International Journal of Cartography Special ISSUE: Call For Proposals

The Commission for Art & Cartography of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) seeks submissions for a special issue of the International Journal of Cartography to be published in the Spring of 2024.⁽¹⁾ We seek a diversity of contributions that explore how dialogues and practices in art and cartography can create generative points of contact. Submissions may take a variety of forms, ranging from full length research articles to shorter creative interventions that rely heavily on visuals and other forms of media.⁽²⁾ Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Art practices that use concepts, grammars, or ideas found in cartography
• Cartographic practices that are informed by dialogues or practices in contemporary art
• Geographical visualization methods informed by humanistic modes of inquiry
• Theoretical interventions that open new possibilities for art and cartography
• Creative approaches to cartographic visualization
• Mapping projects that draw from participatory art
• Historical work that explores connections between art and cartography
• Research that investigates how community groups engage with art and cartography

If you are interested in contributing to this special issue, please send an abstract of 200 words or fewer to taien[AT]yorku[DOT]ca by August 15th, 2022. Potential authors will be contacted by September 1st, 2022, and essay drafts for peer review will be due by January 30, 2023. If you have questions or want to discuss ideas ahead of the deadline, please email!

For more information on submitting to the journal, please see: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=tica20 

⁽¹⁾Articles that make it through peer review earlier may be published online ahead of the print version of the issue.

⁽²⁾Audio-visuals and other forms of media will be made available through an accompanying special issue website 

The Quarantine atlas

The Commission on Art & Cartography’s online workshop from the summer of 2020, called A Sense of Impending Doom: A Strata-Walk for Turbulent Times, caught the eye of editor Laura Bliss at Bloomberg’s CityLab. As a result, some of the maps from the Impending Doom workshop are featured in the new publication The Quarantine Atlas: Mapping Global Life Under COVID-19, along with an essay by Commission Chair Taien Ng-Chan about her own experiences dealing with the pandemic, the subsequent rise of anti-Asian hate, and the value found in mapping one’s own room. The book was published in April 2022 and can be found here: https://www.blackdogandleventhal.com/titles/laura-bliss/the-quarantine-atlas/9780762478132/

ArtCarto Maps in The Quarantine Atlas

Borrowing from (Xavier) de Maistre’s voyage around his room, we carried out a virtual workshop that took 30 walkers from around the world on a tour of their own lockdown spaces. They brought no luggage but two sheets of paper, a writing implement, and instructions to look at everything with the rambling curiosity of a traveler. The first task, as a sort of barometer of feeling, was for everyone to write down their fears and anxieties, which included everything from dictators, militarization and climate change to “loss of emotional connection” and “overwhelming online work.” On the back of that paper, we asked for their sources of comfort: protest, gardening, nature, reading, art, and alcohol. They then tore a small hole in a fresh sheet of paper to represent their locations in space, walked slowly around their rooms to draw their routes and objects that shaped their surrounding emotional landscapes. “Where are the anxieties located?” we asked. “Where do you find comfort? Reframe your view. Share with us the ground under your feet, the sky outside your window.”

The rough, hand-drawn maps that resulted hint at the rich emotions that fill our own interior spaces. In these maps, I can glimpse the lives of others through the squiggly black lines and rough edges that indicate where their bodies were located, where the windows and quiet spaces are for each. One map details a ceiling stain that speaks to worry, while another map confesses a love of the cardinals who hang out by the cornstalks in the backyard. The last task was for each person to fold, scrunch, rip and crunch their maps –  a transformation of their intangible emotions into 3D paper sculptures, an act of catharsis. Some of them ended up a sharp jumble of edges like mine, others meticulously folded like irregular fans or energetically crushed into tight, crinkled-up balls. The maps were then smoothed out again and displayed by their makers onscreen, the shared act connecting us all in the virtual space of Zoom. (Excerpt from Taien Ng-Chan’s “Finding Home in a Locked-Down World” in The Quarantine Atlas, edited by Laura Bliss)

A big thank you to all who took part in the Impending Doom workshop, and especially to Jorn Seemann, Judith Franke, and Jennifer Coates, whose maps are featured.

