[art, map] The Story of the Void in Jerry Gretzinger's Map

3157.

Back last year I posted here about a most singularly delightful thing, Jerry's Map.

To recap, the story goes kind of like this: One day, in 1963, during lulls in what is only described as a tedious job, Jerry Gretzinger, a resident of New York State, started drawing a map of an imaginary city. The city reached the edge of the sheet; he attached another, and kept on going. He kept this up for 20 years.

In 1983, life offered sufficient distraction to cause him to put the map of Ukrainia on the shelf. Then, after 20 years of sleeping, the land awoke again when Jerry's grandson discovered the map and it lit the creative fire again. Since 2003, he's been expanding it even farther using a system of playing cards pained and decorated, that give him directions on what to do next.

The cards rule.

Over the past 51 years, Jerry's been working on the map for 31 of them. The map has expanded into areas of collage that are truly impressive. But some things of Jerry's world tend to stick harder than others, and the most haunting aspect is that of "The Void". See, when Jerry draws a certain card, areas of his map that aren't watched over by defensive works get transferred to The Void.

What exactly The Void is has been left as an exercise to the reader up until now. Some hint has been extended by the creator himself that The Void is not simply an oblivion where people disappear into utter annihilation. As noted in my earlier report on Jerry's map, when a section of the city of Fields West, pop about 700,000, was Voided, …

this largely unprotected city of over 700,000 souls saw the relocation of an estimated 15,700 individuals to the alternative dimensions inside the Void.  This portion of historic old town will be greatly missed by the remaining residents.

While the amazingness of Ukrainia itself is pretty entrancing, the idea of a Void incursion as an occasional thing has a hauntingness about it, and the author's evident idea that the victims within the Voided precincts actually go to another place is compellingly fascinating.

Jerry has begun posting YouTube videos about his process: the channel is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl07nZ3C1kGhnFiDW87EvBQ. This video, however, answers the central question about just what the Void is, while raising further questions, which Jerry is no doubt exploring as we speak:



Again, Jerry's blog about all this, which is interesting following, is http://jerrysmap.blogspot.com/

[maps] A Country By Any Other Name … Or What It's Name Really Means

3053.

The maps in the series The Atlas of True Names sound fantasy-novel-ly.

Heart's Farm and Place By The Meadow are major cities in the Land of Friends whose capital is The Illustrious One. This fabled land is found as a part of The United States of the Home Ruler, which is one of the main nations in this fantasy-tinged land.

Actually, it's a land not far from here. If you know the root meanings, you might have guessed that I mentioned, in order,  Houston and Dallas, which are the biggest towns in Texas which has Austin as the capital city. By now, one has probably deduced that the cartographers have made an effort to locate the root meanings of the words we casually use for our world's place names and brought those meanings forward into English. Thus, Canada becomes Land of Villages (one interpretation of the First Nations word kanata being village) and Mexico being Navel of the Moon (the modern nation takes its name from the Valley of Mexico (present day Distrito Federál), which took its name from the Mexica, the 'People of the Moon').

How the USA became the United States of the Home Ruler is kind of fuzzy to figure, but we know that the word America was drawn, as many readers will know, from Amerigo, as in the explorer and mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci, courtesy of Waldsemüller. The name Amerigo, as this site notes, is a medieval Italian version of the German Emmerich; it speculates that the forepart of that comes from a word meaning home, and the aft part, a word meaning power, so the reasoning normalized that into home ruler.

But, you may wonder, what of our beloved Oregon? Here you are, from the zoomable version that can be seen at http://twentytwowords.com/united-states-map-with-place-names-replaced-by-original-meanings/:

There's not much, but what's there is amusingly interesting. Portland obviously has no other meaning. our capital city, Salem, is an Anglicized version of the hebrew shalom, meaning peace; Well-born is an obvious rootation of Eu-gene. Mishap Lake for mal heure is a good translation of the southeastern Oregon place name essentially meaning bad luck or misfortune. I don't know what exactly the Realm of the God of the Underworld is supposed to be: Madras was named after the cloth, Redmond was named after its founder, whose name is an Anglicization of an Irish name which is a Celticization of the name Raymond, whose meaning has nothing whatsoever to do with Hades.

Although, it does get intolerably hot in the Oregon desert in the summer months,  it ain't that bad.

The most intriguing rendering is that of Oregon into Beautiful Land. That contradicts every guess as to where the word Oregon came from, and that's something that nobody can say for certain. There are many good guesses that make sense, but the best explanation that I can logic out from it all is that we call this place Oregon because that's what we thought the people who were here before us called it.

Beautiful Land is something I can't figure where they got.

