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

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Denis Cosgrove has put forward these terms, drawing on the figure of the mythical Greek sun-god Apollo who drove his chariot across the sky on a daily basis, pulling with him the sun.

In the process, they add dimension and a bit of a backstory to the mediums and materials we use with them. Every year since then those projects have been the subject of an exhibition hosted by the Map and Geospatial Hub: this year’s exhibition, Place and Space, opened on 7 November and runs until the 26th. Cross-curricular connections came up as well: two students chose Alaska because their English Language Arts class was studying a book about the spirit bear. I initially favoured ‘synoptic’ because of its meaning of "furnishing a general view of some subject", "taking a combined or comprehensive view" (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). The criterion for choosing a place was simple: it had to be a place one could locate with Google Maps, similar to Bradford’s process.

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. Every such execution, as targeting, is potentially and tendentially lethal, for by taking aim at its object, it isolates that object from its relation to its surroundings, removing everything that might distract its aim from the place it seeks to secure: that is, to occupy and to appropriate. And those features vary considerably, especially when comparing maps from different sides of the Atlantic. in reference to views of the whole earth, picking up the sense of ‘forming a synopsis’, or overview, but without a determinate meaning. It forced me to confront how much of the world the United States has bombed during my lifetime, with my tax dollars, and so with my tacit support.

On a closer reading, a neat correspondence cannot quite be drawn between Kozloff’s list of bombing campaigns, based on Killing Hope: U.The map projects or provides not only its content but also guidance as to how that content should be interpreted. It is non-mobile, as everything may be viewed and known from its position of ‘nowhere in particular’.

The god’s eye view is situated as both a colloquial cultural shorthand for a view that is all-seeing and all-knowing, and as a trope in philosophy of mind that addresses the question of objectivity. The detention centre at Guantanamo Bay occupies part of the US Naval Station Guantanamo Bay [viii], in operation since the US leased the facility from Cuba as part of the Cuban-American Treaty of 1903, following the US invasion and occupation [ix]. This viewpoint denotes the contemporary and historical phenomenon of remote viewing, through a range of technological practices, carried out by means of remotely piloted military aircraft. Maps are commonplace in today's world, yet many are hastily made on computers with concern only for basic function, while ignoring aesthetics, form, and design.

Autonomy is increasingly a central feature of media and critical discussion of drone capacities; more than a fantasy of the removal of the human viewer-operator from danger, drones are increasingly seen (in existing drone discourse) as a means of both enhancing human capacities and compensating for human deficiencies. With my seventh-grade class at Southwick Regional School, we explored artworks by Lordy Rodriguez and Yin Xiuzhen, noticing that artists can interpret places and play with geography.

My family couldn’t travel from our home, then in Saudi Arabia, to the United States, and we were locked in the land of sand. He says, “I was really thinking of mapmaking and also the history of abstraction because in some ways I look at maps as these abstract grids. The viewing position formed in the artwork offers an identification with an imagined viewing position of the United States, conspicuous by its non-depiction in this re-worked ‘world map’.The end results were exactly what maps should be: small images representing vast areas of land and water. I then explore the question of how the artwork may be ‘read’ as an approach to encountering and responding to the work as a ‘remote viewer’. From origami to paper cutting and decoupage, love of paper crafting has soared, and with it the variety of paper types used by artists. McLean uses various visualisation formats to map her data, which she gathers alone or with the help of collaborators. 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.