Call for papers – Special issues on “Cartography and Narratives”

Building upon the extensive work on literary geography, and on cartographic cinema, a range of scholars in the humanities have endorsed mapping as a conceptual framework to improve our understating of narratives. Meanwhile, geographers and cartographers have recognized the importance of mapping personal stories and vernacular knowledge in order to better understand their contribution to the production of places. Examples of this fusion between maps and narratives range from GPS drawing, to walking as a way of addressing the performative nature of mapping, and from the political mapping of journeys and stories of illegal migrants crossing borders, to the mapping of very personal feelings and emotions.

In order to further explore these relationships between maps and narratives, the commission on Art and Cartography of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has organized a workshop on this thematic in Zurich in June 2012 . We are now seeking academic and artistic contributions to be published in two special issues of two academic journals.

One will be published in The Cartographic Journal and co-edited by Sébastien Caquard and William Cartwright. It will compile a range of academic papers providing more of a cartographic perspective on the relationships between maps and narratives. The second one will focus on the artistic points of view of the relationships between cartography and narratives. This second special issue will be co-edited by Laurene Vaughan and Matthew Bissen and it will be published in a multi-media focused journal (more details about this publication available soon). Both of these issues will be cross-referenced to give more visibility to the publications as well as to support the interdisciplinary dimension of this project.

Here are the main deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in The Cartographic Journal:

– Dec. 19^th, 2012 – Call for papers

– April 30^th, 2013 – Deadline to submit full papers (4,000 – 5,000 words) to Sébastien Caquard (sebastien.caquard@concordia.ca) and William Cartwright (w.cartwright@rmit.edu.au)

– May 31^st, 2013 – Comments sent by the editors to the authors

– June 30^th, 2013 – Final version of the papers submitted by the authors to The Cartographic Journal website for the review process (For the detailed instructions to authors, please look at the web site of The Cartographic Journal)

– Aug 31^st, 2013 – End of the review process

– Dec. 31^st, 2013 – Final versions of the selected papers sent by the authors to The Cartographic Journal

– May 2014 – Publication of the special issue in The Cartographic Journal

Special Issue about “Cartographies of Fictional Worlds”

The quarterly published Journal “The Cartographic Journal” is this time (Volume 48, Number 4, November 2011) dedicated to the Geography of Literature. This volume was guest-edited by Barbara Piatti (literary studies) and Lorenz Hurni (cartography) and gives an impressive overview and insights into exiting interdisciplinary projects.

»A literary-geographical reading can change our
understanding – not only of books, but of the world we
live in. It creates knowledge. Through literary geography,
we learn more about the production of places, their
historical layers, their meanings, functions and symbolic
values. If places emerge from a combination of real
elements and fictional accounts, then literary geography
and literary cartography can work as a very effective eyeopener.«

Barbara Piatti and Lorenz Hurni: Editorial, pp.218-223

»This special issue of the Cartographic Journal on
‘Cartographies of Fictional Worlds’ is made up of fascinating
stories, exotic places, original concepts, and a series of
media that ranges from artistic collages to high tech
geospatial applications. This diversity demonstrates
the enthusiasm that prevails within literary cartography,
as well as the complex relationships that exist between maps,
narratives and places.«

»These examples provide a conceptual, methodological
and practical base that can serve to engage in the development
of original and relevant ways of merging the conceptual space
of the map with the experiential places of the narratives.«

Sébastien Caquard: Conclusive Remarks, pp.224/225

Have a look at 8 exciting papers at:
The Cartographic Journal

Joost Grooten’s artful atlases

Joost Grooten is a dutch artist, book designer, with a special focus on atlases: http://www.grootens.nl/2/10/11.html

His publication have recently be called “grosse Buchkunst” (great book art) by the “Süddeutsche Zeitung.

