On Again, Off Again Israel Map Exhibit is Off Again

The controversial map exhibit Imaginary Coordinates at Chicago's Spertus Museum was abruptly closed on Friday the Chicago Tribune reports. The exhibit had angered the city's Jewish community with at least one member of the museum's board threatening to resign if the exhibit stayed open. The Tribune quoted Rhoda Rosen, director of the museum, as saying that the exhibit was about mapping as a "culturally constituted practice, rather than as a navigational instrument."

However, Michael Kotzin, a leader of Chicago's Jewish community told the Tribune that while many pieces highlighted Palestinian humanity, others portrayed Israelis as unfeeling and guarded, without noting the dangers Israelis have faced for decades.

The map exhibit generated controversy at its opening on May 2nd and temporarily closed a week later. A new version reopened on May 15th

See also: Mapping Middle East Politics.

Via: The Map Room.

Map Collecting: The Next Big Thing?

Paper maps. Who needs 'em? Well apparently as physical maps are increasingly replaced by digital versions the old ones are becoming more collectible. Express India recently ran a story on the growing interest in antique maps among collectors in that country:

It is the fun of tracing unknown routes that draws people towards this shop,” says [Kapil Dev] Aryan, who opened the shop in 2000 and has seen business expand in the past couple of years. While Indians are keen on world maps, foreigners knock on the door of the small shop for old maps of India.

Sanjay Jain of RS Books and Prints, South Extension, that is famous for its collection of antique maps, says, “The love for maps is connected to the sense of discovery. It’s a real pleasure, for instance, to peruse a rare 18th century plan of the city you live in.” Getting your hands on a 16th or 17th century map is difficult, and even a small map costs Rs 5,000-10,000, [$117-$233] while 18th and 19th century maps cost at least Rs 2,000-5,000. [$47-$117]

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Now, the clientele comprises ambassadors, embassy officials, researchers, scholars and avid collectors who are kept in the loop whenever the dealer chances upon a new find. “And some of these guys drive a really hard bargain,” smiles Aryan.

See also: Japanese Take Big Interest in Historic Maps.

150-Year Old Map of Central Park Displayed

"Greensward" the huge map by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux that became the plan for the development of New York City's famed Central Park has been put on display for only the third time in history the New York Times reported:

It lays out the framework of the park as it exists today with a prescience that few master plans achieve. You could use it to navigate through many stretches of the park’s 840-acre expanse. Yet it also is a product of a long-ago, almost Arcadian time, as shown in features like a formal flower garden — never constructed — that would have been laid out as intricately as lacework.

The map is the centerpiece of “Celebrating Greensward: The Plan for Central Park, 1858-2008,” which will be on view in the old Arsenal at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street until June 19...

In addition to the map, the exhibit features 71 photographs tracking the declines and rebirths of the park through the last 150 years. The exhibit will be open this weekend and weekdays from from 9 to 5. Admission is free.

Beware of Misleading Maps

Today's opening of the London Map Fair has inspired the Times' Richard Morrison to take a look at maps that lead people astray:

A great map is much more than a navigation tool. Actually, a great map is rarely a navigation tool. It is a political and philosophical statement. What it displays, and especially what it conceals, tells us far more about the values of those who created it than about the terrain it allegedly charts.

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No map can ever tell the whole truth, if only because it attempts to chart a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. But thousands of maps are acts of deception, one way or another. Israel is unlabelled on many maps destined for Arab countries. Similarly, maps in the old East Berlin used to show West Berlin as white space, as if it did not exist.

What of Ordnance Survey, Britain's official map-maker? “We are not in the business of misleading users in any way,” it customarily proclaims. Except, of course, when it comes to showing military bases and government snooping centres. According to OS, they do appear — but as blank spaces. Orwell could not have made it up.

How will modern technology change mapmaking? According to Mr. Morrison, not much.

The most influential maps of the future may well be located in cyberspace. The map-makers' eternal quandary — of how much to reveal, how much to conceal, and how much to mislead for ulterior motives — will not go away.

The entire article is well worth the read.

About the fair: Held at the Royal Geographical Society, the London Map Fair is the largest gathering of map aficionados in Europe. The two-day event features 40 top dealers and hundreds of collectors and curators. Items for sale range from historic town plans for less than £100 (about $197) to a 1620 wall map of the Americas priced at £80,000 (about $157,000).

Former Educator Maps Busy Retirement

A lot of seniors take up painting in their retirement years. Today's Benton Evening News profiles a senior citizen who paints on a nation-wide scale. Since 1992, Gene Alexander, known as “Mr. A.” to thousands of school children, has volunteered his time to produce big colorful maps of the United States for schools and other public facilities.

