Mapping Hacks

You get Paul Spencer’s project
www.ParisMinnesota.com — A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC ART PROJECT.

“In the 1920’s, avant-garde artists and writers converged on the Montparnasse
neighborhood of Paris making it the center of modern culture. But what if
they had all come to Saint Paul, Minnesota instead? That’s the premise of
‘ParisMinnesota.com’ a new website by artist Paul Spencer.

The website takes the form of a fictional tourist guide, ‘A Guide to the
Montparnasse District of Saint Paul, Minnesota’ with a map, photographs, and
historical notes. Clicking on the interactive map brings up photographs and
explanitory captions tracing the history of Dada and Surrealism in the
Montparnasse neighborhood, as if it had taken place in Minnesota.

In creating the art project, Spencer took a map of Saint Paul, Minnesota,
erased all the street names and replaced them with the names of Paris
streets. Then, using the addresses of famous landmarks of Paris he located
where they would be if Saint Paul was Paris and went to photograph whatever
he found there. “It was all determined by chance, so I couldn’t be sure of
the outcome, but the results were uncanny. Where the Eiffel tower should be
on the map was a large granite cross by the Mississippi River and, when
viewed in the right way, it did resemble the Eiffel Tower. And the
Surrealist Gallery turned out to be a daycare center. All kinds of unplanned
ironies presented themselves.”

One of the funnier ironies, to me, is the ‘catacombes’ (Ax Man Surplus).

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