Description
Book SynopsisMapping Beyond Measure analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing, made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable geometrical space.
Trade Review"
Mapping Beyond Measure participates in a broader scholarly discussion about the cultural formation of geographic knowledge and the ways that we think about and experience our place in the world through maps and other cultural representations of the earth. The book also provides a valuable resource for a growing number of historians who use digital mapping as a method of inquiry."—Kristan M. Hanson, H-Maps
“In this thoughtful analysis of ‘map art’ Simon Ferdinand offers an innovative interpretation of contemporary artworks that tests and reconfigures the challenges and opportunities posed by the transformation in global modernity of our lived world into lines and grids. ‘I map, therefore I am modern’ is the resounding implication that emerges from Ferdinand’s perceptive exploration of how visual artists in our times have used the map form to relate to the world, to the globe, indeed to earth itself.”—Sumathi Ramaswamy, author of
Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe“This is an important book on a theoretical level. By looking at recent technologies as a continuation of existing ontologies, Ferdinand goes beyond the hype around digital mapping. The chapters touch deftly on many themes that will also be of interest to academic readers who don’t deal explicitly with maps in their work, including utopia, modernity, quantification, and futurism, among many others.”—Jess Bier, author of
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific KnowledgeTable of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: I Map Therefore I Am Modern
1. The Shock of the Whole: Phenomenologies of Global Mapping in Solomon Nikritin’s The Old and the New
2. Combined and Uneven Cartography: Maps and Time in Alison Hildreth’s Forthrights and Meanders
3. Drawing Like a State: Maps, Modernity, and Warfare in Gert Jan Kocken’s Depictions
4. Insular Imaginations: Statehood, Islands, and Globalization in Satomi Matoba’s Utopia
5. Cartography at Ground Level: Spectrality and Streets in Jeremy Wood’s My Ghost and Meridians
6. Another Chorein: Alternative Ontologies in Peter Greenaway’s A Walk Through H
Envoi: Artists Astride Shifting Mapping Paradigms
Notes
Bibliography
Index
