Bright colors, music, and vintage design are all good ways to catch our eye, so we were hooked on Jerry Meyer’s new work from the moment we laid eyes on his The Hit Parade over at Designboom. But Meyer’s Technicolor jukebox is more than meets the eye. One of many Photoshop-enhanced lightboxes on view in his Civilization and Its Discontents show, it mixes real songs (“Killing Me Softly”) with pathos-filled parodies like “My Tear Ducts are Blocked” by The Macular Degenerations, casting a shadow of aging and mortality over a cheerful-looking object of nostalgia.
As the show’s title suggests, Meyer’s work explores Freudian obsessions, anxieties, and neuroses through a pop-culture lens: Very Trivial Pursuits (3AM Edition) is a mashed up game board cataloging thoughts that might keep you up at night (“What happens if I can’t remember that I can’t remember that I can’t remember?”), while the show’s title piece is a New York subway map where Manhattan is “Lust,” The Bronx is “Crazed,” and Queens is “Indulgence.” See these pieces and more images from the show after the jump. Civilization and Its Discontents runs through May 28th at New York’s Denise Bibro Fine Art.
Maps can be complicated things; they can obscure more than they reveal, depending on who is using it and what is understood. In Songlines, Bruce Chatwin introduces the aboriginal idea of mapping out the world through song, beginning with the unforgiving terrain of western Australia. In modern times, they have been used in reconnaissance missions, assassination attempts, and the division of urban areas. They can also be navigational charts that allude to the location where treasure is buried or even the cave where Osama bin Laden has been hiding all these years. In the following novels, maps are used as guides for the reader to understand the place described. They aid and abet our imagination, ensuring the suspension of disbelief that is necessary to fully take in the story. So what better way to start the immersion then to take this quiz? Just slide across the black boxes at the bottom of each page to reveal the answers (or to cheat).
The BBC has recently launched an experimental web project called Dimensions, which allows users to overlay ancient cities, famous festivals, and environmental disasters over modern maps to get a sense of scale. The site can be used to try to better understand the impact of both catastrophes, like the flooding in Pakistan, and everyday occurrences, like the growth of urban spaces. It’s also a great way to kill a good half hour of time. Click through for some of our favorite maps.
The good folks over at xkcd have updated their map of online communities for 2010, and things are looking pretty different compared to their map from 2007. Creator Randall Munroe explains that, rather than attempt to estimate raw traffic, he used “total social activity” as his main metric. “Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health,” Munroe explains. “This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community – that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there.” He accomplished through many sources, including Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Reddit, and the New York Times. Click through to check it out.
Collage artist Matthew Cusick creates new compositions from ephemeral images, using maps as the raw material in his compelling portraits and landscapes.
Originally from New York, the Dallas-based artist is inspired by the topographical and the temporary, constructing his works from book pages, Folger’s coffee, ink, and acrylic on wood and aluminum-based panels. With rudimentary tools, he reconfigures roads, rivers, highways, and municipal transit systems into enduring works of art.
Presenting a fascinating range of maps from the collection of the Hand Drawn Map Association, From Here to There is a guidebook to DIY cartography.
From directional doodles and artfully illustrated sites to found and fictional diagrams, this compact compilation offers intriguing illustrations of maps and the stories behind their creation or discovery. Made by artists, adventurers, and caring citizens, they reveal both real and imaginary places in delightful detail.
Incorporating antique (we’re talking turn-of-the-last-century) photos and images, mapping site SepiaTown is like an online time capsule of cities around the world.
Users are able to upload historical images of buildings and other locations with precise addresses, so you can see just what the spot you’re standing on looked like 100 years ago. SepiaTown’s Then/Now feature allows you to compare a historical image to the current Google Street View, or you can map historical events, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 or the 1928 UK Suffrage movement.
We’ve covered cut-out paper art and textile art and everything in between, but stumbling uponShannon Rankin‘s map art makes us glad there’s still a use for quickly outdated old-school road maps. (Quick jaunt down Memory Lane: remember fighting over The Map on family car trips? Trying to figure out the difference between I-95, 895, 495, and 195? Trying to fold it back up after seven hours of strife and a losing battle with McDonald’s ketchup packets?)
Now that pesky but beautiful paper maps are being put to more creative use, high-tech navigation options proliferate. We’ve got two new apps to try after the jump, plus more map porn from Shannon Rankin.
If you’re a reader, you know the dilemma. You may love to give and get books, but you’ve got at least a few friends or family members who just aren’t into what you’ve hand-picked and lovingly gift-wrapped for them. Never fear! We present our handy list of eye-candy books for even the toughest crowd.