Maybe they vacationed here once. Because it's correct enough …

As mentioned, a zoomable version of the map is located at the article at Twenty-Two Words: http://twentytwowords.com/united-states-map-with-place-names-replaced-by-original-meanings/, and the home page of the Atlas is http://www.kalimedia.com/Atlas_of_True_Names.html.  Read and enjoy, and keep with you this proviso:

Not all translations are definitive.
The reader may be offered a number of possible alternatives,
or the translation may be prefixed by ‘possibly’ or ‘probably’.
Please accept the Atlas of True Names
just as an invitation to the world as a strange, romantic continent.

In other words, explore … and just have fun with it. It's not hard to.  

[maps] Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Only Map We Need For The Only War We've Got

3040.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favorite novels. It is a book I've read again and again; Its atmosphere nonpareil; the world of Airstrip One, despite mostly being descriptive writing and very little dialogue, is incredibly real as told by Orwell.

Or maybe it's because of the overhwelming amount of exposition. I was struck hard by the fact that this book dealt very little in dialogue between people. Orwell was a masterful writer, no doubt about it; the paragraph-on-paragraph of exploration of the perceptions of and inner dialogue of Oceanian Everyman Winston Smith have the eventual effect of leaving you alone in this world with him, and since you identify with him, you are eventually alone in Oceania with yourself.

Of the many perceptions of life under INGSOC we eventually adopt is the political-cultural geography of the then-world-of-the future. Smith hears of it as he works in the Ministry of Truth, relentlessly revising The Times; he is illuminated more upon reading The Book … Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, of course. The world of his time is populated by three great superstates and two large disputed regions.

Each of the superstates has its own proof against conquest from without: Eurasia, its vast interior land spaces (as someone once said, never get involved in a land war in Asia); Eastasia, the industriousness and fertility of its overwhelming population, and Oceania, its vast sea reaches. The disputed lands are the grim sandboxen in which the three play war amongst each other.

They are described very functionally and schematically in The Book  and most cartographers tend to take the descriptions fairly literally. The boundaries between the three powers are, while largely stable, locally fuzzy, and not-necessarily clearly defined. The modern cartographic renderer, in their quest for exactitude, tends to draw the boundaries clearly. What I've stumbled upon is a display that makes much more sense.

This map I found at the map gallery at Chris Mullen's vast intellectual playground, The Visual Telling of Stories. Go there when you have time to waste; it will gulp it all down and ask if you have more. The thing to remember is that in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, you have three superstates constantly at each other's throats, and, when convenient, ally swaps one-to-one for enemy, with the mass media wiping and rewriting the mass memory pretty much at will.

At a pivotal point in the story, June 21st/22nd 1984, Oceania's 'glorious ally', Eastasia, and its 'age-old enemy', Eurasia, swap places. Winston and his rewrite crew are called in for a week-long gluttony of overwork, and banners, posters, and even a speech being hectored in a public square are changed, literally, on the fly. The map would be useful to an Oceanian if it weren't for the fact that the Oceanian citizen had to be totally non-cognizant of any other alignment than the extant one ever being extant (this awareness, never more than vague and constantly doubted by Smith himself being one of the chief causes of his ongoing bemusment).

The two legends make the map doubly-illustrated. They are keyed such that the proper hatching matches the proper legend depending on how the map is viewed. Viewed in landscape, Eurasia is the ally. Viewed in portrait, Eastasia has become Oceania's friend.

Taken as a piece, it's two maps in one, and actually rather aptly demonstrates the Newspeak concept of doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory truths in mind and accepting both … and in acknowledging them both, crimethink. 

The research stations in the remotest areas on Earth and the two disputed areas are represented suitably-amoebically, and the interface between Eastasia and Eurasia is, while evident, still vaugely-defined in a way.

This, therefore, is the perfect world map for this world, and the only one one ever needs.

The map itself is from a book by R.C.Churchill, A Short History of the Future, published 1955. The illustrator is credited asJ osef-Jan Szostak.

Via Strange Maps, whose article is also a nice exploration of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four for the non-familiar.

[art,map] Port Oregon Grows To The South And East

3010.

Played around with expanding the city of Port Oregon tonight. Actually it's not an expansion such as a filling in of what was supposed to be there when I envisioned the place and cross-referencing it with my experience viewing city grid after city grid, which has been my lifetime's obsession.

In this view, North is in the more-or-less-1:30 PM position.

The next exploration is filling in the areas outside of but immediately adjacent to the original town. In a city as rigidly planned as the original 672-square-block townsite. As towns grow they tend to follow a kind of hidden logic, a combination of the way developers want to build streets combined with a sort of gestalt akin to manifest destiny … things will go this way because we want to try this and also things should be more or less going that way.

The original town and areas immediately adjacent are bound by two rivers; the wide on, on the east, which forms something of a natural harbor, and is a very short river formed by the meeting of two forks there at the bottom of the photo, and the river that flows in from the west, which rounds off the central city area on the south.

