Treehouse

I am looking for ways to map myself onto other things, an apparatus and method by which I can connect myself to another world which is simultaneously actual and metaphorical. In other words these worlds must exist as separate and investigatable sites of knowledge. And yet the discourses produced by investigating these sites must primarily serve to metaphorically describe the self. This is the process I call mapping.

Everyone has portions of their life in need of revision or remapping. To this end, I have begun to construct this model of a little neighbourhood in a little town. This fictional space is meant to be used as a setting in which the subject is free to revise their life story. I don't think its really necessary that people believe they've actually lived there - though many inevitably will. Even if you know that your stories are fictional, I still think that a helpful remapping could occur. What I need to figure out is how to make a video that presents my little town as empty of narrative yet having it conducive to the viewer's producing their own narratives. I'm finding it impossible to strip the model of details which suggest specific stories. I don't want the model to become an apparatus which simply triggers memories of certain movies. This isn't a landscape to run model trains through, but a possible clinical tool.

— So can you imagine yourself somehow in the town or...

— Sure.

— Another way to do it may be to have in mind a portion of your life that you'd like to re-map. I don't know if you have a portion in mind.

— No.

— Okay, well if you could just imagine yourself then in the town.

— Right. Okay. Do you want to me to be walking down the main street?

— Sure, you could be walking down the main street.

— Going to the factory. To work.

— Okay. Um, I haven't actually put a factory in the town.

— Oh. Okay.

— But we could say...

— I'm going to the fields to work.

— Okay, you could be...

— Is that good?

— Well, sure. Anything is good.

— I'm going to pick apples.

— Okay.

— In the orchards.

— In the orchards?

— Outside of the town.

— It would be good — I mean there's no orchard in the town, it would be good if you actually use the town. I mean if you just imagine things that are outside of the town, I don't know what the point of actually building the town is.

— How 'bout if I'm the babysitter going to babysit the kid that's in the treehouse?

— Okay, sure. And, and...

— I'm walking down the road. To get to this house. With the family and the kid.

— Right. And you get there, you get to the house...

— Yeah.

— And?

— And I ring the door and the mom is there so she lets me in and after she tells me about Johnny and she tells me Johnny has been in the tree house for a long time so I don't really have to babysit him, but just in case, I might have to pay attention to what’s happening in the tree house.

— Okay. Not much happens. How are you feeling about..?

— Fine.

— Fine, its good. They pay well, and uh...

— I can eat all the Oreos I want. Oh, and then it starts raining.