January-February 2005
Charing the Imagination-Terra Incognita
by Katharine Harmon
As a youngster, in the bedroom I shared with my sister, I came to know intimately the ceiling of the room where I was supposed to be napping. I stared upward for hours, making out forms of imagined countries in the water-stained plaster. Why was I seeing international borders even before I knew the meaning of the concept? It was a natural way to pass the time and kept my restless imagination engaged far beyond the bedroom while my body got the rest my mother thought it needed.Maps intrigue us, perhaps none more than those that ignore mapping conventions. These are maps that find their essence in some other goal than just taking us from point A to point B. They are a vehicle for the imagination, fueled up and ready to go. We look at these maps, and our minds know just what to do: take the information and extrapolate from it a place where they can leap, play, gambol--without that distant province of our being, the body, dragging them down.
Of course, part of what fascinates us when looking at a map is inhabiting the mind of its maker, considering that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience. If I had mapped that landscape, we ask ourselves, what would I have chosen to show, and how would I have shown it? The coded visual language of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our worlds we each have our own dialect.
I map, therefore I am: This could be the motto for the contributors to this book.
You Are Here is my own personal proof of the mapping instinct: an idiosyncratic collection of maps that transcend the norm, either because of the mapmaker's personal viewpoint, or sense of humor, or ingenuity, or all of the above. These are maps of the imagination, as all maps are, only more so.
--Excerpted from the introduction to You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, by Katharine Harmon '82. Copyright Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Used with permission.
"I sense that humans have an urge to map--and that this mapping instinct, like our opposable thumbs, is part of what makes us human...."
Images from You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004)
Map of My Day by Sara Fanelli, 1995
The artist charts various facets of a child's world and inspires kids to create maps of their own
Hogbacks Back to Back by Leo Saul Berk, 2002
A three-dimensional topographical map made from sheets of plywood selected for their grain patterns
Fields on a Map (Meschers, Gironde) by Ellsworth Kelly, 1950
Inspired by the topographical grids of cultivated fields that the artist saw while living in France; another story claims he found a map in a Paris bookstall and transcribed its routes to create a grid form
Peralta Stone Maps
artist and date unknown
Treasure maps discovered in Arizona near the Superstition Mountains
Michigan
by K.F. Korten, 1947
From The United States Series, commissioned by the Container Corporation of America
United States of America (Maps Drawn by Las Vegas Teenagers)
by Kim Dingle, 1991
The artist asked American students to draw outlines of their country, then painted the resulting images
Composite Group Dream Map, Night of 23/24 August by Susan Hiller, 1974
The artist invited ten participants to sleep outdoors for three nights in the Hampshire countryside, where there's a proliferation of fairy rings, circles of marasmius oreades mushrooms. According to myth, after sleeping inside one, you are granted entry to fairyland. The participants collaborated on a notations system for recording their dreams (examples, right), and each morning they mapped the events and structures they encountered while dreaming. Hiller then superimposed the maps to create a collective dream map.
Manhattan by Howard Horowitz, 1997
It took the author, an environmental studies professor, a year and a half to design this poem about the city, its geography, cultural attractions, buildings, institutions, individuals, and his own personal memories.
A Dog's Idea of the Ideal Country Estate
by John Held Jr., 1920s
A Symbolic Head by Arthur Merton, 1879
Like other phrenologists of his time, Merton believed that "psychologic physiognomy is the only art by which all the powers of the Intellect, Affection, and the Will can be thoroughly and accurately measured."
A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia (detail) by Kisaburo Ohara, 1904
Shan map relating to a border dispute between (British) Burma and China along the Nam Mao River
artist and date unknown