An old harbor district will form there in the blank pocket between Jefferson Street and the big river, I just have to figure out how the streets will run. Probably extended out from the main town with a few random short streets thrown in for fun in irregular positions.

The central city, north-south, measures anywhere from 2.5 to 3 miles in dimension, and that's only because I haven't settled on the length of a standard city block yet.

[art,map] Meanwhile, In The Studio … City Building In Progress

3008.

Inspired by Jerry Gratzinger, I retake up city creation in the studio.

Port Oregon is growing from the center out.

I forsee the city center (about 28 blocks by 24 blocks, stretching from McCall Street (1400 W) on the west to Jefferson Street (1400 E) and Front Street to 24th Street, bisected by Federal Street, which is the east-west baseline. A lush public square at the intersection of Front and Federal leads, by way of a mall-like boulevard, to a larger public park at the intersection of 12th Street and Federal, in the way Philadelphia's City Hall sits in the middle of Center City Philly.

From Federal Square at the foot of the Federal Street Mall, diagonal streets run to the SW and SE corners of the original town, interrupted by two more public squares where they intersect 12th Street. From the 12th Street squares, just for fun, two more diagonal streets run to where Federal Street leaves the original town area, at 24th Street.

This will be something of a arterial map, the pattern of streets strongly suggested, but not to an exactitude. If I decide to break this up into page panels, though, this is the guide I will work from.

[art,map] A Direct Portal to Jerry Gratzinger's Ukrania

2984.

Almost forgot this. In the WIRED article there's a link to this, but if you don't want to spend time finding it and watch to dive right into wasting hours scanning around a recent version of Jerry's amazing map, there's a zoomable version at http://www.grinsdesign.com/jerrymap/.

Have a few hours reserved. You won't get them back, but you won't care. Ukrania gives back in terms of imagination more than those paltry few hours will subtract from your lifespan.

[map,art] Jerry's World - What'cha Gonna Do When The Void Comes For You?

2984.

It's not looking good, suddenly, for the city of Fields West.

A new Void has appeared in the city of Fields West this morning (map year 1086).
This largely unprotected city of over 700,000 souls saw the relocation of an estimated 15,700 individuals to the alternative dimensions inside the Void.  This portion of historic old town will be greatly missed by the remaining residents.

The white spot used-to-be. Now it's not, no more. 

Our correspondent is one Jerry Gretzinger, of northern Michigan, and on-and-off now, for a period of decades, he's nurtured a very personal, evolving, and awesomely-creative world which is his, and his alone.

Starting with a make-believe town he called Wybourne, he simply drew and drew and drew. Coming to the edge of one sheet of paper, he expanded onto another. The resulting world which, if I'm reading the reportage correctly, goes by the name of Ukrania, but which the artist seems simply to refer to as The Map, is now truly large, consisting of over 2,500 8-by-10-inch panels.

Over time the expression has changed somewhat. Bits of collage have worked their way in, and abstract color patterns in others. I recall the days in which I'd create cities of my own; I kind of worked in this direction, but never went all the way. Jerry not only went all the way, he took it in directions that can only be termed a certain sort of genius.

He expands and evolves (any map panel is open to some sort of change) his map using a deck of playing cards, actually a deck made up of more than one deck, each one decorated with some sort of paint pattern and each one containing a rule. With this, and a set of rules he applies and evolves along with the work, this world expands and changes. Over time it has grown to cover an area the artist estimates as equivalent to Connecticut and a great-sized piece of Massachusetts - some 12 or 14,000 square miles … and has rail lines, highways, and quizzical and interesting cities with English-countryside-inflected names like Leyemouth, Southchurch, Fields West, and of course, Wybourne … a city suffering from its own void incursion.

This is such an entrancing thing to me that I cannot put it into words. And I'm hardly the first one who's noticed; Wired magazine has a wonderful article here (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/jerry-gretzinger-map-ukrania) and I understand that The Atlantic has an article on it, but I'm too entranced by his blog to be bothered to find that one. He puts on shows and his work has garnered him some attention.

The idea of a void whisking some sections of landscape off to some other unknown dimension is most intriguing, though. His blog reports dryly on the loss of numerous thousands of residents to the unknown void, and in the void-vacated areas, new areas can emerge. Now, it's possible to stave off the void with barrier walls, but, sadly, Fields West seems undefended by them. Tough times in that town.

Ukrania must have one of the most bemusing insurance industries known to man.

The evolving nature of the map and the cards which issue commands and the rules which evolve over time also form a dead-fascinating idea: an artwork which revises itself and an artwork which changes the artist at the same time the artist is augmenting and revising the other two.

It it art recapitulating life, life infusing art, or a third thing that, dear God, I just can't find the words for right now?

I don't know.

Just read Jerry's blog: http://jerrysmap.blogspot.com/