You Are Here: Creative Cartography Mapping the Soul of #New_York
You Are Here: Creative Cartography Mapping the Soul of New York
“Each of us is an atlas of sorts, already knowing how to navigate some portion of the world,” wrote Rebecca Solnit in her imaginative remapping of New York’s untold stories, “containing innumerable versions of place as experience and desire and fear, as route and landmark and memory.” But as fascinating as it is to imagine the world’s greatest metropolis remapped according to its unheralded dimensions, New York’s multitude of parallel realities is itself bountiful fodder for the artistic imagination and has inspired centuries of fanciful cartographic interpretations.
Exploring this lacuna between physical reality and the interpretive imagination is a very different kind of atlas — You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City (public library), envisioned and edited by Katharine Harmon. This localized follow-up to Harmon’s wonderful 2004 atlas of “personal geographies and other maps of the imagination” presents two hundred wildly diverse maps of the city, alongside original essays exploring the most iconic of them. There are historical treasures like the first geological maps of Manhattan, masterworks of art like Paula Scher’s obsessively detailed typographic maps, and conceptually daring pieces like artist Liz Scranton’s honeycomb shaped after the landforms of the NYC subway map. What emerges is a layered inquiry into the relationship between self and space, the plurality of perspectives aimed at the same place, and the myriad ways in which we orient ourselves to the landscape against which we live out our lives.
▻https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/11/30/you-are-here-nyc-mapping-the-soul-of-the-city
#cartographie #visualisation #art
via @reka (twitter)