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

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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 term antipodes initially named both the inhabitants and land whose existence opposite the known world was theorised by ancient Greek philosophy (Hiatt, 2008, Goldie, 2010).

Some of these viewpoints are already in existence in popular discourse – the god’s eye view, the drone’s eye view, the antipodes; some have arisen in critical and theoretical discourse – the zenithal gaze (Söderström, 1996), panoptic viewing (Foucault, 1977), the Apollonian gaze (Cosgrove, 2001); while the view from nowhere is an idea that has quite a broad popular usage – to describe the concept of an objective, disinterested view [vii]. The painted panels are formed of canvas stretched on wooden frames, and while the external supports resemble lines of latitude and longitude, they also suggest “a bathysphere or an early spaceship or perhaps a giant hand grenade” (Princenthal and Earenfight, 2008, p. From the outside of the structure, the interior map paintings are visible, evoking commercial wallpaper featuring enlarged maps that has become popular in the period since the making of this work in 2000. This world turned inside out captures something of the physical consequence of aerial warfare, in which buildings and bodies are ravaged and exposed.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. They wanted a map which would introduce the new building to the students in a way that was friendly and inviting. Viewers are able to stand inside the curved structure, and pull closed a door formed of one of the painted sections.

A scratch card map by Ken PerkinsAn artist based in Denver, Colorado, Perkins specialises in scratchboard and pen and ink drawings. In the centre, my eye is first drawn to the diagonal word ‘AFGHANISTAN’, written in block capitals, slanted downward across a field of dark yellow. Rather than ‘seeing through’ maps to a posited underlying reality, instead maps are means of constructing knowledge and “making a world” (ibid, p. However, in visualising the earth as an object in space, at least half of the earth’s surface remains obscured from visibility. There is a disorienting echo inside the globe, so that visitors’ voices are amplified if they speak to one another from within, creating a kind of claustrophobia.The god’s eye view imagines the capacity to view from ‘nowhere in particular’ (Gregory, 2014), similarly to the view from nowhere, to be outside of both time and space, and to confer authority and power on the viewing position thus constructed. In that context, I also briefly consider Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) central theoretical contribution to this area, the framework of space as a concrete abstraction. ADIZ’ means, to me, demilitarised zone, and having never been in one, it prompts me to imagine barbed wire, planes overhead, and armed guards in watchtowers, the Berlin Wall. The viewpoint is constructed as invulnerable; to time, to subjectivity, to positionality and to the viewed.

The antipodes is engaged in the implication of bodies and places through having theorised their existence prior to ‘discovery’, that is, encounter with the West. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have a terrible sense of direction, so if I can make a map that works for me, I feel confident it can do the job for others. The end results were exactly what maps should be: small images representing vast areas of land and water.

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.

The south Pennines by Angela SmythThis work took six months to complete, eventually filling six large canvases of 3 × 2. Thus, "as a product of technology, a cultural artefact whose materialisation and uses cannot be reduced to a unique and transhistorical model, the map is now seen as a complex object that can be submitted to a theoretical approach" (ibid, p.Designer interviews are accompanied by 25 accessible how-to projects of her own design that teach many of the techniques used by the gallery artists. The title irresistibly refers to the Western colonial-imperial conception of Africa as the ‘dark continent’, against which is posed the notion of ‘light continents’ by the title, those ‘lit up’ by the light of industrial development, the light of global capital, ‘light’ here potentially corresponding to imperialism as a global mode of the extraction of value from the ‘global south’ and its accumulation in the ‘global north’. Ian Lee is a CBS News correspondent based in London, where he reports for CBS News, CBS Newspath and CBS News Streaming Network. I use this idea of seeing with maps to claim two things – that maps are deeply concerned with creating a sense that we can see the world by using them, and to assert a commitment to further John Berger’s important claim, that “[o]ur vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are” (1972/2008, p. For a less positive discussion of Harley see the introductory essay to Harley’s posthumous collection of essays, The New Nature of Maps, by J.