Today’s Lecture with Rob focused on the development of maps. We looked into how several artists represented places differently, and had their own take on an area. Maps have been designed in a range of ways, from full illustrations in a panoramic view, to symbols and lines that have become more of a modern day use. There were maps such as road sign maps, trees (plotted on a map, suggesting where streets are), seasonal specific maps where language replaces the icon (looking at the colours of leaves for example), light maps, sound walk; which maps the invisible, also a timeline which looks like sound waves.
Before aerial views were available, maps were designed as a landscape, some in immense detail such as the piece below. Designed by Jan Visscher, this panorama of London consists of everyday life, boats, birds, trees. It also includes a banner at the top to show the audience where the map has been captured. To me, this does not display the body that I would look for on a map, however we as a group carried on looking into maps that became more recent.
http://www.thelondonmagazine.org/article/to-be-a-pilgrim-2/
The simplicity of maps did increase with time, using lines, symbols and colours to help guide the audience correctly and easily, such as the London map of today. Maps can also just include key information, such as the route someone is travelling, or landmarks with historical interests. We were shown a map created by Laura Klein which she had made with text/written language. Lines of paper became the paths. The visual language associated with street maps, however, was still maintained. This style is known as the ‘cut off’ method.
‘The Power of Ten’ was a video we were shown in the seminar, focusing on an object that had a starting point of viewing a 10cm box. This gradually became larger as the viewing range added a 0 onto the size of the viewing box, for example, 10cm, 1m, 10m, 100m. This was really effective I thought, because it was showing different perspectives and something quite large to use, was only really tiny once we zoomed out millions of metres away. This video was useful because I now see that different formats allow people to explore an area or object differently. This technique can be used in my assessed sketchbook for the module, A sense of place.