You will  enjoy to browse through his website: http://www.grootens.nl/2/10/11.html

Michel Houellebecq: Map and Territory

The enfant terrible of the french writer’s scene, Michel Houellebecq has published a new novel, enthusiastically reviewed by the critics. He has also won the most prestigeous french literature award – the Prix Goncourt in 2010.
The titel appears in this blog, since the main character is a celebrated artists who works with street maps and satellite images.
The english translation of the book has not yet been released, but will soon be available.

Journeys beyond the neatline: expanding the boundaries of cartography

There is an intriguing exhibit at University of Alberta Libraries that runs until the end of August 2010: Journeys beyond the neatline: expanding the boundaries of cartography.

This exhibit presents 25 works of two University of Alberta affiliated artist/cartographers who have documented their personal journeys through text and maps. The title of the exhibit — Journeys beyond the neatline — reflects their personal journeys beyond the traditional boundaries of the printed map — the neatline. Both have made pilgrimages which traverse terrain and individual experience. But beyond that, theirs are unique experiences recorded in text and visual expressions as maps. Like the works themselves, this exhibition, exemplifying a growing intersection of art and cartography, also represents a step beyond the traditional map exhibit for the William C. Wonders Map Collection.

I have just received the catalogue of the exhibit. I went through it quickly: It looks like two cartographic travelogues. It is a very nicely designed book and I am looking forward to reading the stories of these two artists/cartographers.

The Map Is Not the Territory Revisited (London)

This group exhibition at the England & Co. gallery is the latest in an occasional series of exhibitions of artists using maps and map-making strategies.

Jason Wallis-Johnson: London USA (detail)

Works by artists including: Chris Kenny, Michael Druks, Georgia Russell, Jason Wallis-Johnson, Grayson Perry, 
Rolf Brandt, Cornelia Parker, Terry Ryan, Abigail Reynolds, Jonathan Callan, Deirdre Jackson, Alberto Duman, Vito Drago, Margaret Proudfoot, Richard Wentworth, Jugoslav Vlahovic, Paul Tecklenberg and Satomi Matoba.

7-28 November. Private View Friday 13 November 6 to 8:30 pm
England & Co. Gallery.
216 Westbourne Grove
London
W11 2RH

Thanks to Tinho da Cruz for posting this information via CARTO-SoC, the Society of Cartographers Mailing List.

Emotional Cartography by Christian Nold

I have been fascinated by the bio mapping project by Christian Nold for a few years now. The idea of combining a GPS with a lie-detector in order to “measure” the emotions associated to places is really appealing. So I was quite intrigued by the “Emotional Cartography” book that has just came out of this project. This book is downloadable for free which is definitely an asset. What is even better is that it provides different critical perspectives on this project and more generally on the overall development of the relationships between geospatial technologies, the body, the emotions, the private sector and the State. Among the different pieces, I really enjoyed “A Future love story” by Marcel Van Der Drift: stimulating, entertaining and frightening. Overall, I had a very good time reading this book, even if I would have liked more concrete examples of the use of the bio mapping tool in different contexts; may be in the next volume.

Special Issue on Cinematic Cartography

The special issue of The Cartographic Journal on Cinematic Cartographic is now available. If you are interested in maps and cinema, you may want to take a look at some of these papers:

• No Throwing Popcorn! by Field, Kenneth
• What is Cinematic Cartography? by Caquard, Sébastien; Taylor, D. R. Fraser
• Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture by Castro, Teresa
• Locations of Film Noir by Conley, Tom
• Applying the Theatre Metaphor to Integrated Media for Depicting Geography by Cartwright, William
• Connecting Real and Imaginary Places through Geospatial Technologies: Examples from Set-jetting and Art-oriented Tourism by Joliveau, Thierry
• Foreshadowing Contemporary Digital Cartography: A Historical Review of Cinematic Maps in Films by Caquard, Sébastien