From the first known map of the trading world (inscribed on a Babylonian clay tablet in 600 BC) to Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi’s 1154 world map, to National Geographic’s rendering of the earth’s ocean floor, cartographic representations have helped us imagine and navigate trade routes, political states, scientific discoveries and geographic territories.
Published maps have typically been the province of dominant cultures. But that is changing. Minority perspectives have exploded, supported by the latest technological developments, popular culture and commercial currents (see “La Frontera,” April 6). Many people—artists or not—have re-imagined their world by way of Google Earth, GPS technology, MapQuest, cell phones, and even their own five senses. (See This American Life.)
The continued influence of Psychogeography can be credited for some of the developments. Many contemporary artists explore mapped territories. Joyce Kozloff’s political maps, Kathy Prendergast’s drawings of cities, Jasper John’s seminal painting of the United States, Elisabeth Lecourt’s map clothes and William Pope. L.’s Map of Old New Jersey are but a few of the map projects that have developed in the art world. On the Internet there are countless mappings of data. Thinkmap’s interactive Visual Thesaurus grows animated clusters of words right before your eyes. There are interactive oral history maps, urban sound maps and public toilet maps.
If you love the idea of maps, check out this new book, An Atlas of Radical Cartography. It “provides a critical foundation for an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography, and activism. The maps and essays in this book provoke new understandings of networks and representations of power and its effects on people and places. These new perceptions of the world are the prerequisites of social change.” The map pictured above is by Pedro Lasche.
EXHIBIT: There is an exhibition of artists’ cartography going on right now at the Dowd Fine Art Gallery, SUNY, in Cortland, NY. It runs through May 6, 2008. Don’t miss it!
bordertalksblog.com 
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,351765,00.html
well get on yur lap top and scan for them pesky immigrants.
Novelists have taken us on peregrinations in which they create (or recreate) maps of cities, maps of the mind, maps of the spirit, maps of time.
Of course, James Joyce leaps quickly to mind. But there’s a lovely novel by the English writer Penelope Lively, that many people may not yet have discovered: “City of the Mind” published in 1991.
Set in modern London; its chief protagonist is an architect, Matthew Halland, who has a special love for historic preservation, and a special antagonism for a certain developer. But it’s not a small story about a predictable conflict between those two. It’s a journey that carries us on a constantly shifting current, as we experience London with Matthew as it is in the moment with him, as it had been, as it might be.
The story, for example, expands to touch an Elizabethan explorer, a Dickensian street urchin named Rose, and a WWII air-raid warden, among many others.
Ms. Lively invites us to meditate on those who came before us, those who will follow us, and how we may contribute to the lives of both.
An excerpt can’t really do it justice, but here is one long paragraph from the first chapter, just to give you a wee taste. I hope you’ll explore “City of the Mind” …
“And thus, driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then. He carries yesterday with him, but pushes forward into today, and tomorrow, skipping as he will from one to the other. He is in London, on a May morning of the late twentieth century, but he is also in many other places, and at other times. He twitches the knob of his radio; New York speaks to him, five hours ago, is superseded by Australia tomorrow and presently by India this evening. He learns of events that have not yet taken place, of deaths that have not yet occurred. He is Matthew Halland, an English architect stuck in a traffic jam, a person of no great significance, and yet omniscient. For him, the world no longer turns; there is no day or night, everything and everywhere are instantaneous. He forges his way along Euston Road, in fits and starts, speeding up, then clogged again between panting taxis and a lorry with churning was-striped cement mixer. He is both trapped, and ranging free. He fiddles again with the radio, runs through a lexicon of French song, Arab exhortation, invective in some language he cannot identify. Halted once more, he looks sideways and meets the thoughtful gaze of Jane Austen (1775-1817), ten feet high on a poster, improbably teamed with Isambard Kingdom Bruenel and George Frederick Handel, all of them dead, gone, but doing well – live and kicking in his head and up there guarding the building site that will become the British Library. And then another car cuts in ahead of his, he hoots, accelerates, is channeled on in another licensed burst of speed. Jane Austen is replaced by St. Pancras.”
Beth: Thank you for this! I will search out Ms. Lively. She manages to create something the Internet claims for its own: linkages to other realities, the sum of which creates a “narrative in the round,” a sort of 3-D awareness of co-existent stories and histories that linear challenge narrative progression without defeating storytelling. I love it.