Art and Cartography

Contemporary methods of depicting the earth and its attributes use graphic and non-graphic formats, maps and map-related artefacts to visualise geography and for building virtual landscapes and environments. In designing and creating these products cartography has traditionally applied art (design), science and technology. The latter two have been embraced by cartography as a means of ensuring scientific correctness; products are considered to ‘work’ if they are scientifically ‘elegant’, technologically ‘capable of being built’ and ‘deliverable’ by modern communication. Incorporating art into the design and production process makes available to it a wider methodology ‘palette’ for better visualising geography.

Art can provide the ‘public face’ of cartography, and science & technology complements this. Science & technology need not always be dominant, although technology is needed to ensure that a design can be produced and delivered, while science is necessary to ensure a ‘correct’ and rigorous product. To illustrate this, take the simple pro­cess of recording spatial information with a pencil and a piece of paper. The harder the pencil, the more precise the product. One feature must be precisely defined in relation to another, and this must be precisely determined and depicted; accuracy reigns over artistic input. The resultant map, whilst showing exact positions and clear demarcation between different classes of information, cannot depict the vagaries and overlaps characteristic of real-world geography. Such a representation can show only clearly defined edges of phenomena. The map user is left to interpret what is depicted by lines, points and polygons, but is not helped to ‘read between the lines’, to find what may lie in the zones between discrete classes. Had a very soft pencil been used, the result would have been a more flowing and interpretative map, a more artistic approach to data recording. The draughtsman, unrestrained by the accuracy and precision demanded by a hard lead and finely pointed pencil, is able to render a different portrayal of the real world. Areas of vagueness can be illustrated, interpretations made and impressionistic drawings produced in place of planimetric map-type drawings; the result is a different portrayal of the same information. Users may show a preference for one portrayal of information over another, and some might want to use both maps in different ways to gain better understanding of the real world.

Cartography is different from other contemporary disciplines insofar as it can design, develop and deliver products with an ‘art’, ‘technology’ or a ‘science flavour’. There is a need to address how to make art-biased cartography as rele­vant as science or technology-biased. To facilitate research and development in this area the ICA has formed a Working Group on Art and Cartography, approved at the ICA general assembly held in Moscow in August 2007. Its first formal activity was a symposium held in Vienna at the venues of TU Wien and the University of Fine Art on 1stand 2ndFebruary 2008 and organised by William Cartwright, Georg Gartner (TU Wien) and Antje Lehn (University of Fine Art, Wien). Some seventy papers were given, presentations and installations made. See for more information the Working Group website, accessed via www.icaci.org or directly at http://artcarto.wordpress.com .