ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understand the formation of a ‘viewpoint’ of the visitor within this work in terms of cartographic abstraction in its construction of a mode of viewing that is ‘immersive’ as opposed to synoptic. It argues that a mode of signification is in play, connecting the visual and the aural registers of River Sounding and mediating the viewer-listener’s conceptualisation of the river as the object of the artwork. Bill Fontana has proposed that River Sounding presents a form of sonic mapping, in which sounds take on the symbolic role that cartography typically assigns to visual marks appearing in the map image. The chapter suggests that the formation of the soundscape in River Sounding follows a process of cartographic abstraction that may be productively analysed through comparison with the visual process of cartographic signification put forward by Denis Wood and John Fels. It argues that River Sounding instantiates an ‘immersive’ viewing experience of the abstraction of the Thames.
