By Tara McPherson

Many of the toys and tools of digital media strive to manage space or geography. Google Maps zooms in and out of our neighborhoods, traversing relative distance at the blink of an eye and updating Powers of Ten, that classic 1970s film by Charles and Ray Eames, with the lure of 21st-century interactivity. We feel we're doing the driving, managing the datasphere and vast virtual geographies. Video games chart massive 3-D worlds, mapping new terrains for exploration and seemingly chance encounters. The player can toggle back and forth between perspectives, switching between a first-person point of view and a god's eye vista.

Such powerful technologies help us to imagine that space is under our control. Much of digital culture trades on the twin promises of transformation and control. Digital tools allow us to easily morph images; home makeover TV shows restyle our houses (and, implicitly, our selves) in a tidy half hour. Yet such programs and tools are, of course, highly constructed, often offering limited possibilities for real control beyond the tightly scripted paths they highlight.

We all carry maps in our heads, powerfully processed networks of the places we inhabit and the spaces that matter. In these mental maps, memories overwrite physical reality, merging the world around us with powerful emotions. The students of the Los Angeles Leadership Academy have turned their own mental geographies into vibrant digital documents. Here, they invite you to enter their worlds and share their spaces.

Gone is the slickness of a video game or the seamlessness of a Google interface. These digital maps began as hand-drawn documents, youthful interpretations of the power of place in everyday life. While these environments might have been reworked into the sleek images familiar from computer graphics, I vastly prefer them as they are. They remind us of the messiness of the world around us. They also underscore the myriad ways in which human memory serves to rewrite that world.

These maps offer a powerful lens into the things that matter to this subset of LA youth, teens who navigate LA's complex geographies. They cross the city simply to get to a decent school, often traversing great distances for a chance at an education. As the maps make clear, they can't always control the spaces they move through. Violence can interrupt their journeys; graffiti remaps the cityscape, providing subtle signs about where they should or shouldn't go. Life is not as seamless as a Google map. Nonetheless, their projects also illustrate how and where they locate hope, friends, family and love in the worlds that they inhabit. They may not have a God's eye view of Los Angeles, but their maps allow us to see and explore the city through fresh points of view, vantage points that really matter.

These projects were made as a part of a larger initiative called Learning Games, led by the artist and writer Juan Devis in conjunction with a local charter school. In this initiative, students learn digital image tools in the context of telling stories about their own lives and worlds. Rather than playing someone else's p.o.v. in a mass-produced video game, they're telling their own stories and mapping their own worlds. In becoming makers of media that matters - to them and I hope to you -- they just might access in their own lives the transformative promise of control that digital culture often sells to us in its slick and shiny packaging.

Tara McPherson is Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema-TV at USC. She teaches classes in race, gender, and popular culture and is author of several books and articles, including Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. She is also editor of the multimedia journal, Vectors (www.vectorsjournal.org).