Creative Scotland Open Fund for Individuals supported the project.

Virtual reality, 3-channel directional sound, and direct to film printing on the fabric.

Variable. Minimal: 300х500х300cm

'Mind Maps: Aberdeen' is the second project in Andrey Chugunov's ongoing Mind Maps series, which explores the relationship between urban environments and the processes of embodied cognition.

As part of the Aberdeen chapter, the artist carried out a series of expeditions across the city using public transport. He focused on bus routes 1, 11, 15, and 18 - lines that connect the city's diverse districts and converge in the centre. During these journeys, Chugunov read Fools' Gold by Christopher Harvie, a historical account of the North Sea oil industry and its entanglement with Scottish politics and infrastructure.

Data was collected through a wearable device called Scriber - a custom-built tool designed by the artist. The device combines a GPS tracker and motion sensors embedded in a pencil, allowing it to record the gestures of text underlining and the geolocation of the reader while in transit. This hybrid trace of movement and attention produces a personal cartography of thought and space.
Unlike the classical method of loci - where one places imagined objects along a known path to memorise them - Chugunov reverses the logic. Here, it is the external movement through the city that connects the text's meaning with the environment. The artist's mental and physical routes fold together into a layered, sensory mapping.

In the final installation, these imprints take shape as an immersive environment of VR, directional sound, and a textual response printed on fabric. Within the virtual scene, metaphorical phrases drawn from Harvie's book appear like found objects - fragments of poetics surfacing amid facts and figures. For Chugunov, these liminal metaphors became a material in themselves. This work approaches virtual reality not as a tool for creating a world, but rather as a subtractive technology, in essence, momentarily disabling one of the senses. Directional sound requires the viewer to position themselves precisely in space to perceive the sonic composition generated from the collected data, creating an experience of deep listening and embodied presence.

In this work, the city becomes a canvas stitched together with memory - not through landmarks or geography, but through rhythms of movement, fleeting perception, and the infrastructural textures that shape lived experience.