“Mapping Four Decades of Touch” is a heat map that plots one hundred discrete memories of touch. The years span 1985-2021, ages 4 to 40. The coordinates that glow “hottest” (white) are the areas where more of my life events have congregated. Un-remembered moments blur around the edges and are often faintest, though not necessarily from lack of significance. The memories are contextualized through a (loosely) structured set of parameters.

The map both reveals and obscures intimacy. The moments in each point require some investment of time and searching on the part of a user; clicking into pop up boxes, zooming in and out, panning across the map, repeating. The user may get “lost” in the constellations of points of touch. Possibly, the narrator’s relationship to place may emerge.

This project takes particular inspiration from Amber Jamilla Musser’s discussion of surface and opacity in “Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance” (2018). I was inspired by this text to think about what a controlled, quantified exposure of (sometimes) explicit content from my work as a memoir-writer could achieve, especially in relationship to the ongoing theft of intimate data that is the status quo for digital life.

Jade Sanchez-Ventura

Jade Sanchez-Ventura

Jade Sanchez-Ventura is bringing her first year of studies in the MLIS program to a close this May. She’s pursuing academic librarianship, with a serious crush on digital humanities. Since the fall, she can’t stop thinking about our relationship to our own data, and she is delighted by Ranganathan’s 5 Laws of Library Science. Her previous decades of work as a writer and educator are shaping her approach to librarianship with her eye for storytelling and foundation in critical pedagogy. Her personal essays have been awarded and published by a wide array of literary organizations, highlighted by Bitch Media’s (former) podcast, Popaganda, and anthologized by Seal Press. She is a series contributor to MUTHA Magazine. As an educator, she worked as a Community Word Project teaching artist, CUNY adjunct professor, and advisor/administrator at the Brooklyn Free School. She is a parent of two, and a devoted surfer of very small waves.
Jade Sanchez-Ventura

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