More from the News:

“The maps are all numbered and dated,” Alexander said. “The 71st map is almost finished and is located at Franklin Early Childhood in Mt. Vernon. I have two more to create in Centralia and one in Radom at St. Michael's School.”

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“After about two months of retirement, I decided I wanted to do something to continue to educate young people,” he said. “I mail letters to school districts and include color copies of maps I have finished. People can't believe I don't want any money for doing this.

Mr. A told the News that creating the maps is a three-phase process that takes between 10 to 12 hours of work.

Mapping Middle East Politics

When you mix cartography with Israeli-Palestinian politics, controversy is sure to result. That was recently discovered by Rhoda Rosen, director of Chicago's Spertus Museum.

Imaginary Coordinates was envisioned as the museum's contribution to the city's Festival of Maps. As reported by Chicago Reader, the exhibit "..juxtaposes antique and modern maps of the Holy Land (mostly from Spertus’s own collection) with the work of eight contemporary Israeli and Palestinian artists." Ms. Rosen told the Reader that she wanted to “explore the limits of mapping,” and “invite discussion.”

Any discussion was quickly cut off when the exhibit inexplicably closed a week after its May 2nd debut. The Reader reports that elevators wouldn’t take visitors to the tenth floor exhibition gallery, and museum staff were saying that the show would be closed indefinitely for “building maintenance". However, rumors began circulating that the exhibit was too controversial for some key members of the Spertus audience. One executive of a major Jewish charity confirmed to the Reader that he had canceled a major fundraiser at the museum because the exhibit "wasn’t appropriate”.

So a “tweaked” version of the exhibit reopened on May 15th. The new exhibit only allows visitors on to be admitted as part of guided tours. Museum director Rosen, who worked on the exhibit for three years, notes no items were removed from the show during the closure, although wall cards were revised and objects were rearranged.

In an essay in the exhibit's catalog Ms. Rosen says that the core of the exhibit is the understanding that “maps have less to do with landscape than with the intention of their makers.” What she apparently didn't fully consider was the effect some maps can have on their viewers as well.

Artist's Project Makes Invisible Grid, Visible

Artist Perri Lynch became intrigued about an invisible control grid over the land known as real-time networks. The way surveying and geodesy use linear and algebraic terms to give precise definition to that which defies definition: land and landscapes became a source of inspiration.

As the American Surveyor reports:

Perri first came to the attention of the surveying community from her work "Precisely Known Completely Lost," a photographic and sound series. She matched images of survey monuments (from the point of view most familiar to us, looking straight down) with a perfectly skyward image from the same monument. Audio from each site collected at the time of photography was played in loops exhibition.

In the exhibit materials for "Precisely Known Completely Lost," Perri notes, "Sense of place does not exist in the physical world. It is not universal and it is not permanent." Part of her attraction to survey monuments is that they are a manifestation of this human desire for sense of place, and a renewed appreciation for the practical value of such amenities.

Ms. Lynch's latest project is a series of black limestone pillars, set parallel to and along an entire kilometer-long National Geodetic Survey (NGS) baseline. The first and last stone are coincident with the NGS monuments; the rest of the six-foot high stones are placed in a progression of doubling distance at each subsequent stone. One side is rough, the other smooth to the contrast the regular and irregular or natural. Holes are drilled at eye-height (and at child and ADA height) aligned perfectly with holes in each subsequent stone, thereby giving the observer the perspective of a surveyor.

Ms. Lynch told American Surveyor that she sought to "amplify the obscure," as well as to "help folks connect to the specialness of subtle things and provide a new perspective on a familiar scene."

Map Design Competition Underway

The Cartography and Geographic Information Society is now taking submissions for their 35th Annual Map Design Competition. The competition is designed to promote interest in map design and recognize significant design advances in cartography. Noted cartographers judge the entries based on: color, overall design and impression, craftsmanship, and typography. Entries are displayed at a number of national and international functions and then become part of the permanent collection of the U.S. Library of Congress.

There are separate categories for professionals and students. If you need some inspiration, you can browse some previous winning maps here. But you had better get busy, the deadline is January 15th, 2008.

Map Exhibition Asks Viewers to Question Everthing

Artists' use of maps to make a political or social statement have been highlighted here before. An exhibit at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts takes a comprehensive look at art work which incorporates cartography.

"Lines in the Earth: Maps, Power and the Imagination" explores the way mapping is used to explore social, cultural and political geographies. Some of the featured artists use maps to rearrange the world; others use them to explore the way that maps reinforce political power; while others use maps to create their own imaginary worlds.

The exhibit runs through December 7th at the center in Ketchum, Idaho.

Strange Maps

The blog, Strange Maps has attracted an enthusiastic readership in the year or so it has been up. Among its admirers are some folks at Yahoo, which recently named it one of their Picks of the Week.

