Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

In her review of TCR 2-50 feature artist Gridlock: Antonia Hirsch’s World Map Project, Sharla Sava writes that Hirsch “draws cartography into the realm of contemporary art. In doing so, it stresses the visual basis of world maps, and the many other occasions in which mapping has been positioned as a facet of the visual arts. While the scope of the conjunction between cartography and art is vast and amorphous, what is pertinent to Hirsch’s concerns is the place of this conjunction with respect to the historical breakdown of modernism. In order to make sense of what we are seeing here,” Sharla Sava urges us, “I think it is necessary to understand how Hirsch’s current work both calls upon and resonates with art in the era of what Rosalind Krauss calls “the post-medium condition.” [A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition]”

Sava goes on to say that, “While disparate in terms of media, scale and content, a common aesthetic aim can be said to unite the artworks in Hirsch’s World Map Project. Hirsch’s artworks take the rational, objective, and highly conventionalized language of cartography as their starting point. Thus we can see that all the works in the World Map Project are governed by the same abstraction, distance and systematization which informs the modern history of European map-making.”

This process of abstracting and distancing in the modern history of European map-making began to develop during the Grand Tour. With increased numbers of travelers following the same routes through Europe, systematization emerged in the form of the itinerary. Artists also followed proscribed routes through Europe south toward Italy, each stopping to paint the same veduta along the way as their predecessors had before them. Art Historian Peter Galassi succinctly summarizes this process of abstracting and distancing in the history of European map-making in Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition:

Reaching back to the sixth century, the guide book tradition always focused on Rome, the center of religious power and of ancient culture. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, serving an increasing number of travelers, the guidebooks matured as a literary form. […] The structure of the guidebooks may be described as a grid. Horizontally, they established an itinerary, a sequence of cities and sights, usually along the road to and from Rome. Vertically, they recorded the role of each place in history and art. The itinerary exchanged the seamless geography of Italy for a blank map dotted with points of interest.

Sharla Sava situates Gridlock: Antonia Hirsch’s World Map Project within this tradition of systematization. “As with typical world maps,” Sava writes, “Hirsch’s maps-as-art remain defiantly impersonal. In Average Country, for instance, as with Forecast, and Blot, the artist’s hand remains invisible, and the recognizable contours of nation or continent provide the basis for recognition. That is to say, Hirsch, in starting with a map of the world, has embraced the commonly held assumption that the world is – or is knowable as – a map.”

In an essay that appeared in Vancouver-based Geist magazine issue #65 (Summer, 2007), Alberto Manguel writes:

Cartography is a literary invention. The world we live in is not concerned with borders and limitations, nor does it measure carefully its extensions and heights. It is made of movement, not of static spaces; it is a world in which rivers run and come to a halt, mountains rise and crumble to dust, forests grow and die, islands emerge and sink back into the sea, sands invade and retreat, time and time again. And it is nameless. Since the day in which one of our earliest and most adventurous ancestors drew in the sand a line between two dots in order to show the road he had travelled, we have imagined our anarchic, movable, anonymous world in the guise of a readable map.
Alberto Manguel, Geist’s Literary Precursors

Maps are a recurrent theme in my electronic literature, often operating simultaneously as images, user interfaces and metaphors for place. I think my early adoption of the Internet as a medium was due in part to my attraction to it as a place-less place. Looking back at my early web-based projects, I see them now as “sites” of longing for belonging, small stand-ins for home. For example, in The Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls (1996), a map of Nova Scotia, my home province, functions as the central image and the user interface for a non-liner intertextual narrative. And in a more recent work, The Cape (2005), an annimated geological map of Cape Cod moves with the jerky frame rate of an old home movies above a line of narrative text that reads: “These events happened so long ago that this whole story is in black and white.” J. R. Carpenter

• other islands in this text-fed stream

  • Post-Minimal Mapping
  • Average Country
  • Gridlock: Antonia Hirsch’s World Map Project
  • Genetic Portraits
  • a two-way stream of decision-making
  • Now I will perform for you
  • Taking a line for a walk
  • Sharla Sava
  • Death is death; life is life.
  • The Monstrous Future
  • Collapsing Boundaries (Hybrids)
  • The Language of DNA (or “The Code of Codes”)
  • Co-opting the Lab
  • Metaphors of Biotechnology
  • Brief Encounters with Biotech Art
  • What the heck is RSS?
  • Streams: The Same River Twice
  • YouTube Poetry
  • a crisis in cognition
  • Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams