The front cover of The Cailano Review 2-50 “Artifice & Intelligence” is graced by a work by Vancouver-based artist Antonia Hirsch, called “Average Country.”
As Sharla Sava writtes, in her essay Gridlock: Antonia Hirsch’s World Map Project: Online technologies have turned us all into potential cartographers. The digital collection and searchable database, NationMaster, for instance, provides an array of world maps based on statistical data. In a matter of seconds (and without paying a fee!) I can create a map of nations based on comparative statistics including “most murderous,” “most generous” or “most trigger happy.”
Works such as Hirsch’s Average Country, then, make some headway in coming to terms with how the ubiquity and flow of digital data has undermined the stability and autonomy of the modernist image. But it is crucial to understand that Average Country, a world map in which all the nations of the world are not only regulated by size but also literally stacked on top of one another, short-circuits the certainties implied by NationMaster and other such statistical data. Hirsch’s project functions, not as an agent of globalisation, but rather as a witty and cautionary tale of globalisation’s problems. What is visible to the spectator of Hirsch’s work is the sobriety and utter lack of differentiation offered by this terrain. This world map is a vast, geographical space condensed into a dense and narrow black hole, as if by the ideology of neoliberal globalisation. From a distance Hirsch’s Average Country looks like the gaping wound caused by a bullet, or the delicate surface of a painting touched by the aesthetics of minimalism.
Sharla Sava / Gridlock: Antonia Hirsch’s World Map Project
other islands in this text-fed stream