Strange Maps specializes in uncovering and displaying obscure, eyebrow-raising, and whimsical maps. The blog's author, who remains anonymous, searches the internet for maps that are, "sufficiently strange." He also takes suggestions from readers. So if you know of a strange map you'd like others to enjoy, visit his site and make a suggestion.

Artist's Maps Don't Lie

Rather than mapping geographic features, London-based artist, Christian Nold combines GPS receivers with polygraph technology to map a city's "emotions".

The San Mateo County Times profiles Mr. Nold's latest mapping effort: an emotional map of San Francisco:

First, he outfits volunteers with global positioning system devices and the sensors used in lie detector tests. Then, he sends his subjects out to wander their neighborhoods. When they return, Nold asks them to recount what they saw and felt when the polygraph recorded a quickened heartbeat or an elevated blood pressure.

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He's the first to acknowledge the intimate portraits that result from his work won't help a confused tourist get from Fisherman's Wharf to Golden Gate Park.

Instead, by taking polygraph technology out of the criminal realm, his goal is to offer a commentary on the subjective nature of reality. Maps, he notes, have always been influenced by whoever makes them, citing the globes that used to show Europe as being considerably larger than Africa.

"There are different ways of mapping the city that aren't strictly about the practicalities or financial sensibilities that we usually guide our urban planning with," he said.

Mr. Nold noted that one limitation of his technology is that it cannot detect whether someone's emotional arousal is positive or negative. The artist told the Times that he has spurned most attempts to put his application to more commercial uses, though he is working with a government agency in London to gauge residents' perceptions of crime in public housing. One thing he has discovered is that people tend to respond to social interactions much more than to buildings.

Mr. Nold's mapping project in San Francisco is scheduled to last five weeks and will require 80 to 100 volunteers to map one square mile.

Map Expert, Author, Philip Burden to Speak in NC

Cartographic expert Philip Burden will present his lecture "The Men Behind the Maps" tomorrow at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. Mr. Burden, is the author of the two volume set, "The Mapping of North America." The first volume, covering the period from 1511-1670, is widely regarding the most authoritative source on North American maps of that era.

Mr. Burden has traveled all over the world researching maps for his books as well for his firm, Clive A. Burden Ltd. of the United Kingdom. During his research, he has discovered many rare maps. He recounted to the News & Observer how he once discovered a rare map of Texas made by none other than the father of Texas, Stephen F. Austin.

Mr. Burden's rare public appearance in the U.S. is sponsored by the William P. Cumming Map Society and Gallery C, of Raleigh. The lecture will begin at 4:00 p.m. with a reception afterwards. Both are free of charge but registration is required and space is limited.

Unfortunately for those of us that dream of uncovering a rare, valuable, map in a dusty chest, or at a garage sale, Mr. Burden doesn't offer much hope. He told the News & Observer, "Most of my great finds for the research of my book have occurred in the great institutions of the world, such as the British Library and the Library of Congress."

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The Mapping of North America Volume I, available here

The Cutting Edge Between Cartography and Art

Yesterday's Washington Post had a story, also picked up by The Map Room about 26 year-old Nikolas Schiller. Mr. Schiller, who is quoted as saying, "To change the world, start with the maps," takes aerial images from the U.S.G.S. and remakes them into into art.

More from the Post:

He is sly, this rebel cartographer. He makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips. You can find America in these maps -- you can probably find your house in these maps -- if you can find the maps at all, since their creator has posted them to an online underground.

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Schiller barely pauses on the way to his computer, which he fires up to reveal hundreds of his map creations. They are places you know -- the Mall, Adams Morgan, Georgetown, plus other U.S. cities and war-torn ones abroad. But the streetscapes -- photographed from above at a resolution fine enough to just make out cars and people -- have been warped and woven into kaleidoscopic mosaics, arabesques, spheres.

So Big Brother really is watching -- and Schiller remixes this surveilled reality to render geography as politically pointed art. The results have stunned his former geography professors and amazed the federal cartographers who commissioned the original aerial pictures for more mundane purposes, such as aiding developers who are gentrifying neighborhoods, such as, um -- U Street!

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Then it gets complicated. On his computer he will take a swatch of a neighborhood, then he will tessellate it by creating mirrored repetitions, then he may impose radial geometry on the repetitions. The result is elaborate abstraction assembled from realistic detail, ready for framing at 5 by 3 1/2 feet.

Mr. Schiller's work is fascinating. Until now, he's been something of an Internet recluse. The Post quotes him as saying, "I'm interested in seeing other people's opinions. Will people blog about it? Will I be made fun of?" So visit his website and check out his work.