mapped maps

$When John Cage proposed that the primary act of musical performance was listening, not playing, he was asserting that an experience is more (or better) defined by the subjectivity of the individual listener than by the objective reality of the music (by reality, I mean what makes the music distinct - the individual listener is defining the music more than, say, the music's tempo, harmonization, dynamics, etc.) My image is an attempt to map the transition between objective and subjective. Because it's difficult to visually represent abstractions, I decided to show something highly structured - notes from a Bach fugue - as standing for objectivity. I put leaves in the middle of my image because on the one hand they are unstructured - strewn here and there, ephemeral, shaped in many different ways. But on the other hand, they are highly structured in that their shape can be broken down into fractal images. Maps, as we commonly think of them are a sort of middle ground. On the one hand, they depict objective physical realities - the location of nations on continents, the longitude and latitude of X place. But there is also a lot of subjectivity in maps. Different map projections depict the world in different ways. The peters projection contrasts with the mercator projection in that the peters projection is based on relative land mass while the mercator is based on relative distance. The result of the mercator projection is that certain (primarily northern, white) countries end up looking a lot larger than they really are. The map in the picture is one I painted with some students to rectify their god-awful objective knowledge of geography. The bottom images are of chaotic, (ok, so i'm not being very objective in my depiction of the subjective but we all have our biases.) When the interpretation of the individual becomes more important than the definition of a reality, chaos, at least in understandings, ensues.$