Borges, maps, terrains & Neogeography

Hypocenter in Hiroshima
Hypocenter in Hiroshima – Elin o’Hara slavick

‘A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face’. – Afterword to El hacedor, 1960 Jorge Luis Borges

Moonriver is posting some great examples of maps and terrains in art and their associated psychogeographies. Dataisnature loves maps, imaginary or real (the real of course just another layer of the imagined). Click on the posts and follow the path through to the artist pages.

Urban American Macrocosm; Bypass; Carbon Drawing; Fetish Map of London; Aerial photography; Wild maps

Bldgblog features some very exquisite charts of the Mississippi Delta in fine colour palettes. Bldgblog comments ‘This is geology as a subset of Abstract Expressionism: rocky loops of the Earth’s surface in the hands of Jackson Pollock.

Previously mentioned at dataisnature regarding maps are Timetube and Psychogeographic Paintings. Then over at Flickr we find the Diagram Diaries pool and the Neogeography pool of which Selflesh’s excellent Map set is part of.

On the paradox and mystery of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map, Borges wrote in A Universal History of Infamy:

‘In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.’

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