We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.
Public Art: The New Cartographers
By Molly Kleiman
We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide openness…that first unscribbled serenity…that anarchic openness of the sky."- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
"…Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors."
-Elizabeth Bishop, from "The Map"
Maps carry the illusion of Truth. We believe them–they are scientific, objective documents. And believe in them–whatever is unseen, unknown we must make visible, make known, in order to control, author, and orient ourselves and others in our world. What else are expression and exploration, but acts of mad scribbling on blank sheets? As a population of cartographers, we must choose the variables (which to track? which to ignore?), draw the boundaries (how arbitrary our hands are!), and color the domains (how significant, Bishop reminds us, are these shades!). The following maps have been installed in, created for, or evolved from the public realm. Their creators use "magic bikes" and "hot spots," "transpoders" and "geopositioning" surveillance; others apply post-it notes and magic marker, chant hymns and ring bells; they enlist cell phones, pigeons, and psychogeographic cartographers as their assistants. Map-makers betray themselves–their values, their concerns, their curiosity, their blind spots–as much as they translate their chosen data. We readers, viewers and players betray ourselves, in how we interpret their charts and apply their inventions.
