Disorienting
Welcome! You have landed on artist Tegan L Smith’s geodesy (Earth-measuring) and geo-odyssey (Earth traveling) website, where discombobulations of a neurodivergent septuagenarian traveler meet ideas about home and normality. Navigate by menus, buttons, charts, categories, or tags to Travelogues and Essays. Or zoom into Travelogues from points on a spinning globe!
By scrolling down the page, you will find a formal Land Acknowledgement and Accessibility Notes, but the whole website is about measurement systems used to legitimate land grabs and all kinds of favouritism. This Home page outlines the website structure as a network of locations. Upside-down “Disorienting” will bring you back here. The About page acknowledges the community behind the project. The website became an unintentional demonstration of autistic-dyslexic thoroughness as it grew to 105 Travelogues, 20 Essays, 18 Geography Chart entries, over 2,000 photographs, and various navigation possibilities!
The Garden in Winter – Caring for Land
Disorienting is grounded in geodesy – measuring Earth’s geometric form and orientation in space. Travelogues and Essays fall into interrelated categories:
- Navigation and Migration deals with travel, borders, and a place to call home. Prime Meridian Geodesy focuses on my trips to the Greenwich Meridian, UK and Toronto, Canada’s antipode off the coast of Western Australia.
- Standard Dimensions explores quantifying and ranking human attributes. Metric Survey follows the 18th C French Paris Meridian endeavour to calculate Earth’s circumference and establish the metre as a fraction of that dimension for the International System of Measures (SI or Metric System).
Categories intersect in resistances to dehumanizing and eliminating groups from their homes or from life itself through eugenics and ecosystem destruction.
The Travelogues revolve around specific geodetic coordinates – intersecting parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude. Photographs and geodetic data are accompanied by short texts about my visits, place histories, and neurodivergent notes.
I used travel opportunities as a Canadian settler and pensioner to collect photographs for this website. It seemed the least I could do for places I’ve visited and my home, where I transplant local shrubs. Compared to faraway emigration or a sudden transformation in a homeland you knew like the back of your hand, disorientations felt by tourists, even if autistic, dwindle.
The Essays on navigation and standardization are illustrated by photographs of places and fanciful charts. While there isn’t a storyline linking the essays in order, they can be read as numbered. Some provide contexts for travelogue clusters:
- 01 Miscellany – why am I writing? Preface (afterword, compiled later)
- 02 Disorienting Home – About Project General Introduction to the website
- 06 Zeroing into Earth Coordinates – Geodetic Chart Introduction to Navigation and Migration
- 14 Secularizing Pilgrimage: Paris Meridian Metric Survey Introduction to Standard Dimensions
The Glossary defines some keywords in geodesy and neurodiversity. (upcoming)
About summarizes the project history, artist’s biography, and acknowledgements to the many people who have helped.
Accessibility Notes
My struggles with dyslexia underpin the design of this website, from the Lexand typeface to margins and colours. Autism informs reshuffling through alternate navigation routes and arranging photographs in patterns. All Essay and Travelogue feature images contain alt text. Travelogue photo galleries captions, and all Essay individual photograph have alt text. Despite proofreading, spell check, and numerous rewrites, dyslexia means there are probably small mistakes and awkward phrases.
Territory and Property Notes
Throughout history, standard dimensions and survey techniques were developed for military navigation and taxation based on the areas and boundaries of property surveying. These roots make sense of statistics and comparisons used as absurd justifications for bullying people and usurping territory. I discuss compass coordinates and Land Back ideas to undermine boundaries by reimagining places and people as points that radiate and mingle like tree roots.
Land acknowledgement
A standard land acknowledgement seemed inadequate for this Earthbound project, and I searched for treaty information on places where I have lived. The chart below emerged. I have benefitted from living as a settler on the territories of many First Nations in what maps label the Dominion of Canada. Colonialism within our national borders as well as economic and military conquests by allies reverberate today. Every Child Matters, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and Truth and Reconciliation are among many initiatives to deal with oppression. The Disorienting website and Coordinates of Home mapping projects show measurement system standardization as a tool to enforce property and normality. This website is dedicated to Land and humans of different abilities, economic background, racialized identities, and 2SLGBTQ+, who are dismantling hierarchies and taking care of each other in Community. Identities and differences are not promoted for exceptional individual’s gains but to assess our group needs and honour contributions through indigenous Land-healing and economics systems reoriented through potlatch practices.
