Assembling Disneyland's Trajectories Mapping the Real and the Imaginary

Abstract

This work approaches Disneyland not as a representational image of a real and imaginary America but as a field of simulacra, a functioning assemblage, that actively produces America’s cultural, spatial, and affective realities and imaginations. By operatively mapping planned, emergent, and expansive trajectories, the mappings (work in progress) will reveal how Disneyland de-, re-, and territorializes: creatively transforms and metamorphosizes America. This while simultaneously being reterritorialized by America’s own cultural and spatial conditions—a reciprocal process through which each continuously produces the other. The mapping practice does not treat the trajectories as successive stages, but as analytically distinct dimensions of L’Agencement Disneyland, whose stabilization, variation, or escape becomes legible only through operative mapping.