MAPPING MAPPING


Epic Vessels, Janet Abrams on Julie Mehretu

Bark to Bytes, Alice Twemlow on Natalie Jeremijenko

Gazetteer I: Mapping Maps

Geneography, Janet Abrams talks to Ben Fry

Skywriting, Janet Abrams and Peter Hall talk to Jeremy Wood

Can't Be Elsewhere when GPS Drawing by Jeremy Wood

Message in a Bottle, Peter Hall talks to Layla Curtis

Flight Paths, Peter Hall on Terraswarm

Gazetteer J: Mapping maps

Contours & Colonies, Andrea Codrington on De Geuzen

Monochrome Landscapes by Laura Kurgan

TextArc of ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING by W. Bradford Paley


Epic Vessels
A Julie Mehretu painting beckons the viewer from afar to enter its force field. Incorporating shards of urban form and giant architectural spaces, her work explores mapping, scale and collective identity. Janet Abrams dives in.

A map is a way to understand a situation: a system for understanding a particular picture or place.

I did a few drawings and they looked almost like a map of a city. As I developed them, I began thinking about them as aerial views of cities, as maps of imagined places and narratives.


Bark to Bytes
By planting pairs of cloned trees on sites around the Bay Area, Natalie Jeremijenko has created a “feral network” which, she hopes, will progressively map variations in environmental conditions. Alice Twemlow taps the OneTrees project and its printed guide.

...the paper map detracts from the fact that the whole project is a map--the trees themselves, and the way they undergo ongoing growth and change--and it's that kind of mapping I'm really interested in: what and whose information gets to count as information.


Geneography
Ben Fry is taking mapping into new territory with his pioneering visualizations of genomic data. Janet Abrams hears how Fry’s work in computational information design is helping scientists compare the human genome with those of other species.

There's just no substitute for visualizing data: you see patterns in it that you won't be aware of any other way.

In the last 10 to 20 years, with the advent of genomics, biologists have been able to pull up to the 100,000 feet level and see the entire world of biology in one glance...The field is suddenly coming to grips with how to deal with all this data.

If you look at an enormously complex map of a city, you get some immediate understanding of where the streets are, what its features are. That's a lot of what's missing from this complex diagramming.

What gets missed in Powers of Ten style continuous zooms are the plateaus along the way where interesting things are happening. You need to design for each of those plateaus, where you see very different phenomena, at the relevant scale.


Skywriting
Using off-the-shelf hardware and custom software created by collaborators, British artist Jeremy Wood turns GPS technology into a satellite-powered Etch-a-Sketch. His “GPS drawings”--drawn on land and sea and in the air--explore the intersections of typography, cartography and topography. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall find out about his hand-held perambulations.

With maps, you can relate the lines to space and place. Aerial images are more ambiguous because you have to be familiar with the area in order to recognize it.

I use billions of dollars of technology for creative purposes. I'd like to thank the American taxpayer for that.


Can't Be Elsewhere when GPS Drawing
Commissioned to create a GPS drawing for this book along the zero longitude line at Greenwich, Jeremy Wood steers around golfers, tombstones, circus clowns and an over-friendly dog, to discover a “no map’s land” between local and global meridians.

Our personal navigation is evolving from looking up at the stars to looking down from satellites mediated by digital devices held in our palms.
The two meridian lines are the edges of maps that don't meet up; between them are places that don't exist. Within this area of adjustment, the east-west hemispheres cannot be straddled.

Message in a Bottle
With her atlas collages as globe tracings, British artist Layla Curtis defamiliarizes maps, reflecting on our wishful attempts to chart the world. In her recent project Message in a Bottle: From Ramsgate to the Chatham Islands, she dropped GPS-enabled bottles in the ocean. She tells Peter Hall how she traced their aleatory journeys.

I was interested in tracking the journeys of these bottles to see if they ever actually get there...tracking through human contact and tracking through GPS.

When you dissect them, maps are very subjective things and only hold a certain amount of information. I'm intersted in playing with that system.

Flight Paths
Could pigeons be preferable to satellites in establishing remote sensing networks? Peter Hall gets a bird’s eye view as an experimental flock of avian mappers takes its maiden flight in Brooklyn.

Contours and Colonies
Silk RAF parachutists’ maps, made into a dress by a Dutch World War II widow, provide the text/ile for a rereading of Dutch colonial history, in the hands of contemporary artists De Geuzen. Andrea Codrington introduces Mrs. Terwen-de Loos’ dress, then fabricates fictional accounts of the original dress and the artists’ three recent re-editions.

Monochrome Landscapes
Laura Kurgan’s suite of satellite images shows the limit and potential of resolution and brings the geo-politics of data visualization down to earth.

TextArc
Brad Paley's map of the contents of Else/Where. To download, click the image: A Map of ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING