Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Jeremy Wood's GPS Art Map: the Cartography of Experience

by Matthew Zuras on July 9, 2010 at 05:20 PM

jeremy wood's 'traverse me'
Have you all been watching 'Work of Art,' Bravo's latest horrible venture into competitive reality programming? The show -- which pits artists of varying skill, experience and taste against one another for a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum -- asked the contestants this week to make an artwork based on their experience visiting an Audi showroom. (We're just going to gloss over how ridiculous that is for the sake of this piece.) Anyway, photographer Mark Velasquez decided to paint an overhead map of New York, which came across as a poor Mondrian rip-off, and which the judges rightfully dubbed "hotel art." What does this all mean in the context of this post? Well, it got us thinking about the function of maps as art objects.

Artist Jeremy Wood is similarly drawn to cartography, a discipline which is nearly extinct thanks to satellite technology and Google Maps. Wood decided to employ a GPS device as he spent 17 days walking 238 miles of unmapped land around the University of Warwick (eschewing both roads and paths). The result -- called 'Traverse Me' -- was a tangled abstraction of Wood's singular sojourn, pictured above.

To bring back 'Work of Art' for a moment, the first episode asked contestants to create a portrait of a fellow competitor. Nao Bustamante, who was sadly kicked off the show two weeks ago, drafted a minimalist plotting of an eccentric contestant who fluttered about the studio, thereby creating a map of his movements throughout the exercise. The insane judges considered this to be one of the worst works, although we thought it was the strongest conceptually. And Wood's map, devoid of landmarks and notation, could be considered in the exact same light: a personal fingerprint and portrait, completely separated from the seemingly concrete cartography provided by Google Maps, through which we so often understand our local landscape.

Maps, like language, give structure to abstract ideas. While coastlines can easily be plotted, territories and borders are imposed by humans to make political sense of the Earth's vast landscape. Wood's map challenges defined paths by creating his own, making his journey manifest by visually expressing 17 days of his life in serpentine lines. When we stand back and contemplate the concept of portraiture, we can recognize that it's an attempt to capture a moment in the life of the subject -- and we'd have to say, with that in mind, Wood succeeded quite well. [From: Engadget]

Tags: art, bravo, cartography, google maps, GoogleMaps, gps, JeremyWood, maps, naobustamente, top, TraverseMe, UniversityOfWarwick, WorkOfArt

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular