Making Art From Maps: Inspiration, Techniques, and an International Gallery of Artists

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I use them for decoupage, from large items such as map chairs to smaller things such as Mason jars, cookie tins and shells. Many students were drawn to Japan as a dream destination, which led to us discussing how aspects of visual culture, like anime, are so popular in the West (as well as sharing our favorite examples of anime).

In this way, the historical particularity is not actively occluded but is assimilated into the broader referentiality of the whole structure. However, remembering Kozloff’s idea of claustrophobia, and Wood’s ‘devastating’ encounter, I read a form of control and limitation in the viewing experience of Targets’ disjointed maps as one is unable to scroll up or down, unfold the next section of the map, or turn the globe to read the adjoining area. While it is beyond the scope of this study to address these histories in detail, I am also concerned to read the artwork in terms of what it is and does more than what it may be understood to stand in for. The view from nowhere is re-performed as a viewpoint that is not objective, or disinterested, but instead is actively constitutive of viewing relations that enable political and military domination. This time I wanted to create a piece of art that was a personalized homage to some of my favourite places in the world.Since 2003 he has covered everything from antique map collecting to the latest in geospatial technology. In this work, the abstract viewpoints discussed here are brought into play together in one space, showing them as abstractions in which the viewer actively participates. Artist Ed Fairburn, left, shows CBS News correspondent Ian Lee some of his work at his studio in Southampton, England. Dotting the ‘I’ is a small white square, which I take to be the symbol for a town, or at least a named settlement.

The initial view of a contained, coherent whole in Targets gives way to the detailed geographies of the fractured selections from the world that may be read from a closer viewing position – that available within the installation.They looked closely at small details, such as the nuances in buildings, landmarks, and cultural patterns to fill empty spaces.

Having noted the relationship of this grid to the abstract grid of lines of latitude and longitude which organise global space and world map projections, I want also to link the grid’s establishing of regular, delimited viewing areas to the panoptic organising of its viewed subjects. O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers. One girl selected Sentinel Island, off the coast of India, which she described as a place disconnected from the modern world. Vision is an active process, constituted by a range of means, including map use, and it is the process of how we see with maps that I focus on here. However, the artist understands the map paintings to relate, not strictly to countries, but to bombing campaigns carried out by the US [xii].Whether the viewer is able to connect ‘Bay of Pigs’ to the organising concept of Targets depends on knowledge gained, or not, outside of the artwork; the bay is the site of the failed 1961 US invasion of Cuba. The height of the god’s eye view is conceptual rather than physical, and it lays claim to functioning at any and all heights above the viewed subject. I couldn’t help looking toward the future, imagining what other materials, techniques, and approaches we will use. Though still not yet definitive, this formulation emphasises the central role of symbolic processes in mapping, as well as bringing in the idea of mediation, describing the human subject as crucially divided or separated from their spatial environment, and requiring an intermediate entity or process to enable interaction and interpretation.

Crampton draws a distinction between institutionalised mapping, and “a parallel series of mappings that were not scientific” (ibid, p. From the inland sea, to the west, rise abruptly the mountains in the west of Pakistan, while to the north-east, beyond El Salvador’s small stretch of coastline we can make out the city of San Salvador in the distance, and further beyond it, Kinshasa. My focus on the effect that viewing in this relation may have on the viewer comes directly from my reading of the artwork itself; I draw on the panoptic and the Apollonian as modes of abstract viewing that enable a productive analysis of the complex form of viewing that is staged in Targets.I argue that the god’s eye view confers on the drone’s eye view a tendency to work towards greater autonomy and more totalising power. From there, they could be as creative as they wished, using colors, designs, and patterns to fill in spaces, with any materials they had handy. In terms of legibility, the Apollonian gaze renders visible the earth as a whole, as an entity in space.