telling the story behind your arrow

find – when you see a yellowarrow simply send a text message to point@yellowarrow.org with the arrow’s id to get the point immediately sent to your phone

save – make your arrow permanent – add a photo, map its location, build your profile at the yellowarrow.org archive, the site where you can view all the arrows placed around the country

Chris (Witmore) and I were talking again yesterday about Serres’s notion of percolating time – a favorite notion of ours – and the chaotic temporal folding of our experience of place

All those stories tied to places and intermingling, percolating, precisely when this kind of project provides the energy, the cultural heat.

It is just what Mike Pearson, Cliff McLucas, Dorian Llywelyn and I were trying to do with our notion of deep mapping cultural experience – a cartography of the intimate, the everyday, the monumental, the ephemeral, the epochal … [Link]

Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place …

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge 2001) page 